How can we better collaborate?

Hi all,

I am trying to understand how we can collaborate better in order to make OSWH sustainable. We’re working on a new economic model that we think is oriented in the right direction. But it is not finished… It still needs to be applied in different contexts and improved based on performance.
How can we join efforts to accelerate the development process?
Please take one minute to watch this video

If you like what you see, dive into the subject here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iwQz5SSw2Bsi_T41018E3TkPD-guRCAhAeP9xMdS2fI/pub

Hey!

I’m working on “Open Innovation” or “Technologies for Common Interest” at SENESCYT (the ministry for Science, Tech and Innovation) in Ecuador. You can call it this or that but it is about OSHW. I’d like to have a meeting with you (perhaps vía skype or something similar).

Sure, propose a date and meeting time and we’ll do it
Contact me directly on Gmail or Facebook.

Hi all,

Here’s our video from OuiShare Fest, Paris, 2014.

Hello, I watched your videos, there would be many things to say, but I will try to address your main question directly:

First, we must try to gather all the Open Source Hardware supporters on a single forum like this one. We should try to provide a meeting place for all the OSH supporters.

Second, we should focus on what the people need:

• The people need to buy machines at decent prices and to repair them quick and cheap. That means we don’t have to only design the machines, but we have to build and to sell machines and parts for those machines. Also it’s very important to start with the most popular machines, in order to achieve our goals as fast as possible. Most of the people need home appliances (washing machines, refrigerators, coffeemakers etc), not open source DDRAM or hard disks or Arduinos.
• The people need jobs, so Open Source Hardware will allow the average citizen to create their own workshops to produce parts for open source machines. OSH will democratize jobs.

So let’s think about what the people need most and let’s try to address their needs.

Unfortunately, I noticed that many OSH supporters become concerned and even obsessed about details and they forget about the perspective.

Many people at Open Source Ecology (OSE) are fans of Jaque Fresco’s Venus Project and they keep talking about Resource Based Economy (RBE). Others want to re-build the civilization from scratch. Others are obsessed about making everything open source: even hard disks or flash memory.

The reality is simple: the average citizen doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know much about open source. They just want to repair their machines for cheap and quick. They also need to be able to open their own production facilities. Therefore we need to create and sell first the machines that the people need the most.

Other than that, I think you are unnecessarily complicating yourself: no need to re-design the whole society (I noticed you struggle to design a way to share work and benefits). OSH will democratize the means of production, the industry giants will fall and small production facilities will emerge, where the many can have a job or where they will employ themselves.
The big companies are not really competing, they just call themselves “industry”. In reality they are a collection of monopolies - they never compete for providing parts for their machines. OSH will simply remove the monopolies and will create a real, de-centralized industry.
But in order to get there we must care about the needs of the many: We have to build popular machines first.

Gonzo is right! I know several people who has washing machines with broken closed-source electronics. These machines could serve for a while instead of being wasted to dust-heaps…
It could be developed a general washing machines ECU, which manages a motors via relays. Power motors schematics are similiar in different models.
There is also closed source refrigerators…

2Gonzo: Is it you participated in OSE forums? If yes, how can I contact you directly? It seems you know a lot of useful things about e{g}onomics & politics.