Acquaintance Ben de Vries forwarded me this email:
Global Villagers,
Last week we spoke at the University of Missouri, Columbia, about the Global Village Construction Set: Open Source Engineering for Sustainable Living. I focused on the construction of economies that utilize local resources. I proposed the route of open source, flexible fabrication – applied to Community Supported Manufacturing – as a viable route to an industrial system free of geopolitical compromise.
Please view the presentation and pass it around: http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=198
This lead me to reading the Factor E Farm which journals an “experiment of Open Source Ecology“, and onwards to some quick reading on 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. 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.”
“Instead of waiting around for solar panels to become affordable, why don’t we collaborate and make them ourselves.”
I look forward to learning more…