[p2p-research] Open Source Manufacturing

Tue Mar 17 22:46:11 CET 2009

Thanks for the feedback.

One clarification: by 'process hierarchy' I am referring to those
hierarchies that are built and rebuilt with every phase of the project or
with every project using some constraints per each position, e.g. circuit
designer must be qualified EE with some peer-assigned job-related credit
points to his name, and a Google-search-like selection algorithm where a
random producer is picked from the range of producers that satisfy the
search constraints. And then you do this in every cycle where a cycle maybe
a complete project or one major and distinct phase of a project and you do
it for all positions in the hierarchy.

I did not know what 'process hierarchy' meant or even that it existed as a
concept. I had asked folks here what I should be calling the type of
hierarchy that results from the process described above and David said he
believed it may be called a 'process hierarchy' as opposed to a structural
hierarchy.

So in this definition, process hierarchies do not create fixed centers of
power/dependency because they are constantly built and rebuilt.

Another clarification: I do not believe in complete openness or complete
closedness when it comes to production organizations/systems. I believe that
in order to maintain the desired 'production parameters' (e.g. quality,
price, creativity, novelty, uniqueness, coolness, etc) there must be some
part of the production organization/system that is "closed" or "fixed"
(despite being transparent.) There is also the competitive need to retain
'some' mystery that no "openness"  or "transparency" will ever eliminate,
simply because the most nobel of us still want to do better or outdo others
to push the production parameters to a higher state and in order to do that
while promoting sustainable abundance (in production) through openness a
little bit of mystery must be retained. No one can be completely open and
still able to compete (to push the evolutionary envelop, not for personal
profit). I find that people, no matter how well intentioned they are with
respect to openness and transparency will still hold a few bits of wisdom
within them undisclosed. So my point here is that I don't believe in
complete openness or complete closedness but in a formulation of both that
encourages both the sustainable abundance as well as the evolution of
production systems. There is always a bit of mystery that has to be retained
in order for the fittest to survive (and not be out done.) I think we have
to consider that in the dialog about openness as it gives us a hint IMO that
what we should be looking for is the optimum formulation or model for
enabling both sustainable abundance and Darwinian evolution and not focus on
openess or closedness in and by themselves.

Or maybe I'm wrong...

My thoughts anyway

Marc

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Ryan Lanham <rlanham1963 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Very interesting points. One view of openness is transparency with certain
> essential rules; I'm not sure that is explicitly noted in Marc's summary.
>
> That is, a form of "open" is the idea of organizational processes that are
> reviewable and available to comment and criticism.  If there is organization
> that is purposeful (teleological), decisions must be made ultimately but
> ought to be made with clear procedure (e.g. due process) and available
> knowledge of interests and conflicts that seem, within some reasonable view,
> to bear relevance.
>  In a sense, schemes of code are beholden to procedures set by governance
> bodies of those who designed the compilers, etc.  Or, said another way,
> someone could feasibly believe in a God who put nature in motion and then
> allowed the rules to be discovered and changed.  Maybe an open
> universe though would have a manual produced by the hypothical supreme
> being.
>
> I suppose I am saying that everything is procedural AND organizational.
> How decision power is vested and used is both organization and procedural.
>
> It would be very hard to discern "open" without some underlying body of
> relatively stable procedural and organizational orthodoxy.  I think the
> general intent is to be as transparent as possible while also enabling use
> of approaches without subscription to the ongoing role of the original
> organizing hierarchy.  That is, a person is free to create their own
> organization or to modify the existing organization to their own ends in
> open systems.  This is true of procedures as well.
>
> Some uses may be to simply learn conceptually the workings of something
> which might then be reapplied in a closed system that is differentiated
> significantly through innovation.
>
> Process hierarchies are, by definition, fixed sources of power unless they
> can be ignored going forward.
>
> Ryan Lanham
>
>
>
> 2009/3/17 marc fawzi <marc.fawzi at gmail.com>
>
> 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:
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>>>
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>>>
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>>
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