Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that’s only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).
Declaring that, “We can lead self-sustaining lives without sacrificing our standard of living,” Marcin Jakubowski believes that only by opening the means of production can we achieve abundance for all. Though he has a Ph.D. in fusion physics, he became dissatisfied with its remoteness, and turned back to the earth as a farmer and social innovator.
He is the founder of Open Source Ecology, which is creating the Global Village Construction Set — the blueprints for simple fabrication of everything needed to start a self-sustaining village. At Factor e Farm in rural Missouri, he’s been successfully putting those ideas to the test.
“It’s not reinventing the wheel; it’s open-sourcing the wheel.”
Julia Valentine, farmer, in The Atlantic
From TED.com
Related Links:
This Talk on TED.com
Marcin Jakubowski on TED.com
Open Source Ecology
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