[P2P-F] The Open Factory - an Open Hardware factory in an Irish Ecovillage.

Sun Jul 17 19:44:45 CEST 2011

Hi Michel,

sorry it's taken me a while to get to this - the important stuff is often
queued behind the urgent stuff in my life at the moment.

re Commodity Ecology http://commodityecology.blogspot.com/ yes, I think
there's a ton to this, although whether The List is that list of 90 items I
don't know. Marcin's got a similar list implicit in his work, and I (of
course) have the extremely abbreviated SCIM / Six Ways To Die model. I'd
like to see ongoing work somewhere in the world on these kinds of maps at a
rigorous academic level, Perhaps One Day.

I'm (perhaps surprisingly) wary of having the Open Factory (or whatever it
turns out to be like in the end) tied to OSE. There are three main issues.

1> We have several serious metal shops in the Cloughjordan area, so we're
not planning on doing much metal bashing at the Open Factory - rather we'd
take jobs out to these local shops

2> Replicating the OSE machines is Hard and we don't have the necessary
concentration of talent, particularly to be early replicators.

3> My gut feeling is that we want an export-driven market for the Open
Factory, at least initially, and shipping the machines around the world
isn't the point - vs. say (dull, but doable) organic soaps and similar
consumer goods. This represents a compromise, but it's an economically
necessary one at the present time.

In short: we don't have the balls to replicate the OSE work here. Yet. Could
change in a year or two as our team deepens and the barrier to successful
replication drops, at which point, yes, it's a natural, particularly if
Ireland's in serious need of cheap farm equipment by then, which is entirely
plausible in a wide range of scenarios...

Vinay

On Tue, Jul 12, 2011 at 6:56 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear Vinay,
>
> Have a look at this, I think this is an important contextualization for
> what you are doing: http://p2pfoundation.net/Commodity_Ecology
>
> I see Whitaker's work as an enlargement and deepening of the open source
> ecology project, which is a subcategory for the much larger transformation
> that is needed, and outlined in this ecology
>
> how is the relation of your project to OSE?
>
> mICHEL
>
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-- 
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest

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