A-podcast

it now became very clear that open source is a successful way to develop in software so all the companies facebook microsoft apple amazon they're all built upon a backbone of open source projects in fact microsoft is the leader leading contributor to open source projects right now [Music] so here with us is uh marcin jakubowski or for those who are uh polish speakers martina kobowski and so thank you for being on the show this is long time in uh in the making in terms of uh uh happening you know i know you're super busy but we're going to be talking about open source hardware uh open source ecology what you're doing over there we're going to talk a little bit maybe about your experience with ted and how how that got you on the journey where you are right now and so uh thank you for being on the show man yeah well thanks adrian so glad to be here so uh open source hardware let's start with that what is it and why does it matter yeah so open source hardware is basically the power it's a paradigm it's so like people may have heard of open source software open source hardware it's a development methodology where blueprints for hardware become open source so open source what does open source mean there's four freedoms one is you can view the so-called source code which is blueprints like in software you have code here we have the ability the four freedoms of open source let's start with open source software are the freedom to view the code to use it to modify it and then to sell it also so there's commercial freedom at the end so for hardware that means that the blueprints are open meaning that people can collaborate so develop things in an open way as opposed to patented ways people can collaborate build upon each other's work and also make that a part of their livelihood so economic freedom is a big part of this where at the end of the day if you have open blueprints you're able to make things like physical artifacts anything from stuff like we do which is 3d printers or tractors or houses we're talking about blueprints for these being open and why does that matter it matters to to balance out access and to accelerate innovation because if we talk about the current silos and proprietary development a lot of people are reinventing the wheel the idea here is to do it a different way that can involve more people and then distribute the knowledge that's generated like wikipedia to to everybody so that on the hardware front we're talking about creating real physical infrastructures and real artifacts of day-to-day life and for that reason in order to open up access to open up access to distributing wealth open source hardware in particular is critical to that mission why do you think it's going to be successful i mean open source software is successful we have linux as one of sort of like the poster child of open source software yeah and the concept is the concept is that people are contributing code they're co-developing code they're building this product yet it doesn't it's it's open source everybody can take a cop sort of copy of it and make their own uh you know variation of it you know at the end of the day for like linux uh especially those more popular ones like red hat and uh that that kind of got commercialized they got purchased and so they are successful now but they kind of went back into the commercial zone they you know and and so what will make open source hardware as successful as open source uh software because it is a little bit more difficult to implement right than open source software vastly i'd say because open source software is just like so ethereal in a sense that everybody can just write code from anywhere you can be in the desert in the middle of nowhere you have access to to uh to internet you can boom you can submit your code and there it is with open source hardware you feel you're you're dealing with uh physical things you're building physical things and so what is your what is your prediction and why do you think it's going to be uh successful yeah it now became very clear that open source is a successful way to develop in software so all the companies facebook microsoft apple amazon they're all built upon a backbone of open source projects in fact microsoft is the leader con leading contributor to open source projects right now it's a major shift from even four years ago when balmer steve ballmer the ex executive of microsoft called linux a malignant cancer that's going to ruin their business well now it's very clear it's simply the preferred way because it works and yes it's much easier than the hardware now with software you're talking about the cost is your electrons and electrons in in the grid plus your time with hardware you're talking about materials logistics budgets for things that cost more than electrons so if you want to build a tractor you need materials you need to organize people you need to organize logistics and so forth so much harder package but why will it why will it succeed i mean the idea goes back i would say to kind of like peter diamandis talks about the 5ds like as long as you can digitize something and design now can be digitized just like software if you can digitize something that lends itself to massive copying massive replication so with the digital front you have cad design software that allows you to digitize physical artifacts and transfer them and share them and then you have digital fabrication things like 3d printers or cnc machines robots that can now take that source code and then replicate it widely so the same kind of paradigm that applies in software in terms of easy transferability or easy reproducibility of artifacts now becomes feasible in hardware because of modern technology we've got cnc we've got internet and we've got communication and collaboration platforms and that to me makes open hardware simply inevitable in my world i mean that's that's what we're working on but as you get more efficient just like in software people are saying you're going to be more efficient if you develop software together absolute same principle applies to hardware and of course it's much more complex because the things you're wrangling there are much more difficult to wrangle the idea of open source hardware and its implementation you know strikes me on the surface as difficult because um like the the typical business approach is we design something a company design something it patents it it protects it any way it can does proprietary stuff in order to do to kind of uh to have the you know the grab grab on it and then when they release it they have full control over it if you need to service something you need to go back to them this is this would really um kind of cannibalize their business in a way when you have something like hey i can design a tractor and i'm going to share the plans with everybody and everybody can can build it so it is a threat from one perspective to to those companies how do you see that how do you see how do you see open source hardware coexisting with with uh with uh with your commercial right i think the