[p2p-research] Open Source Manufacturing

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear Kevin, dear Vic:

Kevin, thanks for mentioning our work to Vic.

The specific areas where we collate information on open design and
distributed manufacturing are:

- http://p2pfoundation.net/<http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives>
Category:Design

- http://p2pfoundation.net/<http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives>
Category:Manufacturing

(well lay-outed overview article at
http://www.masternewmedia.org/how-peer-production-and-economic-p2p-model-can-subvert-physical-production/
)


In the blog:

- http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/category/open-design

- http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/category/desktop-manufacturing


Tags:

http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Design


http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Hardware


http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/P2P-Manufacturing

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 2:20 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear Mr. Keegan:
>
> As a member of several mailing lists frequented by Vinay Gupta and
> other open-source manufacturing enthusiasts, I thoroughly appreciated
> your sympathetic treatment in the recent Guardian article.
>
> You might be interested, if you're not already familiar with it, in
> Michel Bauwens' Foundation for P2P Alternatives, which does a lot of
> work on open-source manufacturing models.  Wiki:
> <http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives>
> Blog: <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/>
>
> You might also be interested in Open Source Ecology's "Factor E Farm"
> demo project in the Kansas City area, which is developing an "Open
> Village Construction Set" (including CEB Press, tractor, solar
> steam-powered generator, sawmill, multimachine, etc.)  Most of the
> machinery (including the multimachine itself) can be produced with the
> multimachine, and powered either by the generator or by using the
> tractor as prime mover.  So the entire package, once prototyped and
> demonstrated, is virally replicable.
> OSE Wiki: <http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Main_Page>
> Factor E Farm blog: <http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/>
>
> There's one statement in your article I'd qualify:
>
> "Open source hardware doesn't have the same power as software if only
> because the final product, as opposed to the designs, can't be
> replicated for no extra cost as software can."
>
> OS hardware may not ever quite reach the "free beer," as opposed to
> "free speech," version of free.  But most of the cost of manufactured
> goods, arguably, is artificial.  It results from embedded rents on
> artificial property like trademarks (what Tom Peters gushingly calls
> "ephemera" and "intellect," as opposed to actual cost of labor and
> materials), and from legally mandated requirements for minimum
> capitalization (e.g., "safety" regulations whose main effect is to
> mandate minimum overhead costs and erect barriers to small-scale
> production in the informal and household economy using spare capacity
> on capital goods we already own, so that the only way to operate
> profitably with the mandated overhead is to engage in large batch
> production).  Eliminate all this, so that the capital equipment for
> manufacturing is individually affordable and larger amounts of capital
> can be microfinanced and crowdsourced, and we're a long way toward
> making the boundary between "free speech" and "free beer" a lot more
> permeable
>
> Right now most of our economy is still built around Sloanist mass
> production, with artificially inflated capitalization and inventory,
> and all the push distribution and planned obsolescence required to
> keep the wheels turning and avoid idle capacity.
>
> Do away with the subsidies to centralization, the protections against
> competition, and the barriers to small-scale production, and most of
> it would be replaced with small scale production.  A good part of this
> would be an informal and household economy of microbreweries,
> microbakeries, microindustry using multimachines, etc.  The rest would
> be distributed manufacturing on the Emilia-Romagna model (small-batch
> production with general-purpose machinery, on a demand-pull basis,
> with modular product design for ease of repair and recycling).  About
> the only things left for centralized manufacturing would be stuff like
> microprocessors and the few heavy internal combustion engines that
> would still be needed in a decentralized economy, stuff that it's
> simply physically impossible to produce on a distributed basis.
>
> This was the subject of a quarterly paper I did at Center for a
> Stateless Society: <http://c4ss.org/content/78>
>
>
> Best,
> Kevin
>
> --
> Kevin Carson
> Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS): http://c4ss.org/
> Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com
> Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
> http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
> Anarchist Organization Theory Project
> http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
>
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