Marketing Strategy 2009
Development will follow the Development Strategy.
Contents
Design Rationale
We need people to be aware of what we are doing, and we need funding from those people who want to support us so that we can develop the products of the GVCS. Therefore we need to communicate our message:
- Effectively - so that people can understand what we are trying to do, and decide if they want to support it.
- Quickly - so that people passing through can understand the message while it has their attention for a short time.
- Easily - so that other people can effectively pass on the message to others.
Message
Some points to cover:
Our latest core message: "Building the world's first replicable, open source, modern off-grid global village - to transcend survival and evolve to freedom."
Replicable means it can be copied at low cost.
Open source means that the knowledge of how it works and how to make it is documented to the point that others can "make it from scratch." It can also be changed and added to as needed.
"Technology for ecology." Technology and permaculture working together. Machines to help with tasks.
Off-grid: Basically means not connected to an electrical grid, but could mean just living without electricity. Modern off-grid can connotate living off grid with some grid-produced temporary electric energy system like solar/wind/hydro/fuel powered generator. In our context it means more: not connected to a larger hierarchical grid, either for water, food, power (fuel, electricity), or production. Maybe we could have a more descriptive term to show the production aspect, like permafacture in there.
Restoring ecosystems: As the wilderness survivalists such as Tom Brown and others can demonstrate, with enough planning survival is trivial with 2 hours a day in labor in an abundant living ecosystem. Most of the world's ecosystems are being destroyed though, and their ability to sustain life is degrading. Since before any of us were born the world has been in an era of cheap hydrocarbon fuels to make survival trivial for many people by using the brute force of cheap hydrocarbon energy to do work and grow food while not worrying about sustaining ecosystems, and forgetting about the future. As this era comes to a close those who have benefit from the era of oil will be entering a world they can barely imagine: a world of wasted ecosystems and declining energy where survival is tough, with almost no preparation for such a situation. For us to make survival trivial again we must restore living ecosystems, and using the knowledge and technology invented by the mass of people that the oil era allowed to flourish.
Permafacture: A car is a temporary consumer product - eventually it breaks down and is no longer useful as a car. The same is true for almost any consumer product - they are temporary, and when they break down they are no longer useful for their intended purpose. They come from factories that use resources from trashing ecosystems and using lots of oil. Even the "green" ones. Most consumer food is grown on factory farms using similar processes, and resulting in similar effects. When the resources or financing for those factories and factory farms dries up they stop producing, and all the products and food they made stop flowing into the consumer world. Consumers are dependent on these products and food for their very survival, and every product and food they buy from these factories contributes to the systems that are destroying the ecosystems that they will need to survive when finances or resources are interupted. The more the consumers buy, the more dependent they are on the factories consuming and destroying the last of the resources left in order to maintain their current easy survival. These factories are distributed all over the world, and need large amounts of cheap fuel to move the products to market through the global supply and production chain, trashing ecosystems all along the way. The consumption of the products and food is completely disconnected from their production and so consumers do not actually see any of these connections or their interruptions as the factories and supply chains try hard to keep things flowing smoothly. We aim to create the means of production and reuse on a small scale, so that we can manufacture the things that make survival trivial without being dependent on global supply and production chains, trashing ecosystems, and cheap oil. And we will be able to do this "permanently" because we will be accountable to ourselves to not overuse our local resources and destroy our local ecosystems.
"Global Village" - Independent, but not isolated. I will make some drawings on the wiki soon to illustrate this concept: Hier-archy - few nodes at the top connected to successive branching layers of nodes below them, with decisions typically made from the top down to direct the actions of all nodes. Chaos - every node independent but isolated, decisions and actions are not directed centrally and work in the same direction only incidentally. Independent and Interconnected Peer-to-Peer network "Global Village"/An-archy - Each node is independent and connected to all other nodes, decisions and actions are communicated to work together.
Discussion
Is the rationale correct? Please give feedback through:
- The discussion tab at the top of the page.
- The factorefarm.org forum.
- Email to [1]