the pattern there would be the same as software which is the first you're like oh you're gonna cannibalize us but then everybody learns and everybody does it it's just going to be normal just like there to me it's just a matter of efficiency if when we talk about cannibalize it's not cannibalized like people won't have something to do now like the tractors are going to get worse no they're actually going to get better right we're going to the idea there is distributing production so solving the last frontier of the current economy which is distribution but the wealth across the world is very unevenly distributed and here we have a chance to decentralize distribute for everybody's benefit and access and and the state of art will only improve there's tons of people out there who don't have access today that given the tools and opportunities would contribute to all this so i look at it as right now even though it seems otherwise we're in a stone age of innovation i mean so much of the work that goes on is about reinventing the wheel everybody competing to do the same thing you know like say a hundred car companies making all inferior cars than they could do if they all work together or something like that it simply has to be a new paradigm where we shift and how we think about our physical world or just abundance in general right now the whole economy comes from a scarcity viewpoint a scarcity mindset and this is what we're trying to to change here so it's it's um the world will go on yes and it will be it can be better and it's about shifting people's paradigms of how uh simply a collaborative economy versus a competitive economy right so why why do you think uh collaborative economy has has a chance with competitive because the argument on the competitive uh economy model is that things get better because companies compete right they get better because you know honda is making a honda and toyota's making toyota and ford is making ford and then they have to compete so every one of them is trying to out uh outsmart outrank out do you know outperform the other ones and that's the kind of classical model which people say like oh yeah that makes sense you know obviously everybody wants to make a better product because then the the market wants to wants to buy the um the better product how does that work with open source hardware i would start by saying that that's that's a mindset there's nothing that says that by competing you're gonna get a better product i think a lot of that is societal conditioning back from when we emerged from the cave and we we started competing and killing each other and stealing resources that pretty much continues today but just look at the the software model um to to make a make a translation it's it's the same argument you can make there it's simply no competition does not make you a better product it's simple economic interest for you to work with others and generate a common core now people still proprietize the stuff that goes on on top of that common core but at least at the level of a common accessible core like lit the linux framework or whatever apache or whatever any other back end of the internet people are contributing to those common projects so that everyone can use them and use them for their own needs so there's a lot of economic activity that comes out of that anyway so i don't think these things are so far removed from the way business is done today at the end of the day you create a product and you sell it that's essentially it it's not such a but i think the biggest biggest deal here is how we think about that whole problem of production or collaboration or how how the economy goes forward we have these preconceptions uh which where we think oh this only can go a certain way but no there's many ways of doing things i i agree with you that it it has to go through a mind shift people are we we have to kind of evolve to to thinking that collaborative uh effort is going to be better for everyone than than the these proprietary things that are kind of hamstringing us right now a good example of that i think is that there is a built-in obsolescence to because it's still leaning on a economical model where companies have to make money and they have to satisfy shareholders and they have to satisfy uh the the investors and and continue to grow the companies uh uh they they focus on like how can we make more money with it right because the everything is still rooted on how much money is this gonna bring and so even when they produce a good product now if it's if the product is too well designed now it's like oh you know like if we're going to build something that's going to last you a life lifetime that's not a that's not good because now suddenly this thing is not you're going to buy one and not buy one forever you know from us so let's make it so that it wears out so that it breaks down and and so on right and so now the focus is going to be on replacing yes they will still evolve and improve the product right but it's the the modus operandi is still in there where you will be like this is not going to be as well designed as possible it's going to be just well enough that you will get enough of value i'm gonna spend hundred dollars for this drill and and it's gonna last me a year or two or five or whatever it is but it will not last me a lifetime because it wasn't designed to to last a lifetime right so that mind shift has to happen where where we design things that are in in the collaborative the way i see it in the collaborative um open source hardware collaborative model people will not have that they will be designing the best that's possible to design right yeah yeah yeah that's the argument for that i would say that the planned obsolescence is a big that's a big deal that's a big essential part of the current economy and that's how a lot of the economy works but open source lends itself to exactly the opposite of that because if you have the blueprints and you have the means to produce things and we talk about the idea of open source micro factories many communities having these very advanced or collaborative digital fabrication center so the what we call the open source micro factory with your 3d printers and cs cnc machines and robots and other just production infrastructure that can be developed and shared digitally and then of course you have a global collaborative effort of design that feeds those kinds of facilities but in there if every community has that then we have the possibility to build things that we understand build things that now we can repair forever or understand because they're no longer black boxes uh you simply have the blueprints you can either fix or maintain something for a lifetime you you get to be the deciding factor when something breaks not what the company designed because you don't have any access to blueprints or to parts or anything you're you're pretty much uh you don't own the product the product owns you or the company owns you what do you think is going to make it succeed in terms of like like what is needed is it like