[p2p-research] Open Hardware Roadmap

Mon Sep 27 10:30:26 CEST 2010

thanks eric, i'm publishing this on the 29th!

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 11:55 PM, Eric Hunting <erichunting at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm not familiar with this specific project -it looks very new- but it's
> clearly one of the many recently created attempts at an open hardware
> repository or catalog akin to the Sourceforge site for open software. There
> are a number of groups and projects working on this, though they're in a
> competitive mode and don't collaborate. A lot of people are cluing into the
> need for this but they are still rather up in the air about how to go about
> it in any concerted way. None of them are in all that much better shape than
> the Open Hardware Roadmap. These are similar to my own proposed Open Source
> Everything project (one of, if not the, first of these devised about 5 years
> ago and focused on creating and cataloging open equivalents to all the
> domestic technologies on which a western standard of living is based and
> devised as a Post-Industrial cultural cultivation program under the
> Foundation phase of The Millennial Project) and the later Toolbook project.
> (intended to use an independent 'Maker' publishing cooperative -an open
> O'Reilly, so to speak- as the basis of a community research cooperative
> seeking to concatenate, consolidate, and catalog the full body of industrial
> knowledge in accessible open source form, self-supported by its for-profit
> media output) Most of these open hardware catalog projects have failed to
> achieve any sort of critical mass due to a lack of concerted recognition by
> the still rather loose and disorganized Maker/Open Manufacturing/Fab Lab
> movements (who, frankly, aren't even all that well aware of each other!), a
> lack of definitive architecture for the structuring and organizing of highly
> diverse technology information/knowledge/recipes, and because of a common
> lack of recognition of the actual scale of the concept. (Toolbook, for
> instance, assumes this to be a 'community' venture to the point where it
> must find a way for its participants to continuously earn a living at it as
> a career -and to this end it relates to my proposed Vajra project -an
> advanced Fab Lab centered Maker Incubator/Ashram community that would
> provide a place to live with a cultural and aesthetic focus on this hugh
> task. I seem to be the only one so far -except maybe Cory Doctorow with his
> 'outquisition' concept- who's recognized the scale of this idea is such that
> it, literally, takes a village -or a monastery of sorts)
>
> As the 'skeleton' for this Open Hardware Roadmap shows, they have the right
> idea and sentiment but don't come anywhere close to being comprehensive in
> the necessary breakdown of industrial technologies and have no templates for
> the standardization of information they intend to catalog. And that's
> understandable given the origin of this particular project with the MITRE
> group and because, really, even our best engineers today are not all that
> 'industrially literate' because of the compulsive specialization and
> compartmentalization of technical knowledge and have never given this all
> that much thought before. Every area of science, technology and industry has
> cultivated its own ways of communication, it's own language and idioms, as a
> means of securing market propriety and professional class specialness -which
> goes right back to when scientists and guild craftsmen used to write
> everything in secret codes out of fear of competition. I was just reading
> today, catching up with Michel's recent discussions on a P2P Urbanism Atlas,
> how a Cold War is emerging between New Urbanists and Landscape Urbanists
> trying to usurp the academic and political power of the New Urbanism
> movement by inventing a new more flowery and sophisticated design language
> with which to impress the politicians, bureaucrats, executives, and
> upper-echelon of academics with. (and who, really, can't get far past the
> relative slickness of graphics anyway...)
>
> We live in a techno-industrial Tower of Babel and the challenge comes down
> to defining standardized media forms and information architectures that can
> bridge the barriers between disciplines and ultimately between human and
> machine knowledge representation. We need a new common applied knowledge
> media model. This is pretty much how I define 'singularity'. Crack that nut
> and you're home free. But it's a tough one that gets into strange and
> unexpected areas, like the history of comic books and how they relate to the
> evolution of technical illustration as applied in the development of DIY
> literature. (there's a hell of a lot going on in a Lego instruction
> manual...) I've adopted this notion of the 'recipe' from culinary arts as a
> basic analogy for spacio-temporal representation of all technical/industrial
> process and have been toying with a concept of digital Taylorization (after
> the infamous Frederick Winslow Taylor) through the simulation-based
> temporal-topological modeling of systems and 'recipes' producing high-level
> 'Taylor Programs' that are then interpreted to the bytecode programs of
> specific multi-machine shop networks. It's a very rough notion for how we
> might some day bridge that human/machine knowledge gap while, in the
> process, bringing the languages of science, technology, industry, and craft
> down to a universal applied knowledge standard that can cultivate universal
> technical and industrial literacy. But, alas, I think we have a very long
> way to go with this. There's still not a good comprehension of the nature of
> the problem/task. And many of the key forms of media and art important to
> this -literary illustration for instance- are now largely dead art forms
> waiting to be rediscovered. People still think the Maker and Open
> Manufacturing movements are about making stuff. It's really about
> re-appropriating and liberating knowledge and the invention of new media
> forms to do that with. Things like the Make blog and Instructibles are our
> most sophisticated open laboratories right now for this -and they don't even
> know that's what they are.
>
> Eric Hunting
> erichunting at gmail.com
>
>
>
> On Sep 26, 2010, at 11:17 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
> > I've cc"ed eric hunting who may know more,
> >
> > Michel
> >
> > On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 8:55 PM, Franz Nahrada <f.nahrada at reflex.at>
> wrote:
> > I saw this website and I think its a great idea but still in its very
> > infancy. (a wiki born a few days ago)
> >
> > http://www.ohroadmap.org/
> >
> > The Table Of Contents sounds ambitious:
> > http://www.ohroadmap.org/table-of-contents
> >
> > but all the respective pages are empty.
> >
> > Jim Barkley and Sam Sayer, both of The MITRE Corporation, own this wiki
> > domain.
> >
> > MITRE is described here: http://www.mitre.org/about/index.html
> >
> > An impressive and very resourceful organisation with a heavy bias into
> > military technology ;-)
> >
> > anybody ready to challenge them about the whereabouts?
> >
> > here is the respective discussion that led me to the site.
> >
> >
> http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/da4088efbb12cd25?pli=1
> >
> > IMHO we do indeed need a technology roadmap (including a huge amount of
> > technologies to be redone in a better way) and I am advocating this from
> > the beginning of oekonux, but we are facing the problem that we either
> > have resources - or credibility and moral influence. Almost never these
> > two factors converge. Maybe this will change soon.
> >
> > Franz Nahrada
> > GIVE - Globally Integrated Village Environment.
> > Vienna
> >
> >
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> >
> >
> >
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> > Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>

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