Global Village Construction Set: Towards a DIY civilization

Meara O'Reilly says:

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters building the Global Village Construction Set -- a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.
They've launched a Kickstarter here.
The founder, Marcin Jakubowski, PhD, has a TED talk here.
Their extensive wiki has been facilitating global collaboration on the toolset. They have been 100% crowd funded for the last 4 years.
The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that could create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, or in the developing world.
Yes, they are crazy, idealistic, foolish, and headstrong. But they may succeed, and that would be really interesting.
Response to a FAQ: Its true, GVCS machines do rely heavily on mail order parts for the guts of the machines at present. This will transition into reliance on DIY parts after the full release of the Open Source Microfactory and the further development of the 3d parts library. The Open Source Microfactory is the portion of the GVCS that is just for making stuff, it will include: CNC Multimachine, CNC Circuit Mill/3d Printer, Induction Furnace, Ironworker, CNC Torch Table, Universal Welder, CNC Lasercutter, Hot Metal Roller.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Guest

I would have never thought of turning farm hands directly into bricks! Thank You Boing Boing!
- http://www.tumbleweed.net/ tyger11
  
  Yet another reason it’s a mistake to get rid of all the illegal migrant workers: fewer raw materials. *shrug*
http://blog.monstuff.com Julien Couvreur

It’s pretty cool, but I am less excited and perhaps more cautious about the implications than most (regarding radically changing the structure of civilization), based on the TED comments.

Yes, having powertools that come with blueprints and can be more easily serviced seems very valuable.

But building your own powertools seems overkill and wasteful for most people. Don’t overlook the benefits from specialization and division of labor.

Is building a tractor the most valuable use of a farmer’s time and skills? It’s not for me to tell, but I suspect the answer is not the resounding and excited YES that the project volunteers hope for.

What seems more likely is that farmers will find it more worthwhile to buy such “open powertools” from specialized vendors. What does it cost for a farmer to build it himself and what does it cost to buy or rent (including non-monetary benefits and costs such as pride, time investment, etc.)?
- ZikZak
  
  But building your own powertools seems overkill and wasteful for most people
  
  The idea isn’t that everyone will build all their own tools. However, everyone will have the ability to become a tool manufacturer with very low startup and overhead costs. Most people will not choose to do this, but some will. Those people will become local independent tool suppliers.
  
  Don’t overlook the benefits from specialization and division of labor.
  
  Specialized mass production does benefit from economies of scale, and in that way can be more efficient. However it doesn’t always. And much more importantly, society overall suffers from economies of massive scale because the centralization of production leads to a centralization of social and economic power. The end point of this centralization is where we are now: where the efficiency gains created by the economy of scale are embezzled by those who own the means of production, and don’t pass on to those who produce or consume the goods.
  
  Decentralizing production decentralizes economic and social power. It also makes our social and economic fabric less brittle and vulnerable to swings and disruption based on the fortune of a small number of massive players (e.g. General Motors, Bank of America, etc.)
  - http://www.facebook.com/mollyclendon Margaret Louise Clarke
    
    Well said, but if you dial it back to the technologies used by our ancestors, as in pioneers, you can find developed and tested technologies which can be re-purposed in these types of endeavors. Look for tech that is reproduce-able in low tech environs and not under restrictive patents, etc.
- gijoel
  
  I don’t think it’s utility will come from giving it to every farmer. What’s likely to happen is that you take one guy in the village and train him up in constructing and repairing these items. He rents/sells them to everyone else in the village. He makes money, everyone else has easier lives.
  
  Hell, you could probably put all of this stuff on the back of a truck and tour around a district like a modern day tinkerer.
- http://www.facebook.com/mollyclendon Margaret Louise Clarke
  
  My first reaction to this was “Why waste centuries of improvements and refinements to what is essentially a technology [farming] which can be tuned to an almost infinite range of environmentals.” Talk about re-inventing the wheel!
  - http://pulse.yahoo.com/_MLAKC2J76NFB64XLSLUKEHF4J4 Daniel
    
    Considering how many civilizations have completely drained their farmland of nutrients practicing what we would today call “organic agriculture” I’m not sure it’s true that “farming can be tuned to an almost infinite range of environmentals.”
    
    If you have enough cheap hydrocarbons in the form of fossil fuels, sure, you can fertilize your crops as long as you can keep digging up oil. That’s where we are now. But the EROEI for oil is going to start slanting precipitously downward to the point where we’re going to have to start making hard choices like: food or fuel?
    