a global shift that has to happen what's needed in order for people to grab on it you're doing a lot of good work and we're going to talk about what you're doing uh shortly yeah to kind of propagate this idea this model and and everything it's it's kind of like shifting you know from like stone age to the bronze age to like all of that is is it the same way in a way from my viewpoint so you know i study this this is my life but what i'm seeing missing right now is a super clear example where we show that the open source methodology for hardware results in a superior product on schedule on time so and this is where actually this year we're mentioned a little bit about the cordless drill but we're launching a challenge to design the world's first open source 3d printed professional-grade cordless drill that's also made from waste plastic so the plastic recycling infrastructure is in there too and that sounds like okay well what's that going to do well there's a lot of 3d printers out there many many people have them we're teaching people how to design collaboratively so we're aiming to launch this project where people are it's an incentive challenge so people are competing but our rules are not about competition the rules will be completely about collaboration so upload your designs upload download as rapidly as possible you get rewarded for uploading early and often the rules are going to be designed for complete collaboration but the bottom line is we need a clear example where there's some artifact which is visible an economically significant product so the cordless drill we chose because it's a 10 billion dollar global market our goal is within three years to show that okay distributed production by individuals all over the world are actually capturing a majority of that market of that 10 billion dollar market now that would be a very clear example that we've developed a product that's better faster stronger predictable time scale absolutely open source and collaborative and the production of this is distributed throughout the world right now there's like four companies that have eighty percent of the market share in cordless drills so that's that's what we are trying to do show one example where it's absolutely clear and undoubted undoubted that the open source technique has succeeded now that already has happened but nobody noticed and that was with the 3d printers so 3d printers since the patents ran out early 2000s the entire consumer 3d printing industry today is based on an open source reprap project it's a it's an open source project for designing the 3d printer called reprap right now most of the companies that are out there they are derivatives of that project they all built upon all that open knowledge that was generated when the patents ran out so that example is already there the biggest company the company i believe makes the most printers i believe that's prusa i mean they they're still an open source company they completely derive from that project so that revolution has happened but somehow nobody noticed like this is not uh like on wall street journal where they they have a report that says wow open source has finally dominated an entire industry so for whatever reasons i don't really understand why but i think it's a lot with industrial inertia where some of the incumbents in the 3d printing world i don't know like that the mainstream media might might kind of be biased towards more of the older companies but anyway we need one case in the world where that becomes absolutely clear that open source has succeeded in better products and on a regular scale because predictable time scale because the rep project itself that took years you know that was a large disorganized project where a lot of people were just working on it in their spare time and it was not a lot of organization but all together the whole movement pushed the state of art forward to the point that successful companies can emerge and in fact most of the current companies so right there you go well i think uh my comment on why people why didn't that make such a huge splash that all these print 3d printers right now or derivatives from uh from the reprap uh open source project is because you know when people buy a printer they hear about 3d printers so i think it's a it's a it's a problem of marketing in a way because when when people hear about printers they're like oh wow that's pretty cool i'm going to buy something like that you know tinker in my little shop over here and play with it and but they don't see the pedigree of that printer whatever they bought they don't see like that this is a child of a project that was open source that you see the final product they they don't see that made with open source or something like that it's you know like the um intel has a little intel inside logo and thing it's almost like every printer that that was that was derived from uh from open source project should have like a label like that you know oh yeah yeah yeah i see this intel inside of my computer here we should we should coin our little label open source inside and make them i mean do we do try to make it prominent like in all our advertising so on our website opensource ecology.org you can actually buy our printers but we we make that central it's like this is 100 open source intended for distributed enterprise meaning that if you want to produce this we'll teach you that's part of our part of our work it's to distribute this enterprise right so let's go back now now that we kind of uh hit the um uh the beginning of this show hard with like specifics about open source hardware yeah let's talk about some history let's talk about you and let's talk about uh how did you get into this you are a ted fellow you had a really awesome uh ted uh ted talk and then actually this is the um this is the um a little snapshot from from from your uh original uh talk open open source blueprints for civilization a uh ted talk in 2011 and since then will you propose so let's talk about what you proposed in that talk and what happened next and then where you are now well let's back up from that where where did that come from so i think we should back up to the phd program yes let's go all the way back to your education and what you were doing yes this is really what informs it so it's important so uh in the phd program that was in the farther i went the more useless i felt in terms of making a difference in the world so i was studying abstract stuff that didn't even exist now at that time i also noticed one thing in my research program was that i couldn't talk openly about the stuff that i was doing and that that hit me in a hard way i'm it's like what are we doing here in a public institution i can't talk openly and share and learn from others because we've got some hot stuff that if people took it you know they might beat us for funding or whatever so that's part of the system and i noticed that it's like wow it's like what a waste um also another episode there so we were using like in back in that time we were using actually macs in our