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 economic sense, with the CEB press as a case in point. P2P Foundation claims that the work of Factor e Farm may be the most important social experiment in the world. Michel Bauwens wrote a further review of the economic model based on Steve Bosserman’s post. I comment that this is just the tip of the iceberg regarding the transformative economic potential of peer economies.

We are getting ready to fund and build the computer-controlled XYZ acetylene torch cutting table for rapid fabrication of the CEB press. Economics here are under $1500 for parts, and turnkey machines sellable at about $2500. We are aiming for industrial duty performance, good precision, fraction of the competition’s cost. The person who helped with the design used to run a manufacturing business, selling machines upon which ours is based- for $30k. Smari also put up a page for a microelectronics-duty open source XYZ router table on Appropedia.

The heat is on with all kinds of new and strengthened relationships. Sam Rose sees totally how flexible fabrication and a few good open source products can be relevant to the economy today, so he is eager to collaborate. Stan Rhodes is doing rigorous work on a transformative model for collaborative property tenure, and appears to be coming up with a coherent proposition for a Peer Trust Network System. Over the ocean, Josef Davies Coates is creating a collaborative, land-based community, among other things. He is the only person I know of, besides myself, who treats land is the number one priority.

We all agree that deeper collaboration is needed, and the key is to be organizationally and personally savvy to be able to unlock ways to mutual benefit. That is a serious question in organizational theory – waiting to be cracked in the forthcoming P2P century.

We are all weaving threads of Commons Production; production of goods At Cost by users (our renegade friend Patrick Anderson); distributive production; self-replicating industrial and natural ecologies; and other breakthroughs in social organization – generally regarded as unsavory to the public.

Yet the peer economy is walking in quietly. An article in the Internationalist says that Energy is one of the next frontiers of distributive production. Brittany is pumping the solar energy work here, and we personally feel that energy is a frontier that will be cracked within a year. The action is hot.