“I finished my 20s with a PhD in fusion energy and I discovered I was useless”, Marcin Jakubowski told the crowd assembled at TED2011. It’s a feeling many others with specialised knowledge might recognise, but instead of venturing further into solitary, abstract study, Jakubowski decided to head back to the land with the hopes of creating a sustainable community. He continues: “I started a farm in Missouri and learned about the economics of farming. I bought a tractor, then it broke. I paid to get it repaired, then it broke again, and pretty soon I was broke, too. I realised that the truly appropriate, low-cost tools that I needed to start a sustainable farm and settlement just didn’t exist yet. I needed tools that were robust, modular, highly-efficient and optimised, low-cost, made from local and recycled material that would last a lifetime, not designed for obsolescence. I found that I would have to build it myself, so I did just that.”

Jakubowski is the founder of Open Source Ecology (OSE), which has grown into a network of farmers, engineers and supporters building what’s known as the ‘Global Village Construction Set’ (GVCS). The project first identified 40 and then 50 industrial machines required to create a small civilisation. The range of products spans several sectors, from farming and construction to engineering and energy, and includes a tractor, brick press, industrial oven, 3D printer, induction furnace and several sources of energy, amongst many other tools. The ultimate aim is to publish full documentation for these machines – 3D designs, schematics, instructional videos, budgets – so anyone with a basic set of skills can build them for a fraction of the cost of buying new. “Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilisation starter kit”, Jakubowski says.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the project is the fact that – as the organisation’s name makes clear – it is open source, meaning everything it produces, all the knowledge it acquires, is available to the public free of charge – think Wikipedia for hardware. Add this to the remaining bit of the organisation’s name – ecology – and the result is an ambitious plan that aims to fulfil all basic human needs while freeing participants from ‘the wasteful resource flows of the larger economy’ by using local resources sustainably.

In conclusion to his TED talk, Jakubowski notes: “If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant – a greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally-sound supply chains, and a newly relevant DIY-maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity.” OSE represents a refreshing approach to resource scarcity at a time when emerging (and in some cases established) concepts like ‘peak oil’, ‘land grabs’, ‘resource wars’, ‘overfishing’, ‘built-in obsolescence’ and impending ‘overpopulation’ might paralyse many with fear and spur governments and corporations alike into aggressive, and ultimately destructive, actions. The OSE model is working towards a ‘post-scarcity’ world, where local communities can flourish sustainably. Jakubowski refers to this as ‘accelerating the inevitable’, but there is, of course, a lot of work to be done before it’s achievable...

Taking a break from what sounds like fairly intense work on the shop floor, OSE’s Director of Development, Aaron Makaruk, brings me up to speed with how the project is progressing. To date, the group has built prototypes for 18 of the machines, and released full documentation for four products: the Compressed Earth Brick Press (The Liberator); the Tractor (LifeTrac); the Soil Pulverizer; and the Modular Hydraulic Power Unit (the Power Cube). This has been achieved through the work of seven to 10 people living on the farm, as well as numerous volunteers who pass through, and, of course, the online network, including a ‘smart mob’ database of around 200. Makaruk explains the concept behind the smart mob: “Let’s say we build this structure and we want to see whether it would hold up to 10,000 pounds of stress, and we need to know that because we’ve got people on site waiting for that information to move forward with the project. We can quickly assemble a team online and then try and get that answer from, say, mechanical engineers from New York to San Francisco to London to Africa. There are no boundaries on who can participate.”

This network comprises part of what OSE considers its ‘competitive advantage’ over proprietary firms currently holding machinery patents, as it allows for a 24/7 development and improvement cycle with minds collaborating around the world. Makaruk continues: “Our aspirations are to compete and outcompete proprietary firms, but in order to do that we’re going to need a network of people with different skills to help us design the machines, do the design review – and not just engineering, it also has to do with developing agricultural techniques and sustainable construction techniques, and enterprise development techniques.”

Inevitably, though, the process of designing such a vast array of machines – even with the help of minds around the world – is a lengthy one in which designs have to be created, tested, refined and fine tuned based on user experience and feedback. At time of writing, the group at Factory e Farm (a play on the concept of a ‘factory farm’, which this farm certainly isn’t – it’s ‘growing ideas’ – and a reference to ‘e’ as used in mathematics as the transcendental number) is working intensively to complete the fourth instalment of the Compressed Earth Brick Press. Makaruk explains: “It could take 10 iterations to get a commercially-viable product. It’s an arbitrary standard because lots of changes happen between each one... So, there could be 30 or 40 different changes between those stages, but eventually you get to the point where there are not a lot of refinements to be made.” He estimates that the current brick press could create up to a million bricks from the ground beneath their feet, with an ideal mix of sand, silt and 20-30 per cent clay; the ‘Liberator’ can press up to 5,000 bricks in a day (enough to build a house), meaning a single machine could build up to 200 homes, ‘liberating’ people from their biggest expense.

