Open Source Ecology Seed Home, 3 Oct 2020

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From YouTube: OSArch - Open Source Architecture

Description

Presentation for the October monthly meeting of the OSArch community. More notes at https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/OSArch. If you'd like updates about the Seed Eco-Home product release, please sign up at https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Seed_Eco-Home_Interest_List.

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A

For architectural engineering.

B

C

Did this come out of any of the other groups like this is related, anything to like cameron, sinclair or anything like open architecture, network, I've seen a bunch of other ones or is it? This is a new one. This is a new thing right.

C

No connection to the other ones.

B

I don't think so.

A

Yeah, I don't think so.

D

What, if, if anything, um I think a lot of us came from various open source communities, so some of us have come from uh people who work on freecad. Some of us have come from people work on blender.

D

Some of us have come from uh building smart, which is the organization behind some of these open boom standards um and the others, uh I think, have just been in the open source and uh space as uh for a while as a trained professional.

E

E

Is my microphone working okay now.

B

Yes, it's better.

E

Okay, sometimes I just stand still: it's not certain that the camera was frozen.

E

So I honestly, how much time have we put aside for this? If you got, I don't remember your name. Is it martin.

F

Marchionne yep martin yep.

E

um If you've got a, if you've got a half an hour, you'd like to present or less or more.

C

Yeah half an hour would be pretty good and then we can get into questions and see if there's any uh how we can collaborate yeah. I think I think half an hour is a good time. I can get a good overview of the work.

E

Sounds great to me, should we go, should we go for it guys.

B

E

G

E

It the screen is yours,.

C

Okay, uh let me put paste in a link to the presentation, so you can also okay uh take a look at that. That's the presentation, I'm working from so feel free to get right in there, and that is.

C

Anyone on the internet can view so you should. Anyone should be able to view that yep, that's fine, and before I start so, how much do you guys know about open source ecology? uh Should I go from the very beginning, or you guys, familiar with the project pretty much or not really.

E

C

From the beginning, even if some.

E

Of us know a bit about it: okay,.

F

B

I I know something but uh go for the beginning: okay,.

C

Let's go from the beginning, I see a bunch of people popped into the presentation, so let me go into um sure. Let me share my screen.

B

So bottom left.

F

F

Let's do it, so you guys can.

C

B

Okay, excellent.

C

Excellent, so global voltage construction set. That's our work um started the project right after getting out of uh grad school. I did fusion physics and then learned that I was useless and making pressing addressing pressing world issues. So I started the open source, ecology project, thinking about how we can use collaborative open source ways of creating a new civilization or really uh it started. As my initial incentive was when I was in in grad school, I couldn't talk openly about my work to others.

C

I was studying fusion energy and and therefore I was questioning well how. How is it that we're so non-collaborative and were you know, trying to solve pressing issues that there was a real contradiction to me. So I started the project about exploring what it would look like to create an operating system for earth, that's based on collaboration and open transparency on everything, starting with the economy.

C

So um I have a ted talk on this, uh the global village construction set. You can take a look at that we'll get into that, but uh the overview of what I'd like to present a little overview of what what we have done to date.

C

The proofs of concept in terms of open source economic development and now we're getting into a project on open source architecture which we started heavily in 2016 and now we're taking trying to take it to prime time, and I will discuss the concept of the missing link for what I think is the key missing link in an open, and that is open hardware.

C

That is not open software but open hardware, where it's about taking products to completion, and our response to that is a model that we're developing called extreme enterprise, which is how do you address the fact that no no open hardware projects ever get finished so we're trying to take a very serious stab at that question, based on our own work, where we see how difficult it is to make hardware. So we started by prototyping different machines like the brick press.

C

The tractor um milestones that we we have achieved so far, so we were into building open source, heavy machines for everything, from agriculture, to construction, to energy, to production manufacturing, and uh it's been a long path and we've done a lot of prototyping like this. This graph just shows up to 2013 like about 67. Different machines were built. This is all our prototypes. We start with the brick press, that's the first one when we found that people can replicate it open source design.

C

This is the first ever replication where, where I saw this first, it was quite a surprise. This is a machine for making block out of earth. This guy downloaded our plans from the internet and he built it completely independently. It's like okay, wow, a power of open hardware. That's that's good! We had decent instructionals ikea like fabrication diagrams that enable people to replicate it.

C

We've developed other things like tractors, where we work with radical modularity as far as a way to to build things in an effective and quick way. So this is the the kind of modular approach where we're using reusable parts from the structural to like structural frames to power units that are modular to to universal rotors that are modular such as this rotor. That's used either to power this trencher at the front or the wheels on the tractor itself. uh Same same module is used so power of modularity, and this is uh same power.

C

Cube, for example, is using this micro tractor, so modularity and module based design is the key breaking down complex hardware into manageable chunks, so that we can make technology accessible to everybody and building on the world of open software. We we break down machines into modules and go through many development steps for each module. To make this happen, we talk about a construction set approach, as well uh as an we've demonstrated that the construction set approach could work for heavy machines too.

C

Like like, when we build a tractor, we we can design not only for a tractor but for all kinds of heavy machines like a backhoe or a bulldozer and so forth, and that applies not only to mechanical but also to electrical systems like modular power, electronics, for building things up to induction furnaces and so forth.

C

We've been able, by modularity to reduce prototyping cycles for months today, so here's a ironworker machine that we built in six months on the left and the one that we said heck. Okay, that's that's really hard to build like if you're gonna put six months into that too much. So we built the one on the right hand, side a machine that cuts one by ten inch slabs of steel. um The one on the right took us 24 hours with two people.

C

So once again, modularity reduce the the design to absolute simplest possible, and by doing that, we found that we can do very rapid builds such as one day where we were able to build the brick press here. uh This was a one-day build where we ended up with 12 people building one of the the big compressed earth block presses, which weigh about a ton in a single day. It was a very long day like till midnight, but we found that hey. You can actually do this.

C

We discovered that scalability is a valid feature here. We show scalability, so we we build things like 3d printers as well. We show scalability where you have. uh This is a cnc universal access, computer controlled for making a 3d printer, but the same kind of access can actually be used to make larger machines like this one cubic meter, 3d printer or this much larger axis.

C

It's not eight millimeter rods, but one inch 25, millimeter rods that can be used for something like a torch table which you can use to to cut steel with, or actually even bigger, like with two inch uh shafts that are used for a larger heavy-duty machine like this is in progress on a cnc heavy-duty cnc machine, so scalability works. We also learn how to do real-time documentation, as you may know that in any open work, documentation is a big deal.

C

You always lose it, but we learned how to by uploading and collaborating online on google hangouts and hangouts like today. You can get uh documentation happening at the same time. So when we built this ironworker machine in one of our builds, we had an instructional at the same time that we built it. So real-time documentation can work. We we explore the concept of swarm builds. This is the amish version of it, but our version is this: this is our seed eco home, which was built with 50 people in five days.

C

So that's uh we're really pushing the limits of open design and collaborative builds to uh to basically I mean the vision here is actually pretty pretty grand in terms of um big picture scenario, is shifting from finance capital to open source social capital.

C

I.E no longer is capital, the limiting barrier to people, attaining prosperity, but open access, so we're developing workflows and methods where, where you can use people, power and open source, design and collaborative economics to uh build even large things- and this could scale to like, for example, vivi house for those who know it from austria. The project they're into open source, larger scale housing like up to six stories right.

C

uh Imagine building that with a thousand people over a weekend, instead of going to a rock concert so models where you use leverage crowd, design and a very modular process to get remarkable results, and this is actually like. You cannot really see this from here, but this is all modular construction, four by eight foot panels that are were built in a workshop and then assembled assembled rapidly into place as an example of modular breakdown, of a project into a build that was very rapid. This is some other work.

