Transcript of Felowship Application Intro Video

My goal is to create a scalable platform for open hardware, just like Ubuntu is developing a scalable platform for open software. We are currently growing exponentially – from $2k/month budgets last year, to a $93k budget for last month. We have demonstrated the economic significance of our work by netting $25k from production earnings based on the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) platform this year, and our goal is to net $250k next year. To do this, we are currenly building our facility infrastructure – to accommodate a team of 12 leading fabricators/prototypers who both deploy further prototypes and engage in production for bootstrap earnings. In particular – we have demonstrated the earning potential of $5k/week from production earnings. We will be dedicating the equivalent of 4 people out of our 12 person team - working one week per month on production – while dedicating the remaining time on prototyping. I will serve as the project manager – to realize a rapid parallel development effort, in which we iterate through three prototypes until product release, with approximately one month per prototype. In particular, I aim to secure $1M of funding by year-end 2011 – to lead a remote prototyping effort of 8 projects at a time at a budget of $15k/prototype/month, while managing 8 more prototypes at a time on-site at Factor e Farm – our experimental facility - at a budget of about $5k/month. We are engaging a bootstrap earning strategy because we want to close the development loop to full testing of economic feasibility within the context of a distributed manufacturing economy. Production is the most effective test of the economic significance of our work – as we aim to develop some of the most replicated machines in the world. The applications of our work are aimed at reinventing the community-based solutions of relocalized production – whether it is local organic food production, green building, or community-based manufacturing. We are pursuing a distributive economic business model – ie, our metric of success is how many other producers replicate our enterprise ideas. We publish not only the technical designs, but also open business models – and we also train people – to lower the barriers to entry.