for our computer platform and then some one of my peers showed me linux for the first time i was like what's this it's like so he showed me that this is a system that you can download you can use it for free you can install whatever software for free and modify it how you want i was like wow this is really cool so that's when i was actually first and ever introduced it probably was like 2000 like 2000 year 2000 or so or 2002 when i first heard about the concept of open source and i then i i thought that was really cool and piecing together the aspect of that i couldn't talk openly i started thinking well what would happen if we actually really collaborated with others uh noticing that i can't talk about my hot stuff to others and wouldn't it be better if i could and then we can actually combine our ideas together but that's not how things work so many places um and that's that's probably like one of the cases where oh this is probably happening everywhere throughout academia and other sectors so i got me thinking to well what's going on with this this total competitive waste all over the place so the last year of my phd i essentially started the open source ecology project just got a website and started to formulate the idea okay well what would the economy look like or what would the world look like if we truly collaborated and so those notions of unbridled collaboration at that point came up but it wasn't a few years later until actually so after finishing grad school the first thing you any movement entrepreneur would want to do or any person interested in rebooting civilization would want to do is get some land so i did that so i i farmed some land actually outside of madison and we got our own land eventually in missouri but that's the first thing so we we got into land and and i got whooped by the reality of this so i didn't have the practical skills or tools to make a small farm or whatever my experiment was succeed and that's where the idea of the global village construction set came about so just started prototyping first thing was that yeah the story in the ted talk where my tractor broke paid to get it repaired then it broke again i was two thousand dollars down like the actual story there was i paid two thousand bucks for this thing two weeks later it breaks again to the same thing it's like uh oh this is absolutely unsustainable right and i said if i'm having this problem and i bet you there's many other people that have this problem so i said okay we're gonna build ourselves an open source tractor uh kind of spun from there so open source brick press the tractor very fundamental things that you'd need on a piece of land to survive and thrive uh the the brick press for making housing the tractor for some agriculture and other utility duties uh so i decided at that point like wow this is a huge impact we could have if we just open source these designs so that anyone can build and maintain them at a fraction of the cost and all the stuff about industrial productivity on a small scale or just the idea that we equalize the balance of power from the countries that have and have not because being born in poland i've seen a have-not country before the wall fell down right we're we were both there with the tanks rolling down our streets uh that's that's the memories from the year before i left to to america so seeing that drastic difference between one country that has everything like america and then other countries it's like they still have all the same resources and you know there's they've got land they've got rocks plants sunlight soil water but one economy is completely advanced another is completely backwards it's like why does that happen so start to really ask those questions and a lot of the answers came through i mean just the way we develop things and the idea of collaborative uh distributive open versus control and one country is going to beat up another or power relations all that all those thoughts started coming up and wanted to do something about it i wanted to do something about it on a material front simply because material goods affect our lives in such tangible material ways by definition right so if we change the world we gotta start with hardware um not software but hardware which is more tangible it's it's still eighty percent of the economy you know the thing that you were talking about on on the ted talk is is um not only you know in open source hardware but you had initially and you're still working on it right now at open source ecology you're working on this global construction global village construction set and and i love that i think that tap to like uh um public psyche people thinking like wow what would it take to like restart a civilization like if i would let's say you know imaginarily like if there's a new planet whatever and we need all the tools and everything in order to to rebuild that rebuild everything and we have nothing what would it be and so you packed on you know all these designs and you're working on on all those all those machines and and tools in that construction set you know that could fit on like one dvd and for those of you who don't know what dvd is it's just a storage media now it's all in the cloud who knows who who's going to be watching this and when but yeah fitting all those all those designs and plants and then just sharing them so that people can build and and and and make them on their own uh one of the things that was really i think caught uh public's eye was your compressed earth brick machine which essentially you had an auger you dug up some soil topsoil you fed it to it into a hopper it it munched on it and then out come you know bricks and people were like it was just uh amazing because like now you can hey build this machine you get the plans for it you can use the materials that are around you so you don't have transportation costs and and material and material costs and you can build and you can build a building out of that it's it's amazing those were my understanding is that those were uh replicated all over the place all over the world and in many different countries and and so it's a it's it's a dozen for the break press maybe maybe we could get into the replication idea but all together the traction has not occurred yet so we're still growing we're like in an incubating stage uh there's been about a dozen so every so often i hear about a person in one country or another they built press like what my favorite one was uh like a nicaragua they actually built several buildings and the whole production facility were cranking out these bricks with what looked to be our machines so that's awesome it's great to hear but it's far from that major transformative impact so we're still working on that and we're just recognizing just how much effort it takes to take a prop product to completion so a lot of this to date has been prototyping like the last decade right largely prototyping but now we're saying okay there's that other aspect that we kind of forgot for that last decade and that is what is your product the actual