C

Initial work with bricks uh swarm builds on the brick houses. You got to develop the the workflow very carefully, so we kind of planned it all out in advance and we we are actually able to build like in this. This was a build in belize here uh just earlier this year with a brick press, but we learned that by using effective techniques for brick building, um we had a chain going where we would lay each brick.

C

In a few seconds, we had people, plastering people, mixing mud, actually mixing cement and with the stops for the bricks, the workflow was such that if we continued that we would build this entire 12 by 12 structure here in three hours we didn't do three hours. It took us all day to get the walls up, but but because of some details like oh, we couldn't really get the forms moving up effectively, but we know for next time.

C

But point is, if you work out the the workflows in an effective way, you can do tremendous things with a group of people, so that was the finish of the build in belize, um okay, so other thing we talk about is product ecology. So we have our machines that build machines like starting with 3d printers that make larger cnc torch tables. So you can print parts, as I mentioned, for the universal axes that are larger.

C

You can then use the the cnc torch table to make other machines, and then you can build houses, so this whole product ecologies that we talk about as far as an effective way to tame technology towards human human adaptability. We also build greenhouses like this aquaponic greenhouse. Here. That's uh there was a a three-day build of the first aquaponic greenhouse, where that's that's.

C

What it looked like in prime time with aquaponic tilapia in there lettuce, growing and 10 000 nut plants that we have planted out and then got most of them got eaten by rabbits, but it's another story.

C

So with with modular design and open source design, you can start beginning to talk about lifetime design and circular economies which are otherwise impossible. If you have black boxes that you cannot fix and see how they work.

C

So in our in our package of 50 tools that we're open sourcing, you can, you can have like the grinder shredder shred up your cars, tractors and appliances back to raw steel and molten plastic, that you can then reform reformulate into virgin steel with metal rolling or into reusable 3d printing plastic using 3d printers that you can then machine and reuse in a circular loop so that you're in a highly efficient circular economy.

C

This all led us to believe that industrial productivity can be achieved on a small scale and that's what we're pushing to the limits, and you can also do crazy things like aluminum extraction from clay. We haven't done this yet. But the point is that out of common materials like like sunlight rocks plants, soil water, you've got all the resources for building building the things in civilization and uh clay is super abundant.

C

It's aluminum is one of the most abundant elements and then imagine you could extract it by using energy and known chemical processes, electrochemical processes to do that. Yeah. You can do that and then you can show that.

C

The limits of what what what technology can do on a small scale so for us it's to show that even on a 40 acre parcel you can you have all the resources and energy required to build a modern civilization, so that's kind of like how we frame it.

C

Let's, let's create this uh starter kit for how you would do that for the ends of pushing the limit of technology to complete human access, that we transcend artificial scarcity, which is a dominant paradigm in today's world, with the wars and resource conflicts and and deprivation of many people where the abundant abundance is really there. But we need to learn how to use it. So high tech allows us to do crazy. Things like you, can look up on youtube.

C

How you make this air bearing lathe, even which allows you to make semiconductor building equipment or rocket ships at the end of the day, so there's really no limit. We believe that there is for technology so, uh but the next frontier in open hardware is uh for us is the learnings over the last decade.

C

So in 2006 we got the land here, started, building different projects and all the stuff you've seen. But the one thing we haven't cracked yet is: we have seen efficient building. We have seen low cost, we have seen efficiencies of all kinds, but the enterprise development is the whole new front at the end of the day and we're applying all our learnings today to to take this kind of a house.

C

So this is our cdc home, we're taking this to a thousand square foot model that we're releasing as a product release next year and we're organizing a big event around that um and framing it in in the context of extreme enterprise. So what is this extreme enterprise thing?

C

It's the idea that we so so the let's talk about the the missing link and what we've observed in all of open hardware, and that is it's like a thousand times more difficult to to develop hardware than software, and you can never get the energy or it's really difficult to get all that energy happening in a model. That's it's like a social model without a highly hierarchical, well-funded organization.

C

So our our goal is to show that well, you can actually do that if you're really smart about it and have the proper incentives and then release everything in an open source. So we start with the concept of distributive enterprise, saying: okay, well, first of all, we're gonna release everything that we we develop on the enterprise front, so not only the the blueprints for the machines, but also for the actual enterprises that arise from the machines, let's, let's distribute that and make it open source. So that's our!

C

We talked about this, the the concept of an open source business model that arises from hardware and then you could think okay well, if we're all collaborating and releasing the plans as open source well shouldn't there be people participating in that, and would we be able to get massive participation if, if we set big goals and and take on ambitious projects that are worthwhile to everybody uh in practice, that's a difficult challenge, but we have have have done some milestones that are making us think that we can actually solve it.

C

So, first of all, uh we've seen that in our we've seen an economic model arise from what what we're doing in the form of immersion education, slash production, workshops that we run so, for example, if you go to one of you can sign up for one of our workshops where you'll build a brick press or a tractor in like a day or a few days, and we charge people for those events and we also sell the machines. So you can actually have a meaningful revenue model come out of that all based on open hardware.

C

So that's one model that we're we're doing like, for example, selling the brick press for 5000 over the bill of materials. So that means the brick press itself is about 5 000 in materials. So we sell that for 10k, and then we charge people for tuition for this immersion learning experience where they actually build the whole thing uh from being completely inexperienced. At the very beginning, we we teach people how to weld and do different things, and then they can get on to more advanced tasks. But that's the revenue model that works.

C

This workshop education model. So we've done that for 3d printers, where we can build like, say, 12 printers in a day and charge people say 300 over the bill of materials. We've done that. um So there are some revenue models that work for the house.

C

We charge people for the admission to to do the actual building where they get an immersion experience on all this, where we raised 25k from the 50 people that showed up for it and our goal is now to make it into viable product that people can can build themselves or as a small small team. Now we did it with 50 people, but that's kind of going to be kind of hard for somebody to find 50 people.

C

So we have to shift that to to a manageable model, and our goal here is um when we set out on this. It was to to create a house that cost 70 000 um that we're actually selling to people. So that's that's the part that we're working on and actually probably doing a little better than that. So that's that's the concept model of this house, it's off grid, but um so, let's talk about um uh so with housing.

C

We're we're getting into the idea of how do we get enough participation to take this product to the finish line? Well, first: first of all, we've done some groundwork that says: okay, this is doable. The the build can be very efficient. uh We can use open source tools like I don't know. If any one of you uses sweet home 3d. This was completely done in sweet home 3d, uh using its technical design capacity by basically parametric modeling in there.

C

So I don't think anybody else, but us uses the sweet home 3d for actual technical design, but we did it and was actually a completely accurate technical model.

C

So we use open source tools, but the point is that, throughout our project and throughout most projects, it's a lot of times a heroic effort by a small crew of people and we're trying to change that and our response to that is to follow what what lit linus has done with linux.

C

So uh the lesson from linux that we can take is that uh his initial goal, linus torvalds when he released linux. His goal was very clear as far as getting a viable working product in rapid time, so that so that it can be used and it can be developed by people with economic interests and that's what happens when about a year from his announcement. He had a basic minimum, viable product that grew so from 1991 to 2010.

C

That's the lines of code that increased, but basically after about a year, there was enough development on the kernel, the linux kernel that it was releasable as a product and and companies started to fund it so cool. How do you do that with hardware, though, if it's? If it's a so you can say software yeah? This is what they did they got now. uh This is like 2004 2001.

C

You got about 2 000, full-time developers, they're, actually not volunteers, they're, all paid by companies like microsoft and google and apple.