    Reinventing the wheel is a good thing. No-till farming is a relatively new and promising farming “technology” (scare quotes because it’s only arguably a technology) and ecologists and farmers are just starting to find out the importance of prairie grasses in making drained soil arable again. There’s still plenty to learn about how to farm better and if projects like this allow people to do more one-off experiments with DIY machinery that hasn’t been proven in the field then I think it’s probably a good thing.
    - Guest
      
      The natural application of nutrient rich materials to good farmland is why it so dumb to live in a flood plain.
- Patrick Hughes
  
  I see this more in the perspective of what it allows for the possibility of autonomous-sustainable communities. Sure specilation to a degree, but if it’s a whole community that’s going to reap the benifets, I don’t see how this would be a waste. Why not all chip in for the construction to the degree of necessity of the piece of machinery. Then all the more complex things like 3d printers and metal working equipment would be wonderful for syndicates to produce less necessary items once sustainment was up and running.
  
  It could be impractical if you are someone with a fairly small farm, looking to turn a profit, but if you’re a group of people looking to forge sustainability and autonomy to help color and document a new model for societies to function, these are amazing developments.
  - http://blog.monstuff.com Julien Couvreur
    
    I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, just that there are benefits to specialization and economies of scale. The question is at what scale (what size community) does this become superior to alternatives? Also, how does that compare to doing an open-source maintenance manual for major brands of tools (Caterpillar, etc.), like a technical wiki with rich media?
    - http://twitter.com/SisyphusSkiLift patrick hughes
      
      I think the social cons of a heavily segmented society divided into individual categories of specific specialization far outweigh the pros. A degree of specialization will always occur naturally as we all drift towards individual interests but open and localized societies would encourage a wider array of skills to be picked up while still allowing us to heavily innovated in one area. While also ridding of the poor social condition intrinsic to pyramid economics of necessitating a large underclass to work the more basic and sustaining jobs.
      
      I think at whatever size community works for that particular community. They would be all different sized. Between 100 and 2,500 people seems like a good range. And i see it as naturally superior being that societies with class divides are by nature oppressive and unstable.
      My bad if i misinterpreted what you were advocating.
      - http://blog.monstuff.com Julien Couvreur
        
        “[...] the social cons of a heavily segmented society [...]”
        “[...] the poor social condition intrinsic to pyramid economics [...]”
        “Between 100 and 2,500 people seems like a good range.”
        
        If you find small communities to be such a great social environment, I can only assume that you live in such a small community (like a kibbutz, with the Amish, or some other such community)?
        
        “[...] what you were advocating. ”
        
        I’m not advocating anything. I’m only pointing out the benefits of division of labor allows people to focus on what they are good at and therefore achieve more of their goals. Conversely, the extreme of DIY, growing your own food, making your own clothes, building your own shelter, etc. offers a miserable way of life, for most except a few dedicated monk types who get a spiritual kick out of it (if that’s what they like, good for them). Feel free to choose that lifestyle, but ignore the benefits of division of labor and economies of scale at your own risk.
      - http://twitter.com/SisyphusSkiLift patrick hughes
        
        “If you find small communities to be such a great social environment, I can only assume that you live in such a small community (like a kibbutz, with the Amish, or some other such community)?”
        
        structurally they are more sound. large communities rely on globilazation, put sustainability far out of reach, encourage social divide by being based in competition rather than mutual aid, and alienation by leaving the vast majority of people no option other than to work low paying and empty jobs with little chance of a brighter future.
        
        “Conversely, the extreme of DIY, growing your own food, making your own clothes, building your own shelter, etc. offers a miserable way of life, for most except a few dedicated monk types who get a spiritual kick out of it (if that’s what they like, good for them)”
        
        In a monetary and highly competitive society yes. These things could be normalized and with whole communities participating I don’t see who localized means of production will be be so bad. Providing the basic sustainments of life as a community would take a fraction of the time we spend working now and as we are by nature a creating and thinking species specialization would flow naturally in our free time.
        
        What we have now is by nature oppressive and unsustainable not to mention draining for the vast majority of people who are less steeped in privilege than the American middle class. Not to say that there isn’t also an obvious void in the day to day 9-5 existence for many middle class Americans.
      - http://blog.monstuff.com Julien Couvreur
        
        You artfully dodged my question, but thankfully actions speak louder than words.
        By not living in one of the existing small communities that you talk up so much, you are demonstrating your preference.
http://www.xradiograph.com/ OtherMichael

It’s difficult bootstrapping a fallen civilization into transcendance, using nothing but a collection of parts.

This is one more piece of the puzzle that can be packaged up with a self-extracting 3D-printer…..
http://twitter.com/sarah_no_cal sarah_no_cal

You know what they used to call “Do it yourself”?
Doing it.
chellberty

I have been involved with OSE and anyone who is interested in the project should listen to the experienced and dissenting persons in forum such as not taking offers of help and Grinding up volunteers one at a time instead of making use of outside help.

http://forum.opensourceecology.org/discussion/comment/2452#Comment_2452

and UNSAFE Building Practices.

http://forum.opensourceecology.org/discussion/421/hab-lab-design-review-and-discussion#Item_49

Since then their has been atleast one parallelsupplement groups created.http://osrliving.org/
- wrecksdart
  
  Non-profit deathmatch! W00t! $10 on grinderman at the top.
http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul

Regardless of the first wave of criticisms, the idea in general is sound, practical, and life-saving.

