Marcin says his goal, is to create the open source economy.
An efficient economy that optimizes both production and distribution,
while providing environmental regeneration and social justice.
Please welcome to the Connecting For Change stage, Marcin Jakubowski.
Thank you! Thank you Calm!
My name is Marcin,
I was born in Poland.
And this is...
Sorry...
Ok, you know that, ok.
This is the town where I was born, my home town.
And many of my childhood memories are those of Poland's history,
so my grandfather was in the Polish underground,
there was during WWII derailing german trains.
My grandmother was in a concentration camp.
And my typical memories of the time
are frolicking in the playground, as any child would,
but also waiting in line for food, because food was rationed.
This was the time when tanks were going down the streets, and this was not a parade,
this was martial law time in Poland, behind the iron curtain.
There was a clear state of material scarcity.
When I was ten, my family moved to America things were much better,
lives transformed, went to Princeton university Wisconsin,
got a PhD in Fusion energy, but at the same time,
I never stopped thinking about the terrible things
that happen when resources are scarce, and people fight over opportunity.
These memories fueled my belief in freedom
and I believe that true freedom, the most essential type of freedom
starts with individual ability to use natural resources
to free ourselves from material constraints.
Wherever material scarsity exists in the world, we see
terible things. Hotspots, resource conflicts, debilitating economies
empoverished, isolated beings, powerlees to live the full life they want.
Isn't it ironic that vast populations living in poverty
are surrounded by the absolut abundance of natural resources
namely: sunlight, rocks, plants, soil
from which all of the wealth of the economy comes
what stands between a human being and what all nature can produce is human created.
It's all business made. So who in this village for example can access the money
or even a place to buy a tractor to till the very soil they live on.
The standard system of capital production distribution work only
if they create enough artificial scarsity for profit
and that's the norm the world over.
So I think we've got a big challenge in front of us.
And that is: Producing true freedom
by bypassing the roadblocks to artificial scarcity
to give as many people as possible to access the know-how and the right tools
so they can convert their environment's abundant raw resources
into personal good and freedom.
And I believe that the answer to this planetary pickle
which we haven't solved yet at all
is the open source economy.
So an Open Source Economy
is where information flows freely and openly
so everyone has access at the most fundamental level
to how to process raw materials into the lifestuff of modern civilization
Each person has a chance to get involved
provide improvements and innovations,
and contribute that all back to a common pool of human knowledge.
Is it any wonder that open source is accelerating innovation
in every corner of our lives?
Imagine one, a hundred brains, and then 1000 brains, then,
fasten your seatbelts.
Even though Open Source is happening right in front of our eyes
many people still behave in denial of the basic proposition
that increasing innovation
starts with open collaboration.
The patent system, trade secrets, and other forms of competitive ways
stall innovation and economic health.
Did you know, for example, that last year,
the spending by Apple and Google on patents
exceeded spending on research and development of new products?
But as Open Source picks up speed with
the adveniment of the cloud, crowd collaboration
a ton of emerging open source platforms,
it's becoming increasingly obvious that open source economy
is the next economy.
And in that work infrastructure alone
Open Source Linux servers have now dominated the marketplace
And an open source hardware association
aggregates the active DIY and maker community
to work at world speed
A business strategist friend of mine told me
he was asking not whether Open hardware would be a player,
but when will companies like John Deere, Caterpillar, or JCB in the UK be
be fundamentally disrupted by the kind of access to equipment
that an organization like ours is providing.
But ultimatelly, the question is
much simpler than a debate whether open or proprietary will win.
The simple question is:
Do we want an efficient economy?
That accelerates innovation,
and creates sustainable future
for as many people as possible,
as fast as possible.
I say yes! everyday I wake up with the roosters at the farm.
So i started 8 years ago
formulating the Open Source Ecology concept
as an antidote to artificial scarsity
I started open Souce Ecology as a social enterprise.
So how would this efficient economy look?
Would operate locally and totally autonomously
but freely utilize and share designs and knowledge globally
It would accelerate innovation, produce efficiencies
decentralize natural resources, labour, capital
It would solve problems at the minute they arise.
due to it's micro-self-funding productivity
would be replicable, flexible, affordable
It would give back more to the land that it would take out.
And most importantly, it would give time back into our lives.
I was pretty excited about this model
I could imagine how the reduction in the scale od production
from global to local
would bring about a possibility
of ending resource conflicts
poverty
hunger
And I could imagine even a deeper effect on a personal level.
