Interviews/Hackers French

Date: March 14, 2012.

For: Fabien Benoit, a French journalist and movie director, working both for the French and German tv channel ARTE and the French quarterly Usbek& Rica, dedicated to prospective and imagining (not to say fantasizing) the future. Among other things, I've directed last year a documentary about hackers' culture for ARTE.

By: Nikolay Georgiev

Q&A

First of all, can you introduce yourself for the French audience that don't know you and your project.

• My name is Nikolay from Germany, engaged in Open Source Ecology (OSE).

1/ Can you explain me the birth of Open Source Ecology and its objectives?

• Open Source Ecology started because of the realization that resource scarcity is a driving force for many of the world issues - war, poverty, living and working to survive, environmental degradation and more. The mission of Open Source Ecology is the creation of an Open Source Economy, an economy that optimizes both production and distribution, while providing environmental regeneration and social justice. Our current project is the Global Village Construction Set, a high-performance, modular, do-it-yourself, low-cost platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

2/ Who are the members of this project ?

• We have hundreds of people involved. From the most dedicated Core Team, to replicators, builders, machine designers, advisers, donors and more involved in one way or another.

What are your links with the hacker movement or philosophy, if I may say so ?

• We are interested in how technology works. We build it ourselves and share the knowledge and skills. We are creators and self define how we want to live.

3/ What are the values you are defending with Open Source Ecology ?

• Technology based on open source, modularity, scalability, simplicity, easy to fabricate, high performance, economical significance and replicability is fostering an open culture of sharing, open innovation and abundance.

4/ The Open Source movement is originally a computer movement, focused especially on softwares. Do you think it could be extended to other fields, not to say to the whole society ?

• Absolutely, this is a natural evolution and we are showing this.

What are, according to you, the assets of such a philosophy ?

• Openness and sharing.

5/ How do you discover the Open source movement ?

• We are part of it.

6/ For you, is it a way to reform capitalism or to destroy it ?

• It is time to evolve.

7/ Do you think we're going to enter a new era, an age of sharing, due to the impact of the economic crisis and the emergence of new collaborative practices thanks to the Internet ?

• Yes, it is happening right now!

How can you see the new age ? Its future evolutions ? What is gonna change ?

• We experiment with that. First we want to ensure material abundance so that people can concentrate on their own higher goals.

8/ You've published a Civilization starter guide, can you tell us some words about that ?

• Having the Civilization Starter Kit as documentation, the people and needed machines you can start a small civilization from scratch. Currently we have documented 4 full beta products - the Tractor, Soil Pulverizer, Power Cube and CEB Press. Soon we will have more machines for construction, energy generation and fabrication.

Do you think we're entering in a new civilization ? How can you define it ?

• Yes, we are evolving our human relationships and our relationship with nature and technology.