Right now the world's productive power is controlled by a few giant corporations.
The products are expensive, their designs are secret, and to make things worse,
we are now seeing these same companies engineer their products to fail over time,
simply to increase profits.
I saw this problem and I thought we have all the tools available to make this machinery for ourselves
and with the internet we can distribute our designs for next to nothing.
So, I bought some land, and started building it.
From our location in Missouri, we are developing low cost modular tools,
that anyone can build and we are sharing our designs on the internet, free of charge.
People who need equipment are typically the ones who can least afford it.
The applications are anything from 3rd world development
to a dying farming community, to standard economic enterprise.
The point is that we make equipment available to everyone who needs it.
OpenSource Ecology is a project, it's... in practice we are working on the Global Village Construction Set.
Which is a set of the 50 industrial machines that it takes
to build a small civilization with modern comforts.
It's everything that you need to provide your energy, food, housing, and other technologies.
Very little true collaboration really happens, when we have the patent system, and it's like:
"I'm gonna pounce on you if gonna try to learn from me and do better than I did!"
The beautiful thing about the open-source development method is that, you produce the plans,
you give a lot to the community, and then stuff starts coming back.
And then products will be better and better, everybody wins.
Other day I got an email, someone who has built the compressed earth-brick press.
Wow! Hey that looks exactly like mine!
I forget exactly how I ran into open-source ecology
but I think I was destined to find it
just from my interest in natural building and open-source.
I just seemed to make sense to use this machine here for building our house.
So then I saw the designs looking at how I was going to build it,
I noticed that some of the code could use improving
and the board that does the controlling could also use some improving.
There's actually quite a few people who
would have never thought that they could build a house.
And by kind of like showing them: "Hey look, I've never built a house before"
"I've never done hydraulics before, but it seems to be working."
A lot of times we think this kind of work is impossible, to build your own living environment.
For me it's been the most transformative experience.
I've learned that I can do it and I want to show that to others.
What if everybody were to join together to make the best products,
most robust products that are open-source
that anyone has access to producing them.
And therefore you can run an economy in a collaborative way
as opposed to a competitive, wasteful way.
We can build this kind of stuff.
This mythology of incompetence or the power control
that got us to think that we can't do things for ourselves
but, we have the power.
So I would inspire people to go out and build yourself.