C

It started completely voluntary, but once the money started flowing so did uh support, which is extremely recent, because even a few years ago, microsoft was calling linux a cancer to its business model, which has quickly changed because right now, over the last three years, microsoft became the leading contributor to open source product projects open source software. Can you believe that when I look at that through the history like how you know, I saw microsoft when my brother even works for microsoft, and um I saw its history where they were linux, haters and now they're?

C

The number one supporter? That's that's amazing, but uh for hardware, it's much harder, because I think that hardware is actually like a not like 10 times harder. It's not even 100 times harder.

C

I think it's actually about a thousand times harder than software to develop a working product of because you've got the hardware costs and labor and not just pushing electrons around on a keyboard, but you've got much more investment involved with hardware and molecules that cost a lot of money and what we think is that hey when you, when you do bug, fixes and hot in software, it's very much similar to hardware uh in software.

C

You might go through ten hundred thousand thousands of changes on on in your linux kernel and you you have to do the same in in hardware too, like you can go forever to making improvements and- and this little thing is wrong or it can be better and so forth. So it's you can go through. So many prototypes, it's not like one, two or three prototypes. It's literally like dozens or hundreds that you have to go through is more accurate and even from our work I mean we see that it's like our 3d printers.

C

It's like, we still keep making changes and fixing stuff and getting better performance, lower cost better build ability. The the number of steps there is is infinite. Now we haven't been able to get 2 000 people to show up yet the best we were able to do this is a graph from 2013 was 20 so 100 times less. This is design sprints that we use to hold collaborative design where we use.

C

We, we work on the module based design to make things happen, but no, you can't get the numbers, so we we are kind of hobbling along to completion like in this is the state of completion of the various machines, comparison between 2014 2018, we're about one-third done, and we do have the module based design where we break down all the steps. But how do we get to those levels where you got 2 000 people participating in in crazy design, uh build events?

C

That's actually exactly our goal and we're framing this within the framework of this, this extreme enterprise model. So that's that's. What I'll talk about pretty much?

C

That's our major effort for next year, but based on the learnings, we're saying hey, we got to get enough people enough resources to take the product to completion, uh because the standard way is you get vc capital, you get loans, you get the corporate structure where you can get money from people um through the the corporate structure mechanism of how you have the say, the initial product offering initial, whatever initial public, offering ipos um all that stock market stuff and all that there's proven ways that you can get funding uh which started like in history.

C

I think that started with the dutch like in the 1400s, or so we got the corporate form, but we're saying hey: let's do something different. Let's do a public thing where we're actually crowdsourcing all this in a different way. So we don't end up with this concentration of capital, but instead a fully distributed model. So right now we can. We can't really get like any buy-in from um like people. If you talk about capital, venture capital, uh if you say open source, know that I don't think it would fly. I mean we've kind of tried.

C

We were never successful in getting money, but at the same time, I'm not sure we would want to because there's a fundamental division there. Philosophically speaking where, where the owners are not, you know they have a fundamental conflict of interest between people who put in money who just want money back and the people who actually run the business, who want to do things right. There's this fundamental conflict of interest. So, okay, let's, let's find a way to address the funding and that's what we're trying to do with this extreme enterprise model.

C

We're saying: okay, let's get a bunch of people to fund it and develop it and make it work. So how are we going to do this? Our model is basically uh surrounds.

C

The idea that we do hold this very massive crazy development event like a big startup camp, hackathon kind of a thing where we're inviting 2 000 people, that's our goal and we think we're pretty confident that we can break down the role, architecture and and the development process into many many steps based on the modular design of the house itself, all the different one, one on the design front, you have like say, 10 different modules of the house.

C

People can work on and then on the enterprise front, we're actually going to be spending a lot of that time during this development event, developing the enterprise aspects of the of the thing so from business planning to to marketing assets, to to business business plan to all the other elements, business process development. How do you do that?

C

So? Yes, we can break down the pro process into many many steps. We can involve a lot of people, but how do we get them to show up? Well, we think the best way to show up is that hey if you participate in this you're first in line to get one of these houses and our we have a design right now, that's uh the package is fifty thousand dollars for a thousand square foot house that you can't can build with a friend in one week crazy.

C

So that's that's what we're we're doing um we're trying to solve for people showing up to make this happen, because the reward is significant. Everyone who participates is there as a direct stakeholder interested in a house. So how does this look like? um There's a little catch to it in that in this modular design? How do you build a thousand square foot house in a week with a friend like from a kid that we drop shipped to you?

C

That's a pretty ambitious thing, but we're paying extreme attention to the absolute simplicity buildability where the designer builders users of this, so we kind of know how you got to design things to be buildable and rapidly buildable. So the basic packages you have to bring your own land, that's that's the catch. I mean it's. The 50 000 doesn't include land, but there's I'll talk about that on zillow.com in the united states, united states got plenty of land.

C

You can get lots for from two to five thousand dollars pretty readily and just about anywhere just google zillow.com and see from land from low to high you'll find plenty of lots, not a problem in this country, but it might be a problem in other countries, maybe not in spain, where they're selling entire villages depends where you are so, if you're flexible you can, you can do this idea? Is it's forty thousand dollars in materials and we charge ten thousand dollars for a support package of training, dropship delivery and walking you through this entire process?

C

So you succeed, including preparing the the package for the code officials and all of that.

C

So that's that's the basic idea now um so forty thousand, how do you can you do that thousand square feet for forty thousand dollars? Well, yeah um we're calculating that each 256 square foot module cost about 6k in materials. Concrete is 2 to 5 cents per pound wood floor roof is a dollar a square foot in general. If you use the lowest cost techniques, but at the same time so okay, let's say we can do the price.

C

Also, the utilities, though, how do you do the utilities? um It's the utilities, I think, are the the hard part here, uh but we have a design based on. um We use a modular utility panel and super simple way to build it. I can get into more details if anyone wants to do that, but the whole utility package costs about 8 000 in this. In this whole thing and it's buildable super rapid, so we're paying extreme attention to the ease of build and this this house is actually going to be.

C

We were thinking about helical piers, like like pop-up house, but we decided on a concrete slab for various reasons. One of them is cost and expandability, because one of the big features of this thing is it's an expandable seed, eco, home, okay, uh expandable, meaning you can expand up, it's actually got a flat roof. So actually, how is it gonna look uh here? Let's, this is actually what it's. This is some initial concept renderings, but that's that's the initial thousand square foot module!

C

This is expanded with some with a section in between and on top of the roof, and, if you think about it, it's it's a super simple building methodology. Where you can go up to three stories, you can have any kind of configuration that you like.

C

So that's that's some of the initial concepts, but um let's talk about the um yeah other costs. So let's talk about the cost because 40k for materials you got to get land. Okay, that's not included utilities. They're gonna cost you some uh for to connect to the grid.

C

It's gonna cost you a bit of money, maybe depending where you are between maybe a couple of thousand to twenty thousand. Maybe so there is some extra costs, uh but there's also a huge case for going solar, like in the house this this house here we're actually off grid solar.

C

We've got three kilowatts of solar on this, so there's definitely a case for uh solar energy and if you go to sun elect.com right now, you'll see that they sell container loads of pv panels for 29 cents brand new norwegian panels for for 29 cents, a watt I mean most people don't recognize how inexpensive solar is today, but we're making um the solar system solar, pv a standard feature. That's you can order with this house so getting involved. So let's talk about the tools.

C

Freecad, sweet home, blender freecad actually is cool because you can do this, so we work between sweet home and freecad right now and we've got some blender animations, but freecad is super cool because it's open source, extensible and there's this very simple way. You can do automated bom, boms and bills of materials by using a part part tree with every single part broken down. Then you can select the part tree and run a macro to generate a csv of all the parts which essentially is your bill of materials.

