WEBVTT

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Right now the world's productive power is controlled by a few giant corporations.

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The products are expensive, their designs are secret, and to make things worse,

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we are now seeing these same companies engineer their products to fail over time,

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simply to increase profits.

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I saw this problem and I thought we have all the tools available to make this machinery for ourselves

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and with the internet we can distribute our designs for next to nothing.

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So, I bought some land, and started building it.

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From our location in Missouri, we are developing low cost modular tools,

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that anyone can build and we are sharing our designs on the internet, free of charge.

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People who need equipment are typically the ones who can least afford it.

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The applications are anything from 3rd world development

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to a dying farming community, to standard economic enterprise.

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The point is that we make equipment available to everyone who needs it.

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OpenSource Ecology is a project, it's... in practice we are working on the Global Village Construction Set.

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Which is a set of the 50 industrial machines that it takes

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to build a small civilization with modern comforts.

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It's everything that you need to provide your energy, food, housing, and other technologies.

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Very little true collaboration really happens, when we have the patent system, and it's like:

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"I'm gonna pounce on you if gonna try to learn from me and do better than I did!"

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The beautiful thing about the open-source development method is that, you produce the plans,

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you give a lot to the community, and then stuff starts coming back.

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And then products will be better and better, everybody wins.

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Other day I got an email, someone who has built the compressed earth-brick press.

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Wow! Hey that looks exactly like mine!

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I forget exactly how I ran into open-source ecology

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but I think I was destined to find it

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just from my interest in natural building and open-source.

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I just seemed to make sense to use this machine here for building our house.

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So then I saw the designs looking at how I was going to build it,

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I noticed that some of the code could use improving

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and the board that does the controlling could also use some improving.

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There's actually quite a few people who

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would have never thought that they could build a house.

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And by kind of like showing them: "Hey look, I've never built a house before"

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"I've never done hydraulics before, but it seems to be working."

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A lot of times we think this kind of work is impossible, to build your own living environment.

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For me it's been the most transformative experience.

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I've learned that I can do it and I want to show that to others.

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What if everybody were to join together to make the best products,

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most robust products that are open-source

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that anyone has access to producing them.

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And therefore you can run an economy in a collaborative way

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as opposed to a competitive, wasteful way.

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We can build this kind of stuff.

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This mythology of incompetence or the power control

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that got us to think that we can't do things for ourselves

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but, we have the power.

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So I would inspire people to go out and build yourself.