Personal autonomy would regain control of our lives
of our communities.
And our world.
If our time is liberated
we would have time that we can use to care about the rest of the world
This follows Daniel Pinks notion, that
"intrinsic motivation is about a type of autonomy
that allows us to pursue mastery
that is consistent with higher purpose."
When this happens inside of people
the politics shift from money and power as
the key determinants of personal and political interaction
to ethics and wisdom as the next force.
Autonomy is a condition where the scale of an enterprise and
the scale of a comprehensive economy is reduced to the microscale
and in that limit, tah is the scale of any land parcel.
What is artificial material scarsity?
When you realy think about it,
all the wealth we enjoy today for a modern standard of living
relies on rocks, soil, sunlight, plants, water.
These are all abundant. yet the productive mechanism of society
is what makes it scarse. And artificially so.
So if we now create the densest possible
packing of productive information and technique
unto the smallest operational scale
that would be the end of reliance on global systems
and it's made possible, uniquely by the advent of the digital age.
It's consistent with D.F. Schumacher's notion that
"societal organization simply breaks down after reaches a certain scale"
it's consistent with Gandhi in economics,
it's consistent with Buckminster Fuller's livinry as opposed to weaponry.
And it's consistent with Martin Luther King's desire for a governance based on law that transcends the law of man.
This is because political an legal systems are built upon economies
and therefor resources in a decent economy, means
decent governants.
This is the case where autonomy defined as productivity
with absolut efficiency and transparency
gives us freedom to pursue mastery towards a higher purpose.
Autonomy is what gives us the freedom to pursue ethics
where our cognitive surplus allows us to look further behind
than our mere survival.
So to start this ball rolling
I turned in my plasma physicist theoretical chalk board
for a tracer
and a 38 acre farm int he middle of nowhere, Missouri
And went to work.
Ok, but then my tractor broke.
So I paid to get it repaired.
Then it broke again.
And pretty soon, I was broke too.
So, I realized that the truly effective
low cost tools that i needed to start a farm and community
just didn't exist.
aha! so tools are essential.
So that made me arrive at the nuts and bolts of the open source economy
and that is what we are doing by building a Global Village Construction Set.
It's a set of the 50 industrial machines that it takes
to build a small civilization with modern conforts.
We simply take industry standars
convert them to simple, open source, modular, lifetime design products
that meet or exceed industry standards,
at a fraction of the cost.
More specifically, our machines are 5 times lower cost
while emboding simplicity, modularity, lifetime design
that make these about 50 times more cost efficient over their entire life cycle.
Our means are collaborative production,
Our business model is helping others replicate our enterprise
and our goal is mutually assured abundance
One feature for example of the set
is that it can be packed into a 40 foot shipment container
this can be deployed even when there is no
industrial economy to create an entire modern economy from raw land
with as few as twelve people
from local resources
at no more than 2 hours of work a day
Does that sound outrageous?
Impossible?
Certainty flies in the face of how we live and how we think.
Working hard means we work a lifetime
to secure the comforts of life.
Or perhaps you cant't see yourself building a tractor,
building a microhouse.
or a brick press machine.
But before you run away scared,
you don't have to do this.
But we will
Myself and a dozen others, maybe someone here in this room,
I invite you the experiment
The pioneers will trailblaze
and just a single data point of possibility
will extend index human possibility,
potentially to wide replication the world over.
Starting on a community scale.
So let me turn to the physical reality of this.
We started from raw land.
about 6 years ago.
An uilt a fclity like this.
we now have a 4000 sqf fabrication facility
where we build tractors
compressed brick presses
whith which we then build
this very facility
We also built a 3000 sqf living unit
and we are optimizing production.
such that an inexperienced team of 6 people
with leadership oversite
built that brick press in 4 days.
that was just a few weeks ago.
And now we aim to build the same in one day.
And economics...
There's some real economics significance that we are seeing
Something like US$ 5000 per day earnings
because the materials are 4000 ant the product sells for 9000.
Here we are getting our CNC torch table up and running.
We built an ironworking machine
as the core of custom fabrication and metal cutting
our own hole puncher
heavy duty drill press
cold saw
cnc circuit miller
and we are becoming quite efficient.
We aim to build a CEB compresed earth brick living unit
on a two day time scale
for 12 x 12 modules
with double brick walls and straw insulation.
