Open Source Ecology (OSE) Business Plan

Ambitions / Objectives

Open Source Ecology intends to create disruptions in three key domains:  machine design, small-scale, entrepreneurial manufacturing, and the structure and workings of an economy.

OSE’s ambitions include:

• Developing and making available to the world the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), a high-performance, low-cost, do-it-yourself platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 core industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.  These designs will dramatically lower the barriers to productivity for agriculture,  construction, machine production, and transportation.
• Enabling “maker entrepreneurs” around the world to develop robust businesses that manufacture and sell machines using the GVCS designs  - we are calling this aspect “Distributive Enterprise Incubator”
• Demonstrating a new kind of economy, built on the foundation of collaboration, autonomy, maximum sustainable use of local resources, fair distribution of returns

A common thread for all these objectives is to lower the barriers to access:  access to high-quality machines that enable productivity, access to models and skills that enable entrepreneurship, access to an economy that fosters a sustainable, equitable lifestyle that promotes human development.

Elements / Organization Models

There are several mutually-reinforcing elements of Open Source Ecology’s model:

1. R&D for the Global Village Construction Set

• Basic R&D principle:  The designs and instructions for the machines are being developed in an open source fashion, with the understanding that future builders and users will contribute to the ongoing improvement of the designs
• Development and design:  To date, OSE has relied on a community of volunteer designers and has completed the development of 4 of the 50 machines in the set.  Going forward, we will accelerate the completion of the designs by writing very careful, detailed, and modularized specifications and building a larger cadre of volunteer and paid designers.
• Testing and improvement:  The testing and improvement of the designs to date have been carried out primarily at Factor e Farm.  As the machines are increasingly built and used out in the world, we will solicit feedback and design improvements, which will be incorporated into later versions of the designs.
• Dissemination and uptake:  OSE has benefited from a significant amount of publicity through founder Marcin Jakubowski’s TED Talk, but we intend to develop active user communities to continue to encourage the use of the machines in situations where they confer distinct advantages over commercially-available machines.

2. Training Team

The training team is developing a series of workshops that will simultaneously produce advocates of the OSE concepts, entrepreneurs who use the OSE model, product to kick-start the dissemination of the designs into the world, and many cycles of manufacturing the GVCS designs.

• Extreme Manufacturing (XM) Workshop:  the experience over a three-day weekend of building an entire functioning machine from scratch.  Participants will become familiarized with machine designs and instructional materials, will develop some manufacturing skills, and will participate in the building of a machine using extreme manufacturing techniques.  Note that because many of the manufacturing processes will be accomplished in parallel, no single attendee will participate in all parts of the production process, but will sample a survey (subset?) of the tasks.  A key objective of the workshop is to give participants the confidence that they are capable of building a high-quality, functioning machine using modern lean manufacturing techniques.
• Entrepreneurship Immersion Program:  an intensive three-month immersion experience intended to prepare prospective entrepreneurs to set up their own business manufacturing and selling one or more of the GVCS machines.  The training will include manufacturing skills development, experience building one or more of the GVCS machines, business skills, and a foundational understanding of the open source development and economy model.  One key target for this workshop might be people from disadvantaged communities / families (financial support from foundations would be required).

3. Factor e Farm

Factor e Farm (FeF) is a socio-technical experiment that aims to determine whether it is feasible to sustainably use abundant local resources to create industrial civilization on the scale of a parcel of land, at 2 hours of work per day, to achieve a modern standard of living, in other words, to create an “open source economy”.

FeF is experimenting with what it would look like if a small group of people were able to achieve a full resilient lifestyle:

• Tapping renewable energy sources
• Producing food, housing, energy, and technology largely from local feedstocks (material security)
• Attaining raw industrial productivity with appropriate heirloom and modern technology
• Using appropriate industrial technology to master infrastructure maintenance at no more than a few hours per year

These goals imply significant technology, productivity and efficiency levels – essentially removing waste from the model of centralized industrial production, and converting to a more congruent and ethical open source economy.  The intended outcome is channeling individual productive power towards evolving as humans – creating an economy where absolute material security allows for uncompromised pursuit of personal autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

4. Organizational Infrastructure

To accomplish its objectives, OSE needs a certain amount of organizational infrastructure:

• Strategic planning (0.1 FTE)
• Machine R&D leadership (1 FTE)
• Workshop curriculum development (0.5 FTE in 2015)
• Workshop planning and logistics (0.2 FTE)
• Publicity, marketing, communication, social media (0.2 FTE)
• Facilitation of user communities (0.2 FTE)
• Sales for machines (0.3 FTE)
• Management of finances and metrics (0.2 FTE)

At the moment, the majority of these roles are carried out by Marcin Jakubowski.  As the organization grows, priority roles to fill will be the Marcom, finance, and sales roles.

Business Model

OSE has largely been supported to date by foundation grants, and intends to move in 2015 toward as much of a self-sustaining model as possible, earning revenues from workshops and sales of machines produced in the workshops.

Open Source Ecology is a non-profit, 501c3 organization, and intends to invest all excess revenues from workshops and equipment sales back into the organization and its development.

Markets

“Markets” for designs:

Markets for machines:

Market for XM Workshop:

Market for Immersion Program:

Need to discuss this

Timelines

Financials

We have developed financial models for the Extreme Manufacturing Workshop, the Immersion Workshop, and OSE as a whole.

Extreme Manufacturing Workshop Financials

Immersion Program Financials

OSE Financials

Business Model for Entrepreneurs Completing the Immersion Program

There are three basic options for entrepreneurs completing the immersion program.

1. Create a business manufacturing and selling machines
2. Create a training business (XM Workshops or Immersion Program)
3. Create a maker ecosystem along the lines of Factor e Farm.

Add detail of financial model and relationship to OSE