C

So I can talk more about that, if you like, but freecad, because it's open source, if that functionality didn't exist, we can create better functionality for automated generation of builds and materials, because that's gonna be one of the challenges when you design all kinds of different configurations, how do you not spend all the time in the world, as the architect is devising boms uh for this?

C

So this is your bim stuff here coming out of freecad sweet home is, uh which is what we actually use for the original designs and you can interoperate by exporting obj just mesh formats, which is not the best, but you can export mesh formats from sweet home into freecad that you can interoperate between freecad and sweet home, so basically, by designing whole part libraries with full version histories. We can manage this and also manage a larger scale collaborative process. So I mentioned about this crazy 2000 person, design, sprint or enterprise sprint.

C

uh Yes, there's believe me: there's plenty of tasks you can allocate between all the open source tools, the modular design and so forth, which can allow a large team just like in software to collaborate seamlessly using very basic processes of version control and part libraries that we are developing various tool chains for so it's really cool like this. The software is there in my view and freecad is we have a way that we can teach people in one hour to do a basic workflow?

C

That gets you eighty percent of any possible design, so you can also teach these tools quite effectively.

C

uh We haven't done that for blender, yet because blender is a little more complicated, but I also think you can learn blender rapidly for the basic functionality, uh if you can, if you wanna do animations and renderings now the cool thing about this, is we we're extensible to all kinds of systems? So I mentioned about the pv system in in this house. We actually have a biodigester that that creates.

C

um This is the only uh tempered zone house with a with an indoor biodigester in the world. Perhaps I don't know if anyone else does that we're we're emitting gray water for septic fertigation as the byproduct for on the wastewater system in this house.

C

That's one of the systems. We have also built a pool very low cost. It's like 2 000 bucks in materials uh for not very nice pool we're going to offer, so the pv is going to be a standard offer uh we're involving other crazy areas based on our machine work, the 3d printing work, where we're building larger printers, where you can actually start printing trim and whole building panels.

C

So that's that's something that will be released in this whole process as well, and there's machines there's a relationship to machines here, because the tractors can be used. Some of the open source tractors can be used to lower the construction costs and you can get into things like aquaponic greenhouses like ice. I showed that's going to be also an option you can get with a house for food production or you can do farm, bots, etc to do various stuff.

C

What's this hydrogen crazy thing here? Well, we're actually going to uh have a an experimental hydrogen solar hydrogen production setup as well. You can see that the first ever solar hydrogen demonstrator house was built in 2006 in the united states, actually um yeah unique properties. This is a big hairy, audacious goal, but if you talk about hydrogen, even um pv isn't expensive, but you can't start. The best bet is probably uh forklift batteries. In my opinion, you can go to lithium ions, but they're disaster in terms of environmental and social aspects.

C

So I don't really like I looked man I was gonna get get into that. But after I read a little more about the environmental and social issues involved with that, it's like they're, not super recyclable. It's a finite resource, and it's it's not the greatest. So I would favor lead acid batteries and over over that. But that leaves the energy question because this thing is not doesn't have energy stuff, it has pv for daytime. But what do you do for night time?

C

You can connect to the grid with like net metering, but I think the real deal is solar, hydrogen and a lot of people.

C

If you look at, if you start googling solar hydrogen you'll notice a big spike of interest in it as everybody's talking about circular economies and renewable energy these days, but the first solar hydrogen house, prototype demonstrator was built in new jersey in the united states in 2006 or seven there's, one that's being built right now in the uk in 2020 so and we're gonna offer the first first in the world open source hydrogen system, you can do it. Okay, you have the pv, that's affordable.

C

You can do electrolysis using alkaline electrolysis and you can store the gas in height in uh in propane tanks at relatively low pressure, so there's a tool chain where you can do it now. You know how do you burn it? uh We're not going to use fuel cells, we're going to use internal combustion engines!

C

Think of, like the honda eu 1000 generator, that's converted for hydrogen, something of that effect where you're still burning it, because that's technology that's accessible today, and that that understandably, could be very controversial to a lot of people who will be like that's nuts you're going to burn hydrogen. But right now we do have the technology to burn hydrogen and internal combustion energy. So we're actually going to look into that as an option. That's going to be an experimental feature that you can order with this house, like I've.

C

Looked at the inspect out some of the the pricing. There's gonna have to be an open source electrolyzers, because that's uh ah those are rather a bit expensive right now, um but even if you go with an off-the-shelf electrolyzer, it could be almost affordable so that a system like this we're aiming for about five thousand dollars for the hydrogen generation and used system no fuel cells, just internal combustion engines.

C

uh So in this project, we're taking on a bhag big hairy, audacious goal of not only solving housing, that's affordable! How well we're making it affordable and buildable buildable absolutely speed and cost wise and it has to be beautiful.

C

We have a distributed enterprise model, so we're teaching entrepreneurs how to how to build these houses as we develop this and that's why we think we can get 2 000 people to show up, because the value proposition is significant.

C

Other people can get involved in blender, animations, renderings and so forth, different ways to collaborate and using open source tool chains, but in this whole process we're we're trying to solve housing and we're serious about it. We say: okay, let's, let's do the first ever affordable buildable house. What do we have to learn from history about it? There's been many attempts at that right, um we're yet another effort to solve it. I think we can, um but I think the real key is being open source collaborative.

C

uh If we're. If we really get really good and successful, then we might solve hydrogen and and a plastic problem if you, if we develop open source uh plastic recycling for making construction materials kind of like uh precious plastic but with 3d printers, let's learn from others. So, let's look at history of why um affordable housing has succeeded or not.

C

Sears kit houses were a major major success. I don't know if you guys have heard about them in the united states between 1908 and 1942, they were a major hit.

C

They were a big success, a drop shipped kit home that weighed 25 tons that they delivered on a truck to your your your steps before you had the house there, so you built the house from a kid guess. Why guess why it ended? I was blown away. I just found this out yesterday, but the sears kit houses stopped because they ran out of wood in 1942. All the wood in the united states was repurposed to the war effort and they shut down and never opened their doors again.

C

It was very interesting, but they had a whole whole set of kits. They had to refund money for people because basically they couldn't get wood. So what's the lesson there control your supply chain? That's actually a big issue. Right now, because I mentioned the forty thousand dollar price for the the lumber um we, we specced out two by six lumber at six dollars a board for an eight footer in the united states. We just looked the other day, they're ten dollars. Now, uh prices of materials have gone up.

C

Eighty percent right now, so the sears kit failure is actually a quite relevant history for us, because, right now the price of lumber is essentially double uh also due to the forest fires, the trump embargo on canadian wood imports and just the general surge of building by yuppies leaving the cities uh during covet time. That's interesting convergence of history right there, uh let's look at others, katrina cottages, if you ever heard of them. So actually in the presentation, those blues are clickable, so you can link find out more about it.

C

Katrina katrina cottages were pretty cool, but they kind of looked like a trailer home. So people didn't like them. They were not buildable because they were too expensive to build. The mobile home industry was a kit house that was to be made by companies that are like the companies that make model kit.

C

The mobile homes and the mobile home guys said now we ain't building this it's too hard, so it wasn't super buildable too complex, which is, uh I think, we're addressing that quite a bit because we're the architects and builders and users and designers and engineers of this thing, so we actually like have the whole uh chain of design from design to finish kind of you can say vertically integrated, which leads into modular housing.

C

If you click on that, there's a great article on why modular housing has failed and basically long story short, is that house building is a complex intricate process with many parties involved and and because it's not integrated enough, each guy tries to pass the buck onto the next guy.

