These days we are struggling with finding a way to communicate the message of  the work at openfarmtech.org. Brittany and Vinay Gupta (hexayurt.com) have been slashing through the thicket of expression choices to narrow down the message so it could be understood by others. The goal is to attract interest in a few, dedicated co-developers. I am convinced that such co-developers exist, yet, for some reason, they are not appearing as I would expect they should.

The website at openfarmtech.org started as a finite but comprehensive Global Village Construction Set. This concept started earlies at the Worknets.org wiki, under http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?OpenSourceEcology. It was there that some of the technology on the Compressed Earth Block Press and the Sawmill were posted. The focus is technologies that are necessary for the infrastructure of a Global Village community, akin to Franz Nahrada’s concept at globalvillages.info.

We are talking about real life communities, and what it would take to
implement them in practice. The infrastructure is the first step:
food, energy, housing, mobility, internet, and technology. There are
basics that are needed, and the internal knowhow is necessary to
provide these needs in a self-sufficient fashion, if we are talking
about making a better world.

One would think that such a program would be supported by a good
number of people, but the reality is that it is difficult to have
people actually develop the necessary infrastructure.

What is needed is affordable and practical solar energy systems.
Affordable and low maintenance year-round growing structures. Vehicles
produced by decentralized industry – in these same Global Villages.
Fuels, such as alcohol or compressed biogas that are produced onsite.

All this requires technology, but the truth is, all these items can be
produced in a land-based global village, not be large corporations or
huge factories in big cities. This is the premise, and it can be
proven that all this technology is capable of being decentralized,
such that unprecedented prosperity for all is the result.

On top of this, make these items 10 times less expensive, and you have
to work 10 times less – or have 10 times the amount of freedom. That
is a simple concept.

But how is one to organize a core team of dedicated developers for
this effort? I mean the types of people who have organizational skills
and engineering skills to pull this off. Are these people so rare?
Yes, but there are some. The rewards, however, are great – the
potential of creating replicable, mainstreamable, transformative
communities. They can be in existing cities or in the countryside,
anywhere – but small enterprise and right livelihood have to be the
economic foundation.

The development of the Global Village Construction Set is almost
synonymous with developing a right livelihood base for participants.
If people are tired of a crap job, they can check out- and here would
be a process for checking into another life. Real work, real products.

It just takes defining a few products, and making sure they are
essential. It takes optimization of the business models around these
products to generate millions of jobs for potential adopters. If the
product is a solar turbine system, such as proposed at
http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Solar_Turbine_CHP_System, then
there are millions of potential jobs created worldwide.

Given the above considerations, it would seem that people would flock
to develop such products collaboratively. But, it seems that society
is presently is such a sad state that very few have the skills,
energy, vision, or leisure to take on such a task. We are slaves by
circumstance.

The work required to take place in order to develop and deploy the
products at openfarmtech.org is rigorous. It means going through a
careful research process to distill the product line and to deploy it
effectively. That’s a research project worth many PhDs, so it requires
a team. But, if I do not find that team, then I will continue as I am
now, nibbling bit by bit at the problem until it is solved. After all,
the potential is replicative and transformative.