Funding Proposal

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Proposal to Foundations

  • Extreme Learning Lab and Rapid Learning Facility: compressing a year of study into 1 week of Design-Build.
  • First test Case - zero energy housing. Because we are able to reduce build cost, we can include 100% solar operation including heating and cooling.
  • Extreme Learning Philosophy - that each person can access the Edge of Knowledge in 4 years, and fund their own way through this journey.
  • Lab (RLF) is the physical and online facility for doing this, using best principles for doing so
    • Swarm education - 24 people + instructionals builds collaboration into the process at the core.
    • Test Case - Roofless Roof Rebar Structure,3D printer for the joints, Solar Concrete, Micro House Learning Facility, and RTK GPS Tractor with Solar, gas, solar-electric hybrid energy, and has-elecyric hybrid energy. Inverter included.
      • Extreme Materials Facility - solar concrete, rebar, and plastic.eans foundation, plumbing, insulation, rubber, sintering or welding + rolling, or other casting method for 500 lb-1 ton per day of each material. Design and cost an MVP for this. Sintering+
    • Design For Swarming - using a combination of IKEA style build cheatsheets, simplifies procedures, and highly optimized modules, a person can build anything from scratch.
  • Extreme Interface Design allows for 5 minute swapping of implement, frame, wheel, power, and control unit. Apply this to the house to develop automated grading, CV, AI control, remote control, swarm networking.
  • 24 top tech schools in carpentry fund this - to buy into the brand at $15k or other sweet spot. Program is exclusive to these schools, we have 4 weeks of build in one year. We house the students, the team is 24 people assuming 4:of us as team leaders. Based on metropolitan areas, the program invites a number of students, we build an RLF structure for learning/production in the community. We collaborate with local tech schools on integration.
  • Inaugural class gets a building and residential office space. You build the village by building your own facility. 1/2 hr out of town, with residential facility as a summer program. Equipped with materialsamufacturing around plastic and wood composites, and hardwood floors. 3D prints, solar concrete, and brick. 2 year program in Civ Construction.
  • Pressing World Issues forum, using simple important questions (beautiful questions) and answers. Methodology for questioning like this is developed, with critical aspects such as modularity, robustness, ecosystem, and already proven tech that we are appropriating and converting into Open Sector.
  • Outcomes: steel comes back to America, concrete goes solar, plastic solved, housing solved at $50k cost per house compared to $180k.
  • Sequencing - 3 engineers to start a tractor mfg biz locally, with waste plastic (rubber) + solar steel. Making lifetime design lawnmowers, or other common items. Buyback at 50% for disassembled parts. We train in open design and mfg.
  • Strategy - go through CoC as the connection to the foundations. They will just pile up. Go with RTK GPS defining equipment for Ukraine, surveying tech. Typical startup budgets as Open Sector enterprises, for guaranteed basic assets. Make a case for guaranteed basic assets, and win it massively by lifetime design, cyclic material flows, solar materials.
    • Nominal: 100x $25k, 30 day campaign - $2.5M based on contingency of aligning 100 of these. The curriculum is the full SEH curriculum for design/build/RTK GPS tractor/3D printer/100% solar/Solar Concrete with a promised cost of facility (Large Workshop Structure with Roofless Roof on raw land and basic 3D Printer/100% solar/RTK GPS tractors/Solar Concrete Equipment at $100k after $2.4M of dev.
    • Rollout: 1 year from securing $2.4M.
    • Roll in other interests:
      • Roofless Roof structure for demining equipment fabrication, where the RTK GPS is a key component - plain funding
      • Zero turn mission planned mowers
      • Automated grading bulldozer
      • Automated foundation backhoe
      • Bags of Solar Concrete
      • Cherrypickers
      • 100% solar Seed Eco-Homes (water storage) - only $20k-$40k to implement (build in Savannah?)
      • Airless tire enterprise for Bobcats. Same price, lifetime warranty.
      • Curriculum for Native American colleges

Etc.

  • Build RLF with my crew of 5.