C

The architect, the average architect will make a house that is not designed to be built easily like unless you have built one. The engineer will not design a house to be low cost because they're just following the standards right, but basically at each step, you have this break of the one agent or party passing it on to the next guy, like, for example, with the modular housing case. It was like the guys have some kind of a product that fits in a modular house and they say: okay, that's the end of my responsibility.

C

You figure out how to put it into the rest of the house. That's kind of the way I understand it, like the whole chain of command from a design to the finished product is so dis, disconnected that the price is just jacked up over that entire process, and you can read more about from from that article uh regarding why that is now what we learned from micro houses.

C

Well, we built a micro house here and we think that people need space like most micro houses are uh temporary, I.e people end up moving up out of them or they're, not comfortable. If we lived in one here too, and it's like katarina said it's like no way it's too little space for a family so make it big enough. So we're doing starting with a thousand square feet now, there's vivi house: what do we learn from them? Yes,.

C

C

No definitely definitely I'm closer.

C

Yeah, no, I can wrap up here. This is, I was just going through some of the uh learnings.

C

And I wanted to ask you guys, because this is learning from others like maybe the the discussion point could be like what do we learn from other projects? Why why there is not affordable housing today um from from wiki, okay vivi house? Yes, they are open. So I I believe personally that any effort that solves housing must be open source collaborative, so any kind of a proprietary effort is deemed to fail by design.

C

I would say, in my opinion, because somebody's catching more profit, probably than they need to so that's to be open source, doesn't mean you're poor, making these houses. You can make a lot of money too, but it's got to be open source. Everyone has access, there's other, so vivi house, it's a great project to look at they're, the modular open source housing, but you need a financing model for that. Wiki house is a bit expensive, dimaxing house by bucks.

C

Minister fuller in us history- uh I I don't know, maybe didn't get accepted, even though it was supposedly superior because it wasn't so humane. I think zero energy autonomous houses are a great idea. Yes, let's make them open source natural building.

C

Hey we've done that it's uh labor is expensive, but that's the cord wood hut there that you see in that picture that since then, we've moved up to a more traditional structure, but that's how we lived initially, and we experienced that to find out that, yes, you can build it for 400 hours, but if you count your labor, it's 4 000 more, like you know, a few thousand dollars, even though the labor might be like the even though the materials may be like almost uh cost free um and the hydrogen houses.

C

Yeah solar hydrogen houses, yeah, that's a cool idea. I think, but anyway nobody's solved the the housing package yet um challenge. What are the challenges that we see here? Well, we've got a lot of development. I don't, I don't think the actual build of the house is going to be an issue. I think I actually crossed that out because I was thinking like okay. Can we build an affordable, attractive, easy to build model? I think so.

C

uh I think the enterprise aspect is the biggest one. How do you roll it out as an enterprise? Maybe the coordination of the 2000 people in uh development event, but we have a plan for that. If, um if we don't have 2000 people, I think the minimum that it can work with is like 500 or even possibly 200 or something it will take longer, but we're trying to go for the large numbers to just get it knocked out and done and we've got a product next year now.

C

The other issue is that house may be speculated upon so say you build this house and now you can sell, because houses are worth a lot right. You sell it for, like you, start speculating with with this open source house. Is that going to happen? Well, I don't know it's. Probably it definitely is going to happen, so we have to just provide enough of them that less speculation happens and everyone has has access.

C

These are some of the house models designs. I don't know so. I think I'll end there, maybe like the feedback. I'd like to hear from you guys is like okay. How do we succeed in making affordable housing for everybody? And what do we learn from projects? Maybe that we have missed so I'll I'll end there. You have the presentation, you can contact me there and all that maybe open this up to housing right now, questions.

C

E

Really cool thanks.

F

E

Just need one more.

G

E

One thought from denmark in terms of avoiding speculation: there are, there are housing systems here where you you don't enter the building, you own your part of the cooperative yeah, so you buy the rights to the building and it's always the cooperative that sets the price. That's that's one model that they use here in denmark,.

C

Yeah that that would definitely be worthwhile to look at uh is that something you can send a link to for their model. I mean we'd love to we've, thought about something like that where, if we're selling the house, maybe we can allocate part of that funding to managing a comment. So basically you buy the. As you said, rights to that house and there's something in the in the contract that says you're, not. Basically, you can only sell it at an affordable price.

C

After yourself, you can still make improvements so that wouldn't dis, dis-incentivize improvements but there'd be.

E

Something for this.

F

C

E

B

Really interesting, as.

E

F

Thank you. Thank you.

C

uh Are you referring? Were you referring to the house model itself in in sweet home 3d or no.

E

The the posters of uh of all the machines you've been working on. Oh.

F

C

Yeah yeah yep yep, that's a graphic from a long time ago. Yep.

A

I just want to understand this better when you're talking about the 2000 people event, let's.

F

A

Or 500 these would be people that eventually would would be trained how to construct, let's say and they get a house something like that.

C

Yes, exactly exactly so so we're trying to solve for people showing up, and we think that if we say hey, you're, actually uh you're you're participating because you not only this- is not a hackathon. This is like you're directly involved, not only designing and finishing and productizing a house that you're gonna get, but also something that contributes to greater humanity. So we're trying to combine the two.

C

It's like you're personally interested in this, because you've got a house that you're gonna get and two you're actually contributing to a bigger global effort that solves bigger problems by making this accessible to everyone.

A

But does this mean that this group of 2000, let's say people or whatever the number, is let's say it's from the same area where let's say.

H

A

This is kind of difficult. Let's say you know the thing about software. We can talk about every part of the planet. Somebody can contribute.

C

No, this is actually uh a remote event because and we're still in colvids- and this is this- is planned for august of next year by which covid is probably maybe we have less restrictions. There probably will be some covet stuff going on in august, but we're thinking it's a remote event. So you can collaborate using online tools. Use like this um with a big big conference, and we have to structure that they're all architecture for that and subgroups and all that.

C

But the idea there is do it in like one weekend where it's 24 hours in one weekend, so it's manageable for people to to just show up to that and there's training like there's a crash course of four hours right now that we're planning, so you bring people on board. How do you actually document your work that you put in a proper version, history and part library like what are all the different steps?

C

So we teach you the basics: here's the the large scale, collaborative development method, here's some basic tools like freecad, sweet, home and blender. Here's um just how you collaborate in this overall design process, the collaborative literacy mindset. The fact that it's even possible to do that most people don't recognize that there's the tools or techniques to do that. So it's an education for the people that go in there. How do you do modular, open source, modular development?

C

So it's also a valuable thing for people, because we want the people afterwards enduring to contribute to further improvements as well.

A

D

Just a question here: uh oh sorry, that's okay! You go ahead.

I

Oh, um can you hear me? Yes, yes, um so I'm very intrigued by that this one thing I've seen in the u.s that works is a land trust where they have, where you know the a organization purchases the land.

I

And then you know you your, then that you know you have a 99 year lease or whatever, so that I think that would be a potentially way to get around the land and also a way to coordinate with planning. Because, that's you know, you're you're excited about houses right yeah. As a more on the planning side, um it makes me nervous, seeing like okay, all these uh five thousand five thousand dollar lots. Where are they, where the consequences of that etc? Right.

C

That's an issue, but that's a stepping stone. I think the real deal is village building, so we have the larger concept like in the global village construction set, as that implies we'd like to build campuses which are essentially facilities where you have education, production, real life, so basically like the the way to build think of it. Instead of the 40 acre cookie cutter development.

C

You're saying this is a development where it's cluster development.