We are trenching,
and digging
with our tractor
we just got our open source dimensional saw mill for the first run
And we built other machines
Like a micro tractor
Supersized trimmer
trencher
hydraulic power unit
Keyline plow
and soil pulverizer
We are just beginning
And we are reminded every day that we've got a lot to learn.
But we know where we are going.
That's the Open Source Economy.
So here's the current plan.
First, we develop the 50 GVCStools
We are right now upgrading our infrastructure
for collaboration and development
so that we can go into truly rapid development
in 2014-2015
And that fabrication facility that you saw
we are aiming to show that we can generate
US$ 80.000 per month
by product sells
through collaborative production
and make it highly replicable
scalable operation
So then we can scale this facilities like mad
That's the business development side of the whole package
It's starts with teaching people
the modules to scale to a number of facilities worldwide creating
an OSE incubator where we would teach people
deep emergent training for about two years
And this distributive enterprise fellows
follow the change model that education should include entrepreneurship
So then we scale into 144 incubators worldwide
after the first 12 fellows another 12 fellows class
small and manageable
keep the class size small
And each of these would contain a significant
research and development arm
so that you really combine to form
a formidable open source product development pipeline
world over
then we can replicate
like McDonald's
so the change modelis
that simply efficient Open Source production yields
at a 50 times cost reduction over lifetime compared to industry standards.
Our brand is about generating absolutely responsible production
the education model is entrepreneurship
as a force of change
to autonomous infrastructure allows for zero overhead operation
and therefor combination of efficient enterprise best practice,
entreprise training, autonomous operation
we are talking about designing this for huge scalability.
To build the open source economy
in reality, we are building this to scale
our goal is decentralized production
decent production, for sure
that's not a political ideology.
I'm just talking about the business case
for efficient entreprise
where the traditional concept of scale
becomes irrelevant
our new concept of scale
is about distributing economic power
far and wide
and our metric of success is
the number of independent replications of the GVCS tools
and the whole package.
so, this actually shows how we've done since
2008 to 2012.
We've built a total of 62 prototypes since the community
in 2011 we had the first ever replication,
someone in Texas replicated the brick press
completely from our open source plans
independently
and this year we have 13 more replications.
We are on our way to grow
There's also a social component to this
and that means how do you optimize global collaboration
for a bunch of wildcats to generate a design
generally designs built in many locations worldwide
we are just using very simple tools
like wikis, google docs, sketchup,
plus other open source tools which reduce the barriers of entry
so that anybody can literally participate
We start the process with OSE specifications
meaning the simplicity, lifetime design, modularity, design for fabrication.
We focus on the modularity for the quickness of the bills
and simplicity of design
it's like Lego blocks
which, where you build upon modules
that clearly applies to structures
but also could apply to things like electronics,
where little bits is an example of electronics kit
that people can plug and play with
and we are scaling that up
to power electronics
like induction furnaces
inverters
welders
and others
we are using collaborative production
where our goal as i mentioned is to build
a brick press in 1 day, with 8 people
when we got down to 4 days the last time
so where are we with all this today?
We are currently scaling our organization
grouping, reorganizing
really transitioning from vision to institution.
Just two years ago we run at 1500 per month budget
and now we've got 500.000 to work with
we are building a team
creating strategy, structure
and process
and we are also feeling the growing pains
it's not easy recruiting people
such as remote designers, onsite fulltime people,
and volunteers for a dedicated project visit
so i welcome any of you to apply.
Our work is about regenerating the world around us
It's about cleaning our economies
so that we are not simply forced to steal from others
by producing within our own communities
I invite you to join us specially if you are
a skilled engineer, retired executive
looking to make a difference in the world
See my TED talk if you haven't done yet
It's actually quite popular, with over 1.000.000 hits by now
you can download a copy of our civilization starter kit
which contains now version 0.01
with the plans for the tractor, brick press, pulverizer
and power unit
you can build it yourself.
all the documentation videos and cad, and everything is in there
And also you can sign in as a true fan
support us at 10 dollars a month.
We have about 350 people like that
people doning from 10 to 100 bucks a month.
It's the 1.000 true fans concept, originated by Kevin Kelly
So, also talk to me. I need mentors
our team needs strategic review
process development
technical review
operations and everything
So, nobody said that building the world's first Open Source Civilization
would be easy, but, with the right social process,
it can be fun
We are testing the limits of what we all
can do.
to make a better world.
Thank you
subtitled by OSE Argentina.