1000 Hour Curriculum

The above includes elements of the Thousand Hour Curriculum. For thus curriculum, we can recruit top graded individuals from across the world to buy in to this program. After we obtain buy-in from about 12-100 top notch individuals, we can proceed to tap there funding, crowdfunding, high net worth individual contacts to create reality. The premise is asking big beautiful questions.

Mundane Version

Based on a breakthrough house build cost of $85k compared to an industry standard of $180k (just for the build, not land, profit, etc) - we are releasing documentation for the Seed Eco-Home, a modular, code-compliant house building system with included photovoltaics. We are extending the package to full PV-powered heating and cooling, such that the house requires no grid. We are releasing an entire curriculum, including house designer software, that allows anyone to design custom versions of the house and build them at the same cost as above. Photovoltaics, a high efficiency heat pump, and super-efficient appliances are part of the basic package at the $85k build cost. (to be released after full BOM/build documentation is obtained for the point of sale).

In order to solve for housing affordability at scale, we are releasing a technical school and 4 year college Civilization Construction training program of 4 year duration, with competency-based advancement. The training program is unique in that it aims to address housing at the high level of civilization reconstruction, with a new paradigm developed for the production of housing, and the technosphere in general. The new paradigm is collaborative, open design - with modular, lifetime-design product ecosystems that can grow or improve with time as innovation continues to flow into the open ecosystem. As such, we begin with empowering individuals to become ultimate design-builders of the world around them - starting with learning how to learn and the deep purpose of technology, which is to make life better for everyone - none excluded from its benefits. The 4 year curriculum consists of 1000 critical sessions where we explore how to build on all known human knowledge in order to build a better world. As such, this includes not only technology but philosophy, the natural sciences, and humanities approached from the standpoint of critical thinking skills and background knowledge to become an effective executive (builder) of the world around us.

We are collaborating with NoVo Foundation to release the 4 year college and trade school curriculum in Native American institutions. This is intended to be a springboard for Civilization Construction entrepreneurship, where a student can choose our immersive, interdisciplinary, integrated learning to augment their studies. The program consists of live online lectures presented to a global audience, plus a week-long spring break of immersion build in each year. This program will be offered as a selective program where individuals learn design-build techniques for solving housing affordability. The key is collaborative design, where students are expected to collaborate on a global basis - via effective builds, new design, and product ecosystem innovation that blends ancient wisdom with modern technology. We will have job openings at competitive pay in the design-build of the Seed Eco-Home product ecosystem based on competency-based performance. The ecosystem consists of (1) Seed Eco-Homes built from off-the-shelf materials, (2), materials production from local and renewable resources, (3) supporting machines of production such as tractors and 3D printers, (4) and enterprise knowhow intended to generate distributed operations at scale.

This program will be released within 12 months of funding the necessary curriculum, which builds upon 17 years Open Source Ecology's extensive prototyping of appropriate technology, everything from open source tractors, 3D printers, aquaponic greenhouses, Seed Eco-Homes, and numerous other technologies. The intent is to create a large pool of design-builders capable of producing lifetime design, modular product ecosystems that transition the technosphere from a throwaway, consumer society to one based on open source blueprints empowering responsible industrial productivity in distributed, solar powered microfactories. This is consistent with cities producing all that they need like in the Fab City concept. The goal is to balance trade, such as re-patriating about a trillion dollars in our country, annually [1], which would otherwise constitute throwaway consumer goods, eradicate artificial resource scarcity and conflicts, and to provide a foundation for thriving with purpose in a more enlightened world.

Meta

Within the context of the Seed Eco-Home and solving housing, we include the heavy machines necessary for building the Seed Eco-Home, materials-production machines, and other technology that goes into the Seed Eco-Home such as the solar inverter and appliances. In order to deliver on the lifetime design concept, the basic design is based on Incremental Housing - which stands complete as a house ready for move-in and low cost, which is at the same time expandable easily as one's needs grow. Because we would like to offer a lifetime design guarantee on the house, we are including the production of the materials and subsystems that go into the house, such that a lifetime of service can be afforded based on the low cost and the efficiencies inherent to an integrated ecosystem. We would like to become the first builder in the world who uses Solar Concrete, converts housing into a productive asset (food, energy, other products), and who reinvents the concept of lifetime design.