C

You have agricultural production, natural preservation, production, so kind of the fab cities idea where cities now begin to produce all that they consume and biological wastewater treatment, and all that, like an aquaponic greenhouse the biodigester work, the pv like yeah, we can, we already can do quite a bit for autonomous energy and food and waste production systems. So that's the greater vision, cluster development right now we're starting with just the single homes but we'd like to do the larger, larger settlements.

C

For us, it's about um we'd like to build kind of like the university that I mentioned. I went to university and I wasn't particularly satisfied with that we'd like to create an environment which is like a place of lifelong learning like a university campus, but it's like where you live there for real, so that kind of a model, but definitely land trusts.

I

And and one thing I've been thinking about a lot around this is uh you know, climate refugees and where the climate refuge refuge is for people right. And how do you start thinking about those as part of this too, which would be really interesting.

C

Yeah yeah, I mean, I think, the basic techniques for construction, like especially if you start adding the compressed earth block machine into this. We did not release the first model as a ceb version. It's much more labor, much more capital intensity there, even though the building material is is almost free, there's a lot of labor and an intricacy to that process.

C

But we are definitely rolling that out as uh if we get enough orders, we invest that revenue into first things get the brick press into full production, get the sawmill into full production, as in a cnc sawmill that you can generate lumber from where whatever site you have. So you don't rely on canada or all forest plantations and stuff like that.

C

So definitely think about how you incorporate local materials like the plastic or earth or lumber that you source locally.

I

um Duncan, I don't know if you want to.

I

Step in here about um you know, there's been talk around um having some sort of project and we've talked about a mad scientist layer to demonstrate all the different workflows for for blender and blender bim and other things. um And so I don't know if, if this kind of thing would be an interesting project to be part of.

E

Yeah, the the idea of with that project was: um we've got kind of a few things. One thing there's a few projects. People are working on which are real world projects um which are not particularly pressed for time, and that's one way. That's that we're helping blender boom and freecad push the push development there, but the other one. Some, um like you talked about. First one is um the idea of a completely fictitious project, which just includes all sorts of you know as a display project, which includes all sorts of kind of different things.

E

So I guess, um because what we talked about is both in in our group, our time and our resources, and maybe not not set up so that we can guarantee things in in somebody else's time frame, but certainly working uh there'd be some interest. I imagine, and people working on a um on a crazy project which just tries to cover all bases with all sorts of things like I was thinking um an aspect to the project uh to the project during their marching is okay.

E

How do you handle the modularity and nationalization of some of these things? Different places have got different requirements. Different lighting, all that kind of stuff and- and that could be an interesting thing to look at well. How can we in our software manage the aspects of a project um and make it easy for people to say? Well, you know, actually, if I need to add one extra bedroom or if I have a great view over here, can I move my window there without brewing the structural integrity and stuff like that?

E

So definitely have a think about whether there are some some things that you think we'd be able to use to push our development forward and, of course, we've got plenty of people with lots of professional skills.

C

How many people are in your network.

E

No idea we have no way of tracking it. At the moment we haven't. Really. We haven't really got as far as saying this is who we are and who's with us. So at the moment, you just have to look at the forum and see how many people are talking.

F

E

D

Terms of forum users we're now sitting at approximately 750, but of course only a a small fraction of that, I would say less than 10 percent, actually actively uh view what's going on um and then an even smaller fraction of that are people who actually contribute and build stuff and test stuff and use stuff. It's kind of like the whole long tail graph.

D

You tend to see in most organizations open source organizations where a very small number of people do the work and then there's a longer tale of people who are encouraging, but due to various uh limitations in time and so on it it becomes complicated.

D

um Just one more thing. Just back, I had a question about your um because you were talking about funding and scaling.

D

Have you considered partnering with humanitarian organizations because, for example, with you know, refugee planning? You know you have one week where you have a whole bunch of skilled people in a room, and you say in one week you're going to get 2 000 people arriving on this public land and you need to have basically a mini village set out for them. I know it's it's much more! Bare bones, like they say: okay, this many people have this amount of water. We need to provide this amount of shelter.

D

We need to provide this, this many square feet per person and they have standards for all that type of stuff. So they've already worked out like really minimum livable standards before people start turning into refugees and they've. Also, I assume worked out- I guess you're after something a bit more permanent and empowering, whereas they're just after temporary and getting it over the line, but maybe there's there's something there.

C

Yeah, no, I haven't, haven't really talked to any of the humanitarian organizations like that. We're trying to get in contact with habitat for humanity, see if there's interest so we'll do that as part of the outreach. uh Do you have any specific contacts that you can forward on to who could be interested.

D

Yeah yeah I've got some people who have worked for organizations like the u.n who do refugee planning and are well versed in the um and the standards involved. In that.

C

Do you think like so if ours is a more permanent solution, would you see that would be relevant to the refugee camps? I think probably some of the utility systems that were we're developing like waste processing or or pv or perhaps.

D

Or maybe after like the refugee camp would be a stop gap, you know a stepping stone to something else, and then you would provide the next step if they do need to set up their own community. I'm not sure I I have absolutely no experience in this process, but uh maybe there is something there to look. I I can probably connect you to somebody who knows much more about this.

C

Yeah yeah, if you wouldn't mind that would be great. How do we follow up through this.

D

Oh, I have your email or on the forum I'll, do it on the forum, so everybody everybody can see. What's going on yeah.

E

Another another aspect of what you've been talking about is, as you say, it's putting more focus. If I understood you correctly, you're, making more use of people's um time and effort rather than expensive solutions and complicated solutions that only perhaps more trained and more skilled people can deal with, and there was some talk here when we had some refugees arrived from syria of helping of helping them through a training funding land uh lease model build some communities, so they would be able to have an area of land and they would get some training.

F

E

They would be able to to build their own community. um I don't think anything happened about that, but that's certainly another way where what dion's saying can be the the natural follow-on to a temporary refugee situation where people actually need somewhere to settle down for at least some number of years.

F

hmm Yeah that will be there'll, be something.

E

uh What what do you think? um What are you guys missing in terms of the functionality or the capability of what's going on in the software world, because one of the things we another of the things we haven't sort of done at the moment, people are developing what they they themselves need, and maybe one of the things we want to look in the future. Is this sort of a priority list of what what do the people out there um need of support for certain functions or file formats or whatever?

E

What are you guys, seeing as a as a whole and what you need for software.

C

Automatic generation of the bills of materials that you can cus customization and bill material generation right now, our simple approach to that is: okay. We can teach you some free, cad and and sweet home and from the modules that we already have and extensive part libraries you can do that. What we were planning on doing is we actually uh one of our guys wrote it's called the osc workbench platform in freecad, where you can start designing workbenches in freecad for all the machines, so we've got one for our 3d printer, for example.

C

We are planning on creating one for the house where you drag and drop known modules into your working document, so just that kind of integration where you're populating a package like freecad with all the modules so that you can you effectively create a full.

A

Recording has stopped.

C

For for design that any novice then can drag and drop and start working with engineered parts, because the way we want to design it is that, because the different modules are already engineered and there's some design rules and design guides, anyone can then become able to uh to generate their own models as well, so be uh adding that functionality to creating. Essentially that.

A

Recording is on.

C

Creating that workbench for freecad we've got a bunch of instructions. Maybe I can follow up on a forum uh regarding the osc workbench platform and how that works, but basically, we've got the whole workflow well defined for how you actually program freecad in python, for any python programmers out there, so they can get involved in and that's that, I think, is going to be a big part of the the customization of how customization and popular involvement which we haven't achieved so much yet, but once people can start designing their own houses that are buildable.

C

That's going to be much better, so filling in the gaps on the design capacity would be that and then from there of course, get to the automated bill of materials generation.

