Open Source Ecology
Posted by kevinwolz on November 8, 2011
Open Source Ecology (OSE) visionary and founder Marcin Jakubowski can articulate the basic idea much better than I can, so please take a few minutes to watch his extraordinary TED Talk. I guarantee that it will leave you speechless.
“Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.”
-Open Source Ecology About Page
After drooling over the many videos that OSE has posted online and scouring every corner of their website, I decided that I had to get down to Missouri and check out what they were doing in person. Now, thanks to the far-reaching vision, encouragement, and financial support of the Illinois Foundry for Innovation in Engineering Education (iFoundry), a group that I was highly active with during my first two years at U of I, that dream has finally become a reality. This past weekend, a group of seven other students and I carpooled out to Middle-of-Nowhere, Missouri to get the OSE experience first-hand. This group of students consisted of some of the most passionate and innovative students I know. The best part? Not a single one of us had the same major! Our backgrounds spanned the breadth of science and engineering:
- Agricultural and Biological Engineering
- Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Materials Science and Engineering
- Theoretical and Applied Mechanics
- Molecular and Cellular Biology
- Electrical Engineering
- Integrative Biology
- Crop Sciences
- Physics
This group could do anything it put its mind to! I think that the intellectual diversity attracted to this trip speaks for the far-reaching impact that OSE can produce.
Despite it’s TED-level fame, the OSE experience did not start out in a fancy room with slide shows and planning strategies. Instead, we got dirty. Within 15 minutes of being at the Factor E Farm, I:
- expanded my network to include a TED Fellow
- received a hands-on tutorial of how to structurally and practically design a support column
- helped develop a plan to maximize construction efficiency
- interacted with some of the most amazing machinery I’ve ever seen in my life
- was covered in mud
