Marcin Jakubowski - The Open Source Economy

http://www.connectingforchange.org Connecting for Change: Bioneers by the Bay conference hosted by the Marion Institute is A SOLUTIONS BASED gathering that brings together a diverse audience to create deep and positive change in their communities. The conference connects the dots between food and farming, health and healing, indigenous knowledge, women and youth leadership, green business and restorative living.

MARCIN JAKUBOWSKI - "Growing up in Poland, and having a grandparent in the concentration camps, I was aware even at an early age what happens when materials are scarce, and people fight over opportunity."

"It's what drove me to identify the 50 machines that are necessary to build a modern economy. 50 machines, from cement mixers to 3D printers to moving vehicles that will allow a working society to be created. My goal, and my daily life, is dedicated to open source these tools, so that anyone - from the remote villages in Third World countries to the rural farms of Missouri, can have access to these meaningful tools to create a better life for themselves. EVERYONE needs access to these tools - it's why we're creating them with an open source model, and with the most advanced digital and physical technology known to us today. Let's be clear...this isn't about mere survival, it's about THRIVING. The intended outcome for these tools is for 12 people working for a mere 2 hours per day, are able to sustain themselves, and take advantage of a modern economy. The goal is to build cities from the ground up, allowing for normal thriving life, while living in harmony with each other, and in harmony with the very nature of the planet we inhabit. With these tools, and with this outcome, I hope to decrease the barriers to human potential - freeing up human capital to achieve their higher goals of awareness and actualization, with an ultimate benefit of freedom for all humanity - for themselves, and for the continued growth of their spirit. And hopefully, the very planet itself."

Marcin came to the U.S. from Poland as a child. He graduated with honors from Princeton and earned his PhD in fusion physics from the University of Wisconsin before shifting direction and starting a hydroponic vegetable farm in Madison, WI. Lacking real experience in practical matters, he then began his education from scratch, and in 2003 he founded Open Source Ecology in order to make closed-loop manufacturing a reality. He began development on the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), an open source DIY tool set of 50 different industrial machines necessary to create modern civilization from scrap metal. OSE has prototyped 8 machines and intends to build everything from an induction furnace for melting metals to an open source combine.

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.