E

A

I know because the data's.

E

There I know that what deals has been doing with ifc and blender boom can also can also fill that hole in um automatic bills of quantities, but that's that would be through the ifc format for building the other macro that you mentioned for freak head. Does that have a name? Can we find that on the internet somewhere or is it part of freak at all.

F

Yeah the thing that I refer to, let's see.

F

E

I guess I'm just asking other other the other developers of freecad well aware of that.

F

C

So, uh let's see the the link there that I have in.

C

I can follow up.

F

I thought I had the link in.

C

F

C

uh Let me send you a link right now, which is simply that'd, be great, and then we can just we.

E

Can just check ourselves that the freaking people know that this and there's something there.

C

uh So that's the this is a simplistic macro. I just put a link to it and then there's the osc workbench.

F

C

So take a look at the second one, the second link there. That's that's pretty good stuff, um where I think it's perhaps the most comprehensive documentation of how you actually start to program free cad, to make workbenches that that kind of info is scattered. I think we've got the most comprehensive uh instructionals on how to do that there that we know of at least so. I see freecad workbenches.

C

How do you actually start designing workbenches within freecad.

F

C

So yeah there could be tons of python and freecad people involved in this, and we'd want to generate relationships with a lot of architects who are doing this customization work so we'd like to involve a lot of people who develop these capacities. It could be standard architects, it could be open source people who learn the software.

C

um That's part of the business problem to work out for rowing out these houses.

E

C

E

Do some other people have some.

B

Questions about the I understand that in the u.s there is a lot of land and you need to build houses. But, as you said in europe, there is many villages which are very inexpensive because.

B

Some are almost desertic and to solve the house issue, we also need to talk about rehabilitation renovation. I don't know how you say it.

B

And currently, as much as I know, it costs less energy to do renovation than to build a new house.

B

So I don't know if you plan to a project about this or you first go for the new house and uh you think about renovation later yeah.

F

C

We we know that our take on that is yeah to to renovate an existing thing. It's for us, it's probably lower cost, definitely faster, possibly lower, lower energy to build from scratch because we've got. We think what we have is a very basic building method, so we haven't we're not touching the remodeling right now.

C

So I don't have much comment about that. But um but if you do have a building, that's already standing there, of course you wouldn't want to tear it down. One thing that could be done is maybe use some of our techniques for either like modular additions or modifications like you can certainly retrofit some of our subsystems like say pv or say the aquaponic greenhouse to adding them on to existing structures. We definitely do think about infill development like, for example, in the city.

C

You might have one lot in a burned down: neighborhood, that's just there for buildings, so that would be, uh but that's still new construction. So so that is definitely uh because we are so unique. uh I mean unique as in like we're not. We know that our technique, it's a completely different skill, set to build what we're doing than to say renovate something from that's already standing. So it's kind of different packages.

E

Some other questions.

D

Yeah, I'm not trained in mep or structural, but this is an mep instructural question, so um you use I. It seems as though from my understanding for your purposes, the existing open source software is plenty capable of delivering the you know doing a basic blocking massing diagram, drawing out each individual part that already exists. But what about the engineering side I mean, are you? How do you do your um uh mep calculations? How do you do your structural analysis?

D

Do you use open source software for that or do it do it old, school and just say, okay, you know we'll just we'll just work it out by hand and yeah.

C

Right now, it's old school as in okay, here's, the structure, design of the interface between panels here engineer, verify this and show us some of the detail or what we need to do so we get it certified. This is non-standard construction, so it has to be engineered.

C

So we're just hiring an engineer to do that, and but because it's a modular construction method like once we get a few basic engineering calculations done then we're we're good for more. But of course this is where all the open source engineering software could come in. We haven't used that at all yet, but if there's expertise within this community on that- which I think there is plenty uh yeah definitely would be points of collaboration. Okay.

C

So let's get the thermal and structural and all kinds of analysis done in freecad, salome and open whatever brl cat or whatever we've got out there open foam, there's a ton of stuff that I'd love to see all that functionality migrate, slowly but surely into freecad.

C

That would be awesome and I think that's going to happen over time, and perhaps we can fund some of that with the revenue from this project, maybe make that a fast track to getting some of that capacity, because we definitely love to have it in an open source right now we're just getting it. Whichever way we can.

E

I know here in denmark, you won't be able to build anything until you've got some pretty good documentation for all sorts of stuff, including the thermal yeah. It makes life hard because you calculated also in a very specific way.

C

Yeah, so local adaptation and and that kind of a capacity that we develop as part of the source code in this project, where we teach people so okay. How do you do this? What's required for each localization um for localization-wise, because right now we're starting with the us, but we'll be going to? Of course, this will spread to other countries so yeah. How do we do that? So the localization questions is a big one.

B

Zero, yes, um I I think you know earth chip principle and there are very interesting airflow management and water management. I think you talked about water management before, but I'm not sure.

F

B

It is inspired from uh of chip or something.

C

uh Not ex exactly uh earthship is also very expensive and proprietary and not easy to build um it's not an open source project to begin with, but the more inspiration comes from another, even more unopen source project, which is called living machines right, but the aquaponics.

C

The picture that you I showed in my presentation is for real. The stuff is amazing and it works, and we figured that out how to do that, how to do the towers, so we've got that part. uh Personally, I was inspired a lot by living machines in this and then seeing some of the other aquaponics work.

C

We are aware of earthship if they were more open source and collaborative, we could probably work more with them.

B

Don't have don't they I've uh open plan.

C

Sorry, no, no, they don't like. You, look at download one of their models from them and it's it's copyrighted. It's it's not open source. You can't use those plans, you have to pay for them and so forth. um This kind of brings up the other question like a lot of times. Yeah I mean for me, like I've, studied a lot of this okay who's, open source and who's.

C

Not what you'll find out is that once there's an actual, really good working design, it's super rare to find on any open source version like for the aquaponics, the stuff that we did was previously pretty much proprietary by this other company, and we had not a lot to go on outside of other people that were doing similar work, but a lot of times just all this stuff gets sucked up and disappears, and uh the general comment is that all together is very little.

C

If you talk about an efficient, good, solid design, it's very very rare, there's only a few projects that have that maybe axiom the vivi house farmbot, um but no there's a lot of stuff that looks open source, but it's fake, open source, and we have an article on that. If you want to look at our wiki, but we ran into a lot of that where first of all, a lot of people are going to use the word open source and they're not open source according to the definition, that's very common.

C

So it's one of the issues of cultural uh transformation that we need to address as we move forward in an open source economy.

D

That's a really really important point and I think there's something because we're mainly focusing on the software side, uh not so much hardware, there's something that we need to do about that too something about whenever we, even whenever we build stuff software wise, we need to open source the building process so that more developers can join in and get interested and that's something. I think we need to work on as a community.

C

Absolutely- and that is exactly the thing that we're trying to address with the extreme enterprise concept, we're not just publishing the the design of the house, we're publishing the business process and the very enterprise that we publish it free. You can replicate it yourself now. Also. We will train you to do that and we will have a whole open source franchise model where we we, we can train.

C

You give you the rapid training on that, but we publish everything, absolutely and- and anyone can learn from it, because we want to work on solving bigger problems, and that's uh it's very rare that there's a anything resembling the distributive enterprise thing.

C

I think we're the only guys in the world right now that are very deliberately talking about the idea of open sourcing business plans so that if you have a best practice, like apple imagine, apple open sourcing, their stuff, so everyone gets up to the level of apple or any best player allows everybody to raise the bar.

