BFI Challenge

Optimal Enterprise Priorities Foundation - a Development Pipeline for Transformative Technologies


 * Premise: development of a transformative, Open Source economy
 * Utililize Vinay's white paper as model theory, extend to mainstream products, and focus on small enterprise incubation
 * Keys: open source, flex fab, open license products
 * Start with meeting needs (food-energy-housing-tranportation-wireless networks)
 * Funding utilized to develop this pipeline process
 * Prioritize product selection by a metric (I can detail this metric): most significant products for timely economic decentralization
 * Select 5-20 key products as Phase 1
 * Explicit process for liberating people from the bottom rungs of Maslow's pyramid
 * Explicit process for addressing pressing world issues of resource conflict and resource deprivation (war, hunger, poverty, etc)
 * Focus on high value items (cars, CEB, solar turbine, etc.) to make flex fab model work
 * Ex: $1k material costs for CEB, sell device for $5k - makes for a viable enterprise model when labor is considered
 * Utlize funding to market the message and organize a core development team (say 1-4 directors, 12-100 experts)
 * Development process is R&D due dilligence until a solid proposal is produced
 * Said proposal is for larger funding to actually deploy the technologies of interest
 * Technology development focuses on optimization of proven technologies (ex, solar turbine) and their subsequent integration into a family-scale or village scale infrastructures
 * Aim at Factor 10 reduction in price = factor 10 increase of one's freedom
 * Leverage Vinay's Hexayurt as existence proof for the possibility of optimization
 * Include a physical facility in the development pipeline process
 * Overhead reduction via a self-sustaining, land-based facility
 * Leverage existing $127k capitalization of present facility
 * Utilize technology development wiki and a facility progress blog
 * Partner with Fab Lab, RMI, ZERI (Gaviotas), and P2P Foundation
 * Leverage Smari's Fab Lab involvement, motivate a product library aspect to Fab Labs
 * Leverage Mel's contacts

Key challenge to this proposal is being able to explain the selection metric and its impact to potential developers (including you, the Cabal). My firm belief is that there is a key set of technologies, which if developed to feasility via optimization (and therefore price reduction), provide maximum impact on the well being of society. I believe that a large (12-100 people) team of dedicated, voluntary developers may be collected and aligned for this process within a 6-12 month period, so that this team could propose an unrefutable funding proposal for actual deployment (design, fabrication, and economic model) of technologies by means of small enterprise. The bounty is essentially replacing perhaps 90% of the world's largest corporations with small enterprise that also provides superior products. The bounty is an explicit process for inserting the open source economy as a viable livelihood option.

Immediately, you probably question why I keep talking about the products that I talk about - like CEB, Solar Turbine, low-speed electric wheel motors, etc. But the challenge here is to simply evaluate the potential of open source deployment of said products - by evaluating market share, economic significance, economic decentralization potential. I believe the solution set is degenerate, ie,