What is Open Source Ecology (OSE)?

OSE is a specific organization devoted to the goal of inspiring a movement by the same name.

From the FAQ. OSE is a movement for healthy interaction of human and natural ecosystems, based on land stewardship, regenerative use of resources, open access to information, and distributive economics. These guarantee well-being to all the planet's denizens. “Open source” comes from the open source software and hardware movements, and ecology refers to the harmonious interaction of natural and human elements to the benefit of all.

OSE is working on the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), an advanced, industrial economy-in-a-box that can be replicated inexpensively anywhere in the world.

Our vision is very ambitious - we are hacking society. We are building a set of machines for creating a self-sufficient modern life from low-grade, abundant local resources. We are sharing the information needed to redesign, repair and re-imagine this set, developing networks for sharing skills and raw materials, and helping each other perfect visions of self-sufficient living. We hope that having survival needs taken care of independent of the current order will give people the freedom to become deeper, more thoughtful, more creative human beings. By enabling people to live a modern life that is closely connected to the land and the biosphere, we hope to help them become careful stewards of the land. This way of life may change the game for human survival on this planet.

The most important feature of the Global Village Construction Set is its nature as an integrated tool-set or ecology of products that fit together like a Lego set or jigsaw puzzle for building real infrastructures of communities. Pieces of the GVCS build upon each other; when you have one tool, then you can move on to the next. For example, once you can produce electricity, you can run an induction furnace, which in turn can produce metal that can be CNC machined to produce more devices that make electricity. The scope of the products is not only technology, but permaculture and agroecology – integrated, regenerative, natural ecosystems that provide a wide array of products and raw materials. We aim to push the limits of transformation of materials by creating an industrial landscape in which all elements work together and even advanced materials smelted from rock are either recycled indefinitely or returned back to the earth. We are beginning to demonstrate that this can be done cost-effectively on an unprecedented small scale.

Our vision is a world where every community has access to an open source Fab Lab which can produce all the things that one currently finds at a Walmart cost-effectively, quickly, on-demand from local resources. We envision these Labs being self-replicating and multiplying like rabbits. This would be a giant leap for distributive economics – where resource constraints no longer apply. People would then have a chance to shift a significant portion of their energy to interests beyond mere survival. The end state is super-skilled workers, free of control from remote power centers, as people in communities regain their power to thrive without strings attached to their happiness. The scope of production should include everything from food to fuels and energy to semiconductors and metals.

We are interested in economic surplus not via centralization, but via decentralized production that uses digital fabrication to produce a wide variety of tools for the local community, whatever size that community may be. Centralization has to date been accompanied by poor distribution of wealth, and our work aims to address this point.