products that people can buy or make very easily so lowering the barriers so you don't have to be a super skilled person you just have a buy button on your website so at this point it's a lot about enterprise development how do you see uh so so a why do you think it didn't catch on in in such an explosive way that the whole planet is talking about it's saying like oh my goodness look at this look at this guy he designed this thing that's like saving lives giving people shelter giving people a not only shelter but also education because now when you get have access to these plans you can just download it you can replicate it and then you can improve it and submit the um improvements in uh back to the um the kind of the um you know the source uh um and yeah and and that should have caught like wildfire why do you think it hasn't no that's that's a very interesting thing i remember publishing back in 2008 on a brick press and i was like i actually asked myself holy cow this is so powerful here we can make a machine for like at that time was like four thousand dollars nearest competitor if you were to buy it from somebody else would be like 52 000 it's like can i let it go and and of course i mean that was kind of like the last moment i ever would ask ask that question because i thought it's like wow like what am i giving away here so but i said okay no i'm committed to making a better world this is not about me it's about helping everybody so that was clear but at that time i thought that man this is going to just go wild all over the place with these kinds of economics that were demonstrating the such drastic cost reduction but no way jose that did not happen at all so yeah that's i i'd say that on one side is the product needs to be very highly refined so one of the things then was i'm not sure if we had at that time actually we did not have the machine that's actually digitally fabricated so one of the improvements was it's always about okay make it easier for people so after that that release in 2008 we converted the machine uh so 2011 we had one that was digitally cut by either cnc laser or cnc torch table that you can just give to a fabricator give them all the plans they cut out all the parts for you and then you gotta weld them so it's like much much easier it allows you to build the press like what we can do right now with a group of people in a single day as opposed to like a week by a skilled fabricator so we can now do these swarm builds but everything is about the ease of replication on one side so on one side we made things super easy on the other side it's like make the product that somebody can just click buy because most people do not have the patience like say you're a skilled fabricator um even for the brick press i would not say i mean why doesn't every single fabricator replicate our brick press and sell it well it's about business it's about an enterprise it's that's called running an enterprise so so the full connection from somebody just taking the blueprints to running as a full enterprise that's a that's a far cry and that's what we're working on right now to make that very easy so we are starting things like our startup camps and so this summer we have the summer of extreme design build where we continue to take the products to that level of finish that makes it super easy to replicate for example our micro track right or the house that i'm sitting in right now the cdca home that's my office here man those things are ready for replication but it takes a certain level of skill to get there right from one perspective i say hmm we built this it was an epic effort it's not super refined but that's perfect fuel for the the avid entrepreneur to take and productize it but it's not happening that easily because it's it's uh to have that kind of a broad skill base the vision to collaborate you know the entrepreneurial spirit that's pretty rare to find that all in one place and i think also the the other part there is the open culture like if somebody sees that oh our plans are open an entrepreneur might be like oh well i don't really have an advantage here they don't see it as an advantage so they might not replicate so it's still that kind of so so it's still that kind of old mentality of of like hey if it's open source like what kind of advantage do i have to uh to uh to to to actually do it and get into that business of actually doing it that's right so so there are many many barriers that i can point to but the number one is simply i mean we have been been de-skilled any of our practical skills have been removed by schooling and i've seen that in my school i mean my own school career like the farther you go the less practical you become to the point that by the end of your phd you're theorizing about stuff that doesn't exist i mean that's kind of the industry standard for your phd program so far removed from what i was after and it's about pressing world issues your journey to uh on on the um with open source ecology open source uh hardware like you said it's still sort of like an inception even though you've been working on it for a while what do you think has to happen in order to for it to like fully explode is there like a critical mass that you need to achieve that this is going to be like the tipping point where there's enough of people doing it there's enough of examples i mean the one thing that you said was like you know we need like a solid example that open source hardware design and this collaborative uh model is going to kick ass of like standard commercial designs and and practices right so that's that's kind of like you need like that poster child in order in order to be like the splash on the news in news uh you know newspapers and magazines like look this these guys worldwide they design something that's way better than what all these other companies can design and it's now open source you guys can download it and make it yourself or you can buy a kit and assemble it yourself um so that's that that's definitely step one what else do you think is needed in order to succeed to kind of shift this mentality yeah the latest in our thinking is culture because we're finding now that this has nothing to do with feasibility or cost practicality i mean better faster stronger is going to apply just like in software so what's the missing link and that is the collaborative culture so thinking about that at length it seems to me that in software why that became so clear and visible in a relatively short period is that because the original hackers and the original software was open source so a lot of the open source community has been familiar with that culture that culture at least existed even though of course like microsoft and apple came about and they were very proprietary but open source was not a new thing there it was in the background so and then before long it turned out oh yeah it actually makes economic sense too of course because you can collaborate now with hardware we have 200 years of industrial history where proprietary what is the norm right and i think that's