An open source, libre economy is an efficient economy which increases innovation by open collaboration. To get there, OSE is currently developing a set of open source blueprints for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist – everything from a tractor, to an oven, to a circuit maker. In the process of creating the GVCS, OSE intends to develop a modular, scalable platform for documenting and developing open source, libre hardware – including blueprints for both physical artifacts and for related open enterprises.
The current practical implementation of the GVCS is a life size LEGO set of powerful, self-replicating production tools for distributed production. The Set includes fabrication and automated machines that make other machines. Through the GVCS, OSE intends to build not individual machines – but machine construction systems that can be used to build any machine whatsoever. Because new machines can be built from existing machines, the GVCS is intended to be a kernel for building infrastructures of modern civilization.
We – the countless collaborators upon whose shoulders this Vision stands – imagine a world of innovation accelerated by open, collaborative development – to solve wicked problems – before they are created. We see a world of prosperity that doesn’t leave anyone behind. We see a world of interdisciplinary, synergistic systems thinking – not the isolated silos of today’s world.
This work of distributing raw productive power to people is not only a means to solving wicked problems – but a means for humans themselves to evolve. The creation of a new world depends on expansion of human consciousness and personal evolution – as individuals tap their autonomy, mastery, and purpose – bo Build Themselves – and to become responsible for the world around them. One outcome is a world beyond artificial material scarcity – where no longer do material constraints and resource conflicts dictate most of human interactions – personal and political. We see a future world where we can say – “Resource conflicts? That was back in the stone age.”
Your project is amazing. Thrilling, actually… It’s people like you who really give me hope for the future.
— Chris Anderson, TED Curator
Interesting ideas. I don’t know of anything quite like it.
— Noam Chomsky
Our core values revolve around open collaboration – which implies the vulnerability to share work in progress, without ego, power struggle, and insecurity. Our core values are efficiency, and the ethics and wisdom to understand what we should be efficient about. In practice, we strive to find effective ways to document our work – to create an open collaboration platform – where we can bring collaborators on boards rapidly. While it is difficult to document – the realtime, cloud collaborative tools of the information age make this easier – and we aim to tap these new tools to document and develop together.
The end point of our practical development is Distributive Enterprise – an open, collaborative enterprise that publishes all of its strategic, business, organizational, enterprise information – so that others could learn and thereby truly accelerate innovation by annihilating all forms of competitive waste. We see this as the only way to solve wicked problems faster than they are created – a struggle worth the effort. In the age where companies spend more on patent protectionism than on research and development – we feel that unleashing the power of collaborative innovation is an idea whose time has come.
When OSE was first founded in 2003, the concept of Open Source Ecology was born. This means a world where open source meets economy meets ecology. This means a prosperous world of people living in harmony with their natural life support systems. The is the initial writing from the OSE Legacy Site:
I. What is Open Source? Open Source refers to the model of providing goods and services which includes the possibility of the end-user’s participation in the production of these goods and services. This concept has already been demonstrated in Linux, the open source computing system. With Linux, a large number of software developers have contributed to creating a viable alternative to the proprietary Windows computer operating system. Many people can readily see the advantages- all Linux software is free. Please read these articles on the concept of Open Source software and its implications for changing business.
II. What is Open Source Economics? Our mission is to extend the Open Source model to the provision any goods and services- Open Source Economics. This means opening access to the information and technology which enables a different economic system to be realized, one based on the integration of natural ecology, social ecology, and industrial ecology. This economic system is based on open access- based on widely accessible information and associated access to productive capital- distributed into the hands of an increased number of people. Read about an inspiring example of such an economic model being currently put into practice with respect to manufacturing vehicles.
We believe that a highly distributed, increasingly participatory model of production is the core of a democratic society, where stability is established naturally by the balance of human activity with sustainable extraction of natural resources. This is the opposite of the current mainstream of centralized economies, which have a structurally built-in tendency towards of overproduction.
III. What is Open Source Ecology? We derive our organization’s name from a concept which refers to the integration of the natural, societal, and industrial ecologies- Open Source Ecology- aiming at sustainable and regenerative economics. We are convinced that a possibility of a quality life exists, where human needs are guaranteed to the world’s entire population- as long as we ask ourselves basic questions on what societal structures and productive activities are truly appropriate to meeting human needs for all. At the end of the day, the goal is to liberate our time to engage in exactly that which each of us wants to be doing- instead of what we need to do to survive. All have the potential to thrive. Today, an increasingly smaller percentage of the world’s population is in this position.
Since 2003, we have gained much more clarity on our mission. We have been transitioning steadily from vision to execution – via the GVCS and the radically efficient, distributed production methods that lead to 1-day production times of heavy machines. This is a metric of efficiency that underlies our work – and indicates that the economic power of distributed production is real – and that open development is the next industrial revolution. We believe that the open source economy is an idea whose time has come.
