Open Ecology

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= OpenEcology (œ) is a community of people developing open source tools anyone can use to generate wealth from nature's abundance.

URL = http://openecology.org/


Description

"Open Ecology is a movement dedicated to the collaborative development of tools for replicable, open source, modern off-grid "resilient communities." By using permaculture and digital fabrication together to provide for basic needs and open source methodology to allow low cost replication of the entire operation, we hope to empower anyone who desires to move beyond the struggle for survival and "evolve to freedom." (http://openecology.org/home/item/4-welcome-to-open-ecology.html)

"We believe that everyone in the world should have access to the technologies they need to escape poverty and generate natural wealth for themselves and their communities. This belief compels us to put together a free and open information resources that explains how to convert sunlight and land into food, shelter, energy and fabrication capacity for oneself and one's community. By reducing the amount of time people must put aside to meet their own material needs, OpenEcology enables people to spend more time developing their own unique skills, generate more economic value and become more active participants in their own communities as well as our collective social evolution.

In the pursuit of this goal, we're also creating what will hopefully become a world-class open source research and development process that can produce higher quality goods at lower costs than proprietary alternatives.

Our first major project is the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), a collection of 40 open source tools that constitute an 'economy in a box.' With an GVCS, a small community can produces nearly all the products desired by members of industrial societies. Our goal is to make it possible for 6 individuals to build an entire GVCS in under 6 months with under $20,000 of capital using inexpensive, commons, off-the-shelf components and ubiquitous natural resources.

Our next major milestone will be the Self-Sufficient Community Construction Set (SCCS) which goes one step deeper than the GVCS by incorporating digital fabrication and hot metal processing to enable people to make their own 'off-the-shelf' components such as precision drives, stepper motors, electrical motors, surface grinders, fully automated metallurgy and CNC machining.

Finally, we aim to produce the Abundant Community Construction Set (ACCS). This set goes the last step by providing it's users the ability to process and smelt minerals to produce the metals, semiconductors, ceramics, rubber, plastics and other materials feedstocks. The ACCS would allow nearly any piece of land to generate the resources necessary for the construction and maintenance of a developed economy. Humanity can transcend material scarcity by achieving this level of open source technical sophistication." (http://openecology.org/vision.html)