Currently, our materials cost for the base model is $60k, but we expect to cut this by $35k in materials and machines by producing machines in house, which we have already demonstrated with pilot projects of various machines produced in a basic, 4000 sf workshop equipped with open source digital fabrication capacity. See more details of cost reduction at SEH Cost Savings. Thus, we expect our production cost of housing to drop to around $50k including labor for the basic 1300 sf 3 bed, 2 bath model, or a build cost (not including land and legal) over 70% lower than industry standards. See OSE Build Cost.

We initially grossly miscalculated the cost of the documentation, which we initially though would be about $120k. The more realistic figure is $5M for a $50k build cost Seed Eco-Home. See OSE Build Cost and combine with Cost Reduction to arrive at $50k including labor.

Documentation Budget

  • $600k - Seed Eco-Home Build Book, Design Guide, online forum, and Marketing Materials. Requires the conversion of thousands of pictures, hundreds of diagrams, and thousands of pages of instructional content into a high quality publication that can be referenced by designers and used as blueprints. Requires staff of 8-12 technical writers and graphic designer for about 1 year. For the Forum, qualifications for a forum manager involves prior commits to our designs and the Global Steward Assessment.
  • $600k - Module design automation of all house subsystems in FreeCAD for ready publishing of blueprints and design detail. This covers all plans and architectural detail and calculations necessary for submitting a package to a building department.
  • $600k - Aquaponic greenhouse - based on several years of experience in running an aquaponic greenhouse and perennial agriculture, we are publishing a design guide for the nursery, Swarm Breeding, and edible landscape/greenhouse that we plan on becoming a standard option of the Seed Eco-Home. This requires documenting further several operational aspects of integrated pest management and automation of the greenhouse, namely automated seeding that allows one to harvest and renew the greenhouse on a continuing basis, with minimum effort. The same goes for the hardscaping and edible landscaping of the house.
  • $2.4M - Design guides: the output of each is the integration of state of art open know-how to working product releases. (1) Tractor Construction Set - which includes designs for tractors, excavators, etc, including RTK GPS precision navigation and remote control infrastructure that allows for increased machine assist throughout construction. For example, one of our cost reduction goals is automated site preparation with bulldozers and bobcats that are mission planned based on 3D surveys using RTK GPS drones., (2) 3D Printer Design Guide - how to design and build 3D printers capable of printing in plastic, metal, and other materials, including the infrastructure for recycling feedstocks and addressing the waste plastic issue. (3) Solar Concrete Design Guide (how to manufacture concrete from gravel, additives, and PV energy just about anywhere in the world), (4) Power Electronics Construction Set - how to design and build power supplies, induction furnaces, motor controllers, inverters, welders, zone refiners, transformers, and other electrical equipment necessary to manage a civilization's electrical power infrastructure. Includes reference design and production engineering for all these devices, designed modularly as frame, wiring, electronics proper, casing, display and selectors, and ancillary systems.


Other

  • $2.4M - STEM curriculum for the Open Source Everything store which involves school children in the design and enterprise of consumer goods that can be produced readily in an microfactory consisting of 3D printers, basic electronics fabrication, small CNC machines, and other basic assembly operations on a small scale. By creating such distributed capacity, the goal is to replace the throwaway consumer goods found on Amazon etc with lifetime design, modular, evolving product ecosystems that can be serviced using a small set of universally-used parts such as microcontrollers, sensors, electric motors, and 3D printed parts - while involving students in practical production as opposed to unapplied studies. This program starts with the creation of design guides for the production of the top 100 consumer items and small appliances found on Amazon, and spawns a general method that applies STEAM education to the product development of real goods in addition to just having fun. $1.2M goes to Design Guides, and $1.2M to marketing the STEAM program throughout the USA.