Self Supporting Village Sweden

Introduction

The Self Supporting Village Sweden is a project that aims to create a fully self supporting village in the harsh and sun fatigue location of mid-Sweden. By combining existing theories with practice, the project also aims to create templates of how an self supporting village could be created in more locations than the initial "test" village. The location of the initial of the first "test village" is not decided yet, but Ramsberg, Skattungbyn, Hagge and Malingsbo-Kloten are likely candidates. Most of the technologies developed in this project could be contributed to the Open Source Ecology project.

Background

The background to building this village is to be independent of the unstable world economy, to pursue a healthier and more environment friendly life and to facilitate the creation of free culture.

To be independent, it is necessary to leave the state-provided "grid" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-grid ), because as long as being dependent on the state-provided grid means dependance on earning regular money to pay bills, and earning regular money often means becoming a wage slave.

The first and most important step of leaving the grid is to provide cheap living. Different kind of housing is being evaluated at this time, but it is likely that it will be some kind of earth sheltered buildings. The next step would be to produce food as efficient and sustainable as possible. After that, local energy production looks as a likely step.

In this self supporting village, it is desireable that can start to flourish. Since people living there would have no (or very little) expenses in regular money, it is likely that they could start to accept Ripple based credit for their goods and services. In the longer run it is desireable that new self supporting villages with Ripple-enabled trade between them will be created.

The self supporting village empowers people in that sense that the citizens does not have to be wage slaves, they can instead focus their time on things they think are important. One particular thing that we hope the citizens will create is open source technology. By this I don't talk just about software, but all kinds of technology. There is already the project of Open Source Ecology which could be a good starting point.

Action plan for the "test" village

Step 1: Break, as soon as possible, the dependency to the centralized grid, which demands you of big amounts of centralized currency each month. To be able to do this, we need to develop knowledge about how to build as efficient houses as possible. The aim is to build the houses in villages, to gain scalability advantages.

Step 2: Create sustainable food production.

Step 3: When we are able to host ourselves in these new houses, we will start to build additional houses to host hackers, who can come and live very cheap, temporarily or permanent, to develop open source technologies. It is fully up to the individual hackers to develop which technologies they find desirable, but our initial hope is to develop tools for producing houses (to make production of new houses as quick and efficient as possible, to be able to host even more people), then to develop technology for electricity production and transportation. Substep - Computer network: A substep in this process is to build an open computer network, wired + wireless, to secure high speed internet connection for a very low monthly fee.

Step 4: Would be to help new villages to be built. We really hope this project can act as a template to build new similar villages.

Brain hostel

To speed up the process of getting people there that wants to work with open source technology, we plan to open some kind of "Brain Hostel" as a side project, in which people can come and live very cheap, or even free of charge if they can provide some labour. It would be really cool if this village could produce open source windmills, open source buildings, [open source cars], open source computer hardware, open source medicine etc.

This project is probably very much aligned in what Open Source Ecology is doing, one difference is that this project initially focuses on housing for living in fairly harsh climates (the initial "implementation" of a Self Supporting Village is likely to be in the middle of Sweden), and the fact that it is physically located on a different continent.

Joining the project

If some of you are interested, I hope you could think of joining us, especially for a long time commitment (>1 year) to build this self supporting village. It is essential to be quite many people, so we can get "scalability" advantages regarding housing, energy production and food production. See contact information at User:Mats