Build Your Own Farm - Free the Hardware!

Build Your Own Farm - Free the Hardware!

It is pretty unusual for me to link to a TED-video talk, but this one is so close to the heart and the casa-philosophy that I can't let it go. In this video Marcin from openfarmtech.org explains in four minutes why open hardware is so important, and amazingly groundbraking. Thanks Tau for letting me know, Anu for always being so close to the source and TED for picking this up.

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that has been imagining and creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform. These DIY-fabricated industrial machines can be used to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. It is a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies.

And yeah, I wanna build that bread-oven :)

Comments

topi's picture

open farmers, unite

It always annoys me to see some people have actually already *realized* my ideas. When I looked at 3D modeling machinery for the first time like 1 year ago, I thought to myself, shit, this technology will allow you to create your own machinery parts from blueprints, and eventually create all sorts of machines that you could need for farming, without any partaking in the global industry and their business.

robino's picture

free society

Funny. In fact, it always make me happy (and doesn't annoy me) when I see other people are doing the things that I thought of before (but maybe you didn't mean it in that way). It encourages me to join with what already exists, or to even move it further.

Man, especially when we have so many ideas coming to mind and so on! There is this saying of "If not you, who?". Which for some sounds encouraging and empowering but I think the other way around: if not me, someone else will do it. This actually encourages me more. I don't have to feel responsible for doing something, because if the idea is great enough or the need big enough, it will be done (eventually).

Besides, ideas are so much connected to the social conditions we are in, that they are hardly can be called "our own". Remember that the printing press was invented by different groups of people around the same time-frame, but in different places?

This is also one of the reasons why we started http://sharewiki.org If you have some great ideas, just share them here. Other people can then elaborate on them and push them further, and maybe one day someone might even do it, ha!

And anyway, all this is still so much at the beginning of things. And there is a lot lacking in terms of social awareness on how-to do things in terms of co-ops, social work-spaces, skill-sharing, organising and working together, and culture of sharing, and so on, that although maybe the technology is making more possible than before, the general human mind and the quality of social relationships is still very much behind of what we can actually make out of it ;-)