Turn Up the Heat
Vinay just informed me today of a great post on our work on BoingBoing, a Directory of Wonderful Things. Sam found another link about us at the Wired magazine blog. A few days ago, Steve Bosserman wrote a great post on how open source products can make...
How it all (could) work
“When solar cell companies develop cheaper panels, then we’ll switch to solar power.” Did you ever hear someone say this? Instead of waiting around for solar panels to become affordable, why don’t we collaborate and make them ourselves....
Open Engineering: Better Than Sliced Bread
We are presently struggling with explaining a general open source product development method to others. We are talking about developing a large-scale, parallel effort of world-class, optimal product development to address the needs of the emergent, peer-based,...
A Letter to the Concerned Denizen
We have been busy on refining our funding method for open product development, and in particular, for the open source Compressed Earth Block (CEB) press. Our present strategy is to recruit social network leaders to spread our collaborative funding request...
OSE Product Cycle
We are proposing this model for developing open source products, which includes voluntary funding from many stakeholders: More notes are found here, and the more extensive proposal is here. Today, Michel Bauwens of P2P Foundation commented that he’s...
P2P Economy and Permafacture
We need to take this P2P economy seriously. A new financial system is waiting to emerge, with power at the bottom of the pyramid. As international boundaries begin to crumble, local and bioregional economies take over. People learn from torrents, not...
From 12-11-07: Yesterday a stove; Today firewood.
The cord wood room was coming to completion and we were still without a stove to heat it with. Craigslist, ebay, and local newspapers only had dead ends; the stoves listed were either too expensive, too far away, too big or already sold. I had asked a...
Jeff’s Experience and Other Visits
Jeff Budderer of One Village Foundation and Andrius Kulikauskas of Minciu Sodas Laboratory visited us at Factor E Farm a few days ago. Here is Jeff’s writing on his experience: http://blog.onevillage.tv/wp/?p=491 Jeff’s comments prior to the...
Ups and Downs and the Plan
For all of you who are interested in building global villages in the future – here are some lessons from our experience. This applies to the case where you start with raw, undeveloped land. To begin with, the upshot is that we have just succeeded...
Brick is Born
It was thirty days before Christmas, two thousand and seven. The first compressed earth brick was born from an open source compressed earth block press. It was smooth, it was sleek. Six inches by twelve and four. Wouldn’t give it away for twice...