I ask if any of the proprietary firms that make the sorts of machines that OSE is effectively ‘hacking’ have reacted to the project, if John Deere is quaking in its boots, and Makaruk tells me: “We feel like we’re compatible with the existing commercial corporations because we serve a demographic that would never be able to afford a John Deere tractor, for example. So, we really feel like we’re just expanding the market for tractors and as we help people use enterprise-based solutions to poverty, it will raise their standard of living... Part of what we want to do is inspire these commercial, mass-market companies to make designs that are more resilient, that are open, that last a lifetime rather than being designed for obsolescence. We’re using a disruptive approach to the market to inspire the entire industry – whatever industry that is, because we work across multiple industries – to make positive changes that they haven’t really needed to make in the past.”

Building out obsolescence through cradle-to-cradle thinking and designing for disassembly will play a big part in this: “Right now, we just basically design the machines to be easily disassembled and easy to fabricate”, Makaruk explains, adding: “But in the future, as we get further along into the integration of the machines, they could have a common, finite subset of basic components that can be used to assemble any of the other ones.” The goal is to create a Lego-like set of standard pieces to use in assembling (or repairing) all of the machinery, though Makaruk acknowledges this is “a pretty large engineering task”.

At the moment, the modularity is already manifest in the Power Cubes, external energy units that can power any of the machines “rather than every machine having its own dedicated engine, which is very expensive and redundant and wasteful”. The cubes, which can be stacked to increase power if required, currently run on petroleum-based hydraulic fluid, but could, in theory be run by modified canola (rapeseed) oil grown on the farm.

Recycling will also play a big part in the plans for sustainability and affordability: “Recycling steel is one of our major ways of cutting costs”, Makaruk explains, “because material costs are probably the highest price in getting involved in developing the GVCS. So rather than paying $5,000 for the materials for developing a tractor, if we use recycled steel, we can get the material costs down to about $500.” As a result, one of the 50 machines considered necessary to build a civilsation is an induction furnace, a heated chamber to melt down scrap steel (or indeed aluminium) to reforge fresh stock.

And while the ultimate goal is to allow for low-cost replication of everything required by a modern society, it will doubtless be quite expensive to get there. OSE estimates it will cost $50,000 to take each machine through three prototypes ($2.5 million in total), plus $50,000 per machine to undergo 1,000 hours of prototyping and extensive documentation (adding up to another $2.5 million). The organisation is also planning on developing the first open source CAD/CAM platform (‘computer-aided design’ and ‘computer-aided manufacturing’, for the uninitiated) for $0.5 million, bringing the total budget to $5.5 million (which, though a hefty sum, pales in comparison to the John Deeres of this world, of course). Initial funding has come from a growing network of ‘True Fans’ (currently totalling 600), who donate $10 a month for two years to the project, as well as from a Kickstarter campaign. The project has now started to attract larger grants from charitable organisations and foundations, and is aiming to start selling commercial models of the technology, the profits from which will be driven back into research and development and documentation.

Having volunteers to field test machines will also keep the costs down. This summer, a number of volunteers traded their time to receive training on the farm for a few months, living in a 4,000-square-foot residential unit built by an earlier incarnation of The Liberator. These, and other volunteers, are the perfect testers for the prototypes, as they can test the machines in different situations and provide feedback into areas that need improving.

Makaruk seems extremely enthusiastic about an emerging partnership in Guatemala, which is likewise providing fieldtesting for machines, while also aiming to eradicate hunger in the Central American country: “We’re developing a partnership with Andres Botran, the first secretary of food security in the Guatemalan Government, and Manuel Aguilar [an energy entrepreneur and TED Fellow]. Their goal is to have their engineers look at the design of the LifeTrac, and they want to field test it during harvest season. It’s a pretty rugged terrain in Guatemala, but then we’d take the design to make it ready for mass replication so all those rural Guatemalans can really use it for their own agriculture.”

With only four products fully released and the recent adoption of a longer development timeframe, though, Makaruk stresses that the Global Village Construction Set is still far from completion: “We’ve had some people who have expressed a lot of deep need, and there’s even some desperation in the way that people talk about their need, and we don’t have a solution for people yet. It’s hard to say that, but the honest thing is we really need people to get involved in trying to make the GVCS a reality.” Anyone interested in creating this reality can find out more at: opensourceecology.org