one of the biggest things we're struggling with culturally now what does it mean in practice and practice means that from the time we leave kindergarten we're taught to share in kindergarten but after that it's everything about competition so in high school you might still have some of your innocence left where you think that you can collaborate but as soon as you get into the job market after college in college everything turns proprietary companies fund research when you go to a company it's all about non-disclosure agreements right and all of that as your competitive advantage for us the opposite is advantage the collaborative advantage is what we look at i.e you can develop things more inexpensively and you can get to what's already been shown in software so i i don't need to go on that we know that's the case so why is it not happening what what can we do for us what we're doing right now is um so we did start a program of which we call the open source micro factory steam camp but a huge part of that is to address that one gap in society that that's prominent and that is the collaborative culture so the idea that you actually can do better um by co-op cooperating so we we just practice that in a steam camp so steam camps are about learning the tool set which means wikis open editable docs open design software like freecad collaboration architecture and the processes that are derived from standard product development just project management and all of that you can do that and we're developing innovative techniques where we want to scale those to thousands of people working on at the same time and that's exactly what we'll do in the incentive challenge right the missing is training people up first of all to say that yes this stuff is possible and you can make better products and make better everything open source everything and it can actually work so so that's the level we're working on right now um promulgating that through our our steam camps as one way so we're trying to scale that program up the other thing is the incentive challenge that's going to hit the news so in that we expect a couple of thousand people to collaborate now if that works we have a chance to change economic history here because if this paradigm works then it can be applied to any other product or or hardware good so two questions so two questions a just for those who don't know what is a steam camp and two how do you see this uh once this challenge is going to be uh you know happening how do you how do you how do you see that how do you predict how do you see how do you envision how this is going to change the economic model of what's happening right now with the commercial aspect yeah good question so what is the steam camp and you can show the link as well but the steam camp we call the open source micro factory steam camp with science technology engineering art and math it's basically a public event sign up for this workshop and a very immersive intensive nine-day workshop that we're running where you learn so the first day you build a 3d printer using our open source modular construction method and you add on different additions like a pen plotter for cnc plotting like a cnc little drill and other things we end up building a raspberry pi tablet this project days where we all collaborate the idea is that we run multiple events at the same time so those nine days means we have several locations last event was three locations we're aiming to increase that up to uh our goal is about 24 and that's only the beginning just like i always say that's only the beginning like in my ted talk but imagine 24 events at the same time say 24 people each you've got an army of about 500 people that can be collaborating in those five project days you can get some major design done pending your ability to leverage an effective process so for us an effective process is one that's module modular designed where we break things apart just like in software into very small parts and develop them we create part libraries that people can then build upon continuously to the point that we develop effective open source products for what we call the open source everything store so basically think about right now 80 of the stuff that's on amazon could be produced in an open source micro factory a basic digital fabrication facility with 3d printers cnc machines maybe robotic arms and other things small scale facility you can do a lot of that so that's the steam cam part now let's answer the on the challenge incentive challenge what is the the intended outcome of hosting a design challenge where we design a cordless drill sounds simple well for one there's an aspect of recycling in there so that's that's one aspect the ideal situation is that out of this incentive challenge which is probably gonna run six months and six months from start after the collaborative not competitive but collaborative effort it's not a team competing against another team you get rewarded for contributing to the final product on all its levels from the the product design to the enterprise design that successfully produces these so our goal is explicitly to have 100 or 200 people who take the work product of that challenge meaning up to okay how do you build the machines that build that 3d printer so that means that involves some 3d printers possibly a torch table but maybe not the recycling machines definitely so it's about distributing that economic operation to many people so this so the idea there is we either hire the people or they they work independently but ideas to create what would most most aptly be called an open source franchise so it's a collaborative effort where all the product development happens collaboratively we all are contributing to this common pool and as open source ecology we're providing the support infrastructure for enterprise startup for all these operations to start up around the world so within six months of the challenge we hope to be producing drills in 50 to 100 locations right around the world help me understand how is how is the winner going to be picked out of this challenge if if everyone is going to be collaborating how do you pick a winner if it's not a competition of sorts how do you pick a winner we haven't gotten the details of that exactly as far as what the formula is but and we won't disclose that for gaming purposes but but the general idea is that you reward so you have you track work product by people uploading designs to the wiki everyone keeps a work log everyone contributes to part libraries and you can simply see people's activity so we will reward how often people people upload stuff how they comment on existing design how they collaborate with one another so for example if they provide design review that says okay this is a good idea for a reason x that that is counted as a plus so everything you get points for every single action where you're not hiding anything but you're inputting into the system and helping others do better so we'll probably have a number of prizes probably like probably like a grand prize and like