C

That is the critical missing thing that is very rare, very, very foreign to people today, because of course, we live in decades centuries of proprietary hardware starting an industrial revolution. That culture is very strong for the last 200 years, and software had a different little bit of a different break because because the original software people they were actually open source. So so that's why I think it happened faster in software as well, but in hardware, a lot of stuff yeah.

C

It's much more of a foreign topic like john deere is not going to open source their tractors. Until we do and then we we show them that it's actually an economic advantage to go open source, which has been amply demonstrated by open software. But just people are not making that connection that the hardware could work the same too and it's much harder and hardware agreed, but the exact same kinds of methods of of collaborative development for creating an open core, that's still applicable just as much even more.

E

F

E

Maybe half past we can round up, but I know best. One has another question.

H

I have a question: can you hear me, can.

E

H

Okay, thank you. uh Thank you very much for the presentation. It's really really interesting. Thank you, uh yeah ambitious as well, but you have the reputation that you are able to do this open source technology, so I think you can do it. uh The just uh two questions. One is why you do you say that wiki house is expensive project um and this because I just thinking you know the jury by harvard he.

H

He built his uh on the wikilab using freecad, as well with the weak house concept behind that project and this he build it. But I would like to know what why you say that this is an expensive, because I I was thinking that the concept of quick house using you know, cnc machines and all that thing which should go in the direction of make it cheaper, and another thing is, uh is what about the industrialization of houses uh in, in your perspective, with this this this project, that you are you you are, you are designing.

H

uh Do you do you think that it's possible to move this into an industrialized house, build it in factories using freecad.

C

Yeah so two questions for for wikihouse. It's not particularly expensive, but it is expensive by our standards because we are aiming for a price of fifty dollars. A square foot. uh Their cost is 150 per square foot. If I'm correct, so it's 3x our cost, for I think that was with respect to one of their like one of their older models.

C

I'm not exactly sure what the exact cost structure is right now, but it's at least 3x more than what we're trying to do, and we have more features as in that actually includes the utilities and utility systems, but by standard construction techniques. No, that's it could be lower like 150, that's the figure, I'm kind of working. Do you I mean. Do you know the exact cost per square foot or per square meter figure for wikihouse.

H

No, no, I don't know.

C

Yeah, so just google that- and I will guarantee you that it will be between 3x and 10x- are cost so yeah. um It is a really good question and if the wikihouse people- I don't, I don't want them to get mad at me here, but wiki house cost per square meter.

C

It says 325 per square meter an immediate hit on the internet uh 325 per square meter. What no is it.

C

If that is true, then it's the same cost as ours um here: build cost 1 000 to 1 600 per meter, squared so yeah, so about like 100, 10, 160 per square foot, or so um a little more than that so yeah, it's I mean we're we're serious about a 50 per square foot build cost, so so there, according to their official numbers, they're 3x our cost. So you can say: well, that's that's good for for standard construction because it's still cheaper than standard, but it's not as as inexpensive as ours.

C

So now can this lend itself to industrialized production with freecad? Hey? Why not? Now um I think it's all a matter of how you do it.

C

uh The thing that I want to be cautious about is having ethical enterprise. You know once you get into you know, read small, is beautiful by schumacher right and find out that at a certain scale of operation, just things just break down, so the question of scale is important if you can run that as a run, a an industrial part or industrialized production. That would be great as long as that organization is highly collaborative and a good business that does things well for the environment and for people that's fine, it can.

C

Certainly, you can certainly do that with with our method. I think I think I.

H

I I just once uh I was you know, thinking that uh you are, you are working with the several areas of the technology that could help small factories. You know a small workshop to build houses because, because you already have you know all this is incredible: open source machines and and then a open source methodologies and low cost. You know process and method.

H

So and now you you can as well. You have this uh business models that as well, are open source, so they can be. Maybe you know adopted by small workshops, to use this machine to produce open source, low-cost houses.

H

What I I was thinking you know when I say industrialized, I'm not talking about corporate yeah corporations. You know this is a small or medium workshops uh that in many countries you know this is where a lot of people work. I couldn't.

C

Agree with you more that's as long as we make the distinction between just like corporate and just foul business. No, this is absolutely industrializable by small scale, micro factories, absolutely.

G

And to to follow that that line of thought a bit more, um I know you are thinking of extreme enterprise as one big event.

F

G

uh Well, I'm wondering if, if that big events won't benefit from like a groundswell of little activities involving um small shops and people who, like people here, for example, or other people that you're talking to over time, that they can engage with the idea of the distributive enterprise and um be part of a network and have little ways in which they can start bootstrapping and um and engaging with the idea be beyond just listening to you.

G

Talk about it right as a way of building a groundswell that can then really push into um the extreme enterprise event. The first one when it happens and then also um provide a network that can start to trigger the localization um that you we've identified as um being potentially problematic.

F

G

Some people think about.

C

Yeah definitely no no you're right.

C

I think the the extreme enterprise event is going to be like the culmination, but before that as soon as we launch, which we're looking at like january 21st when the presidential transition occurs, uh if we don't have a revolution we'll launch on january 21st, so and at that time it would be a great because right now we're doing a lot of prep work and we're actually building two more models like right now in in november and december, including one that's in a different location, to prove that you can actually do this with full codes with a business model that actually works and so forth.

C

So but yeah. Definitely, I think the groundswell idea is absolutely right so uh and that's why you know I'm doing this presentation here and keep talking about this and get people involved and there's so many different elements that can be developed. There's the house technology and all the ancillary technologies, including 3d, printing and and machines, and renewable energy systems that are related and the utility systems. So I think the groundswell idea is definitely definitely a good one. We'll try to do that.

C

Let's communicate on that as well, how, if you guys want to be involved, how we can do that, and things like that.

E

Okay yeah, um unless somebody quickly has another question, I'm just gonna say thank you. There's uh I mean it's.

B

E

Was really glad to hear that we have a presentation from you, so thanks for whoever got that set up, I think that was, I know.

F

Yeah, thank you and the best.

C

Best way to continue the follow-up, so we should communicate through the forum.

E

Yeah, if you want to talk to us as a group yeah through the forum excellent um and if you, if you find some places on our wiki, where you think there's an we should be uh linking to your stuff or or whatever just um make an account or let one of us know, yeah the the wiki is still very, um very loosely organized. So we certainly need to add some links to our friends out there. Groups like yours and what you're doing.

C

Yeah, definitely definitely are you the lead, organizer kind of lead, instigator or well.

E

We don't with that. You have that because, like I saying we don't even know who we are yet at the moment, we're just people with um with similar ideas, again priorities.

F

But on the wiki I'm certainly one of the people.

E

Who can make sure that things get done and.

F

C

Stuff, yeah excellent, and definitely I mean let's talk about how we can start building in all this other functionality for the calculations and all that, so we have a full and robust open source tool chain. In my view, it's just a matter of time before that happens, because I mean no way is proprietary software going to be able to compete with something that improves over time. I mean, I just think it's in that.

E

Definitely have a look on the forum. There is, um if you don't find it, let me know, but somebody did start a thread on quantity surveying, um so the current options and what's happening there is uh discussed in that three on on what on on quantity survey, so bills of quantity in okay, in that whole field, yeah yeah, that's great um yeah, so thanks very much somebody's making fun of me in the chat. Thank you raphael yeah.

E

As far as I can see from the from the forum the os arc in general, we don't have any um important agenda points so unless anybody thinks we need to talk about something while we're live here now, then we might be finished for today this morning tonight, whatever time it is around here, does anybody have anything that we need to sort out right now?

E

Yeah? I don't think so.

E

If everybody turns on their microphone, we can say good night and goodbye and thank you, martin.

E

Thanks a lot for.

G

F

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

B

Thank you very much and let's figure out.

F

Let's make it happen thanks.

E