Combined with many other similar projects and the many Make projects featured here, what we’ll eventually have is a true handbook of open source civilization that can be built from local sources. It’s not a matter of choosing to use those sources instead of cheaper mass-produced parts, it’s just the capability alone that changes just about everything for developing societies.

Even if one builds nothing, just knowing how to do it changes your relationship to technologies and engineering, and just may one day percolate to the surface with an idea at a moment of dire need.

Damn… I should go drill me some grid-beam.
koko szanel

Marcin Jakubowski has Jim Jones vibe. I dont like it.
AbleBakerCharlie

I stumbled upon these folks a few months ago and really think some of it is clever. It had all of the awesome bootstrap goodness of the self-replicating 3D printer crew- and their crazy old uncles, the nanobot team, but without any of the presumptiveness about recalcitrant or theoretical technologies. Those always struck me as placing too many eggs in one basket, when we already know that whole industrial economies of tools and workers are self-replicating, and there is a long standing, though perhaps somewhat faded, tradition and set of clever techniques for using simple and sloppy machine tools to make complicated and precise ones and making a whole machine shop out of a lathe or a drill press. Having a farther-reaching, well compiled sets of plans and instructions for getting to the machine you need from the machine seems to be of the right degree of difficulty and promise to actually deliver.

I’ve also had thoughts along these lines for a whole different reason- space exploration and colonization. Any way to leverage the outgoing mass into more products at the other end create the sort of advantages that bring the whole enterprise down to a realistic level of financial outlay. Most of the work in that sector has been on raw materials- making fuel, water, and oxygen from Martian air (it’s not hard) and some work on the next steps, bricks, plastic, and metals, but none that I know on the machines. So maybe these machines will have some very far flung offspring…
rafterman

I wonder if he makes his own hats.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

My assumption was that they were turning farmhand shits into bricks. They guy peeking over the edge of the hopper is both supplying raw material and stomping the stuff into the feed chute.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Gideon-Jones/100000909387494 Gideon Jones

Whole Earth Catalog? Mother Earth News, circa 1972? There are some really good reasons that an entire generation of people (my parents among them) tried and failed at what this guy is talking about. And it had nothing to do with whether their tractors were open source.
I’m continually stunned at how many of my peers seem oblivious to what the previous generation tried, and some of the lessons learned (or not, in this guy’s case).
Bokonon

I think that one of the takeaways from this is that the nomenclature needs to be changed to reflect the type of progress that needs to happen from a cultural standpoint. It seems like a small difference in semantics but it might be a signpost for a way to explain what a successful society will represent. IT’s not a new concept, many have been doing it for a while. It’s just something that has been lost from a western perspective. I think that there might be some importance in exposing the DIY culture into one more of DIT (Do It Together).

Dimitrios
bcsizemo

Why is it when I read the headline: Global Village Construction Set all I can think about is the Constructicons and Devastator?
ncinerate

This reminds me of the whole David Gingery book series on making an entire machine shop from, well, scrap:

http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/series/index.html He goes from a home made charcoal foundry to a basic sand-cast lathe, and then uses it to machine all the parts he needs to both upgrade the lathe into a better and more precise instrument, and also to create shapers, drill presses, and milling machines – each with tighter and tighter tolerances.It’s like reading the evolution of the machine shop from the very simplest components. Insanity. I remember reading these and being incredibly inspired to have a go at it myself. Sometime between then and now I regained my sanity and simply bought a reasonably cheap and effective mass market metal lathe.
DeWynken

Holy shit. I want to live in that village!!!
Pepijn

I can’t believe nobody mentioned Daemon or Freedom™ yet. This sounds a lot like the self-sustaining, micro-manufacturing communities from Freedom™. Perhaps it will turn out to be a prophetic book. :-) I sure hope so, I think it would be awesome to see this catch on in a big way!
http://watercooler.iridesco.com/ EvilPRGuy

I’ve been following this project for a while, and I find the whole extremely clever and impressive. If you read into the details of their plan, it isn’t just about making farm tools, it’s a whole system to create a reasonably comfortable, civilized society from scratch. Even the order they are creating the various tools in makes a lot of technical sense. They have also done a lot so far, and have created quite a bit, it isn’t a vapor project by any stretch.
Redwan Safi

Projects like these give me hope in a future towards decentralized power and real freedom.
martinfeller

Ahh, the first STCs. The Emperor’s Great Crusade and the Techpriests of the Mechanicum will be looking to recover these in 10,000 years.
http://lectiblog.blogspot.com/ lecti

It’s people. Brown bricks are made of people!
Simon Papon-Jousset

I don’t know if any established farmer would be interested by such machines but knowing the amount of debt one has to take to start a farm – lifetime debts, at least in France – I can’t imagine buying a full set of standard tractor and tools when this is available for a fraction of the cost.