top probably top 10 prizes and maybe there's going to be like a whole bunch of small ones but the reward that we're looking at is we're looking at we're looking at about 200k for the the prize itself so that's significant that is it's quite a significant let's play money to go around there but the idea about an incentive challenge is that the amount of effort that people put in for that reward is actually much larger so we're not buying 200 000 worth of research and development it's more like 10 or 100 times that that's just how these things work but we're using this format the incentive challenge to make this happen in our particular case so we have the details of the judging will have to be determined we can use basic metrics of wiki edits and submits commits to our repositories where you can just track that all and give people points for for doing that right so and and we'll have a continuous a manager that that manager or two that are constantly working with the people providing the right direction my role in it's going to be to be the the keeper of the uh of the paradigm basically like of the rules of the principles keep her kind of like the keeper of the principles so i'm just gonna be not not designing i'm gonna be guiding people in design and incl more importantly in collaboration how do you collaborate effectively how do you make sure that your log is updated that you're uploading on a continuous basis that you're providing feedback so we'll be teaching this whole community of people how to do that and this is just a small step to what we see as a simple collaborative design method so just like linux you've got linux foundation they basically steward the linux project the various open source development projects uh people contribute to that common pool what we see here is that we steward a process where meaningful high quality design is generated and then people can can draw from that so the same model as in linux and doing that with the cordless drill challenge as a first example and normalizing as a as a way to do business simply it's simply showing that okay it's it's cheaper better more effective uh to do this this way because the the results actually happen right so one thing that i that kind of came to my mind is in in terms of how you're going to use metrics um to kind of award whoever is going to be the the winning um you know the winner of this i like a i like the fact that you're going to have like several prizes it's not going to be just like a grand prize and nobody else is going to be grand prize and and like the top 10 maybe your top three what what have you the the complexity that i think that's going to strike you is is not every so let's say we're designing this this cordless drill not every part that you're going to design in the drill is has of equal weight right in a sense like you know you have one piece that may be more complex you know motor maybe uh then let's say just a casing uh and and so uh that's gonna be probably a challenge of its own but uh but i appreciate that and i and i acknowledge that this is a evolving idea so you're going to learn from this and then the following is going to hit the following uh competition or contest will have challenges we'll have uh you know have learned from this one and so on but it is going to be interesting to see how you guys figure out how to come comparatively judge the submissions and the contributions on uh different parts that are different levels of complexity and design um that's going to be that's going to be interesting as always we kind of make the road by walking we just dive into this experiment it's a complete experiment that's worth doing absolutely so let's see what comes out right what do you think is going to happen yeah what do you think what do you predict i am ready for some interesting surprises because as we go along we're pushing forward an aggressive schedule of our programming we constantly meet new people opportunities are getting better and better i think you know when i look back on a project every year is better so then you know i'm i'm in my mud hut at the farm and then all of a sudden hey i'm invited to the world stage hello everybody uh great and then other things like that happened that open opened up a bunch of other stuff like getting foundation showroom foundation fellowship all this publicity and all that and that is not stopping i think all together we're recogn on one side we're recognizing wow this stuff is difficult this is like impossible and the latest thing was just the recognition about open culture like initially it was proof of concept that show okay do these open source things actually work are they gonna suck well the learning was very quick that wow these things are actually better than expected like for example the first break press i was hoping that when i did that i'd get like three bricks a minute and then i ended up getting like 10 you know using common available technology technically it's not impossible in fact it's extremely encouraging because once you see how powerful technology is how enabling it is it's like wow your mind changes as you get get your hands on it and you understand so it has nothing to do with feasibility right now we're at this point it's an organizational challenge and a cultural challenge so even if we had the best organization that organization would have to include the creation of a new culture in society because right now wow we are finding of having a very hard time finding people who are into the simple idea of open product development everyone talks about it at the end of the day there's very few people that are doing it and there's so many barriers to collaboration that that's been one of the things that and so you know just to give you an example with the steam kids so it's team camps i made a very explicit effort to go out to all those people that naturally want to develop products together and collaborate so that's like the open source hardware association list directory where they certify open source projects and products i went out to like the fab labs other places youtubers who i thought are open source the the turnout has been very low like very very low to the point that right now for the first event which just happened january we had three instructors so for example one person out of the entire oshawa list of say a hundred or more that i contacted was like yeah let's do it this is open source product development we can work together actually make something better and not worry about competing because we're all going to succeed the people that have that mindset are extremely rare and it just blows me away you know there's you think that it's easy and it's like yeah it's a great idea but as far as people who are actually doing it extremely rare so that's that's that's like the cultural barrier that we're trying to bridge and it has to be at the point where um well one of our missions is is to to do mass creation of sustainable livelihoods through open source i mean that's part of our game uh and it has to come to that we have to basically say have have the ability to say to people okay here's something you can do uh within the framework and you make a living so the steam camp instructors are an example of that right and we just got to get the enterprise level up that's right i mean that that was one of the things that we originally talked about when i was at uh at your fab lab um i mean at your location uh yeah open source ecology headquarters let's call it that in missouri and i told you like hey you know you need to turn this into something that will provide people livelihood something you can you have to monetize i know that open source ecology is a not non-for-profit but that doesn't mean that you guys shouldn't be you shouldn't be making money to to propagate this because the reality is that the world that we live in right now is is essentially you know uh driven by marketing and and the awareness and awareness costs awareness costs you know eyeballs looking at this and considering things is going to cost money because you need to to market and advertise to people but um so what i'm really happy about uh seeing is that you you've kind of adapted that that idea and are doing those those team camps concurrently which kind of ties in uh the collaboration right and uh and you guys are learning from that and you mentioned some of the obstacles in in terms of collaboration that collaboration is one of those those kind of like evolving obstacles what are some of some of the main obstacles in in collaboration as it is right now uh so let's back up to the steam camps where i must report that an initial hint of what we predict which is get a bunch of people together with that explicit tool set and skill set to collaborate and you can have magic happen it's starting a little bit there was evidence of this like like in the last steam camp outside of meeting a couple of people that actually want to start similar operations or teach the steam camps which has happened or actually start micro factories in their local communities that kind of stuff there's there's interest there but in the event itself let's talk about that we for example had our design of the pen plotter the cnc plotter that draws you pictures using the cnc control axis which is the same machine that the 3d printer is based on so somebody made a design to improve that so that they added the pen plotter attachment not as a separate tool head which means that you'd have to re take off the printer head and put on the plotter they actually added the pen right on top of the printhead so it could the printhead could function both as a plotter and a printer right awesome cool so that's a small example where okay now we're getting to collaborative innovation and a framework where that result is going to be open source and continue to be developed awesome okay but what are the you're asking what are the challenges to it in collaboration challenges to collaboration there's technical the cultural one i mentioned and that is where uh the idea that it's very hard to find people that think that more can be done together i mean as as obvious as that sounds that must be very frustrating it's it's just a recognition of how this works it like i've been going through this recognition about the last three months it blows me away like the farther i get into this game it's stuff that i'm learning just blows me away first it was the idea that wow these things work incredibly awesome and they're gonna take over the world second wow and there's nobody to replicate it even though this even though this is the next trillion dollar economy and now wow um if this model can work for software and it's obvious that it will will work for hardware it's just we're just a decade or so away why is nobody jumping on it in larger numbers when we actually at that point we're saying okay here's a way you can actually make a living with us here's the open source steam camps we're actually going to pay you to run these and still like very little uh it's still a i mean it's a high-risk entrepreneurial undertaking but it did blow me away that the response was was low i would say low and it's building and it's like as people see the reality it's it's uh just kind of like the long walk to freedom it takes a while for the transition to happen and and it's so we are definitely in this as an exponential organization we're like still at the very base before the hockey stick explosion comes in which which i'm confident it will but what are the so be beyond the cultural what are the other things other things are actually quite tractable so over the years we've been doing module based designs basically one of the huge keys to the success of open source software was the idea that they can break down a software product into very very very tiny bits we've learned how to master that for hardware it's not too hard it's you design whenever you have a design you break it down into components like the tractor it's gonna have an engine unit it's gonna have a frame it's going to have the tractions that have control you break that down like that for any machine about a dozen modules then you break that down further into subparts but you can basically break down a complex product into modules and then you can run through like 40 or so development steps through each module so it's not a big deal to learn this kind of a technical ability to to manage a complex product by breaking it apart into many many parts that's awesome and the software now lets you do that you've got wikis you got various project management software the largest part about that is the the kind of a cultural once again that technical process is limited not by the technical tools it's limited by the the framework that most people have in their mind and interestingly it's here's another one we're finding that you'd think that a complete novice like socad is one of the main things we use you'd think that an experienced cat person would learn freecad um pretty fast what we found out instead is that the absolute novice is able to learn freecad much better than a cad professional why is that do you think it's because they have to all learn what they've learned yeah yeah it's absolutely that and it i was just talking to katarina my partner here about that today as i uh basically because for the steam camps program one of the requirements is that you learn free cats so we ran into a couple of people that were like oh yeah yeah like they're masters of cad but it turned out they didn't want to learn free cat or couldn't or like they had some resistance to it right so it's amazing and then then there's another student that's signing up for the summer and it took them like a day they already learned it or another guy in another workshop here where i was able to teach them a complete novice to go into designing an object of any complexity pretty much and actually exporting that as a print file all in one hour wow so it's amazing like that's that's another thing so yeah just just a thought i want to put out there that of how the mindset is so important because technically we peddle