[p2p-research] Open Source Manufacturing

Tue Mar 17 19:45:31 CET 2009

Dear all,

Has anyone made the distinction between the openness of the production
organization and openness of the schemes and code to be produced by that
organization?

The production of open source software and hardware is typically governed by
a hierarchical organization of leaders, co-leaders, and contributors and,
while there can be N different distributions or versions of software or
hardware produced by N such organizations, each production organization is a
closed system with usually one leader at the top of the hierarchy, a few 2nd
tier leaders (or co-leaders), project managers and tens to thousands of
contributors, all governed by an implicit or explicit set of governance
rules (e.g. democratic voting, leader dictates, leader decides by consensus,
etc)

In contract, the software code or hardware scheme itself (as opposed to the
production organization) is completely open.

So when people say "open manufacturing" or "open source software" or "open
source hardware" they only describe the process, code or scheme. They do not
describe the "production organization" which is made of people not code or
schemes and which matters more than the code or schemes.

It's just as important IMO to open up the production organizations, by using
process hierarchies instead of structural hierarchies, as it is to open up
the software or hardware produced by those organizations.

People forget that the reason for openness is to evolve higher consciousness
as a society (of people) and so by opening up the software and hardware but
keeping the human production systems entrenched in structural hierarchies
(as opposed to process hierarchies) we only win half of the battle. It's far
more important at this point in the evolution of the openness movement to
focus on opening up the production organizations by abandoning structural
hierarchies where the power if those at the top increases with the increase
in the size of the hierarchy giving us bureaucrats as the final answer!

It is important to start thinking of 'process hierarchies' which allow
orderly and constructive production systems but do not create fixed centers
of power (or dependency)

~~

I will be adding this as a new section to the P2P Energy Economy under "Open
Production Organization" and add that as a pre-requisite for Sustainable
Abundance.

Marc

2009/3/16 Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

>
>
> 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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>>
>
>
>
> --
> Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
> http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
> http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
> Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
> http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
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>
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>
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>
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