Remember my futuristic, utopian blog post about the sovereign community concept just some days ago? Now just yesterday I found out there is one approach for such a high-tech enabled power community underway. I was seriously bedazzled. May I introduce: Factor e. It took me the whole night (literally) to read and watch all the interesting stuff on their website.
Here is the most interesting stuff that I found on the web about them:
- Overview.Most interesting collections of content:
- the Open Source Ecology main webpage
- the Factor e blog
- short video introduction: “How to Build a Post-Scarcity Village“
- longer 10-part video introduction: “Factor e Distillations“
- Youtube video channel of Open Source Ecology with 78 clips
- Vimeo video channel of Open Source Ecology with 48 clips
- Overview of the current conditions at Factor e Farm: Open Source Ecology wiki: Factor e Farm
- their image of humanity, called “integrated humans”
- Products.The stuff that Open Source Ecology has released so far:
- An automated compressed earth brick press in two versions: Liberator Beta 1.0 and Liberator Beta 2.0.
- Upcoming products.
- According to Marcin, their next project release will be the LifeTrac, an open source tractor.
- techniques (or ideas for them) to feed oneself efficiently by gardening, using only 12 hours per person per year
- a developed a pattern language to decompose technical systems into their functional elements, and build them up from such modular elements
- a self-made CNC plasma cutter
- RepLab, the open souce, self-replicating fab lab
- their off-grid industrial-grade fab lab
- … many more
- Governance. It’s not all easy when dealing with each other in close proximity. At OSE, they had a serious issue documented in their blog post “The End of the “Early Days”“, with proceedings here and here. But they learn and make progress, see their upcoming system of internal governance. As one comment said, “We need to spend energy learning how to work together.”
- External and related sources.Some theoretical material on autarky and related concepts, from other sources:
- Thomas McCarthy: “Engines of Autarky” (on the potential of molecular nanotechnology)
- Thomas McCarths: “Designer Communities” (also on the potential of molecular nanotechnology)
- Comment 570016 and on in The Oil Drum: “There is plenty of oil but . . .”
- The Oil Drum: “Possible Responses to Peak Oil: Some Lessons from the Past”
- Thomas J. Elpel: The Art of Nothing (on primitivist living in some tribes)
- jeffvail: “The Promise of Decentralization, Localization, and Scale-Free Self-Sufficiency”
- Kevin A. Carson: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution; A Low Overhead Manifesto. Actually a large free PDF e-book, also including an academic case study on Factor e Farm.
- 100kgaranges.com. A new way to make things by contracting small local fab lab style garages.
- adciv.org: Abundant Resources. The notion that we have enough space, air, water, and matter for all … but we need to learn manage and distribute it to get “post-scarcity”.
- FSCONS. This is a conference around the whole “develop a free society” stuff. Yes, there is such a thing as a conference about this …
- Leashless. A manifesto for better organization of property, with some cool definitions.
The challenge: finances. It is easy to imagine that a not-yet-autarkic community that in addition to autarky first of all needs to acquire autarky by creating the toolbox for it, needs more money than it has itself. While autarky brings independence from money, this is not the case on the road to autarky … . So if you like what they do and share their vision, you can surf over to their “True Fans” page and from there, join their “1000 True Fans – 1000 Global Villages” campaign and join by contributing a monthly USD 10 for two years. If we want to enjoy an open-sourced equipment for autarkic living, we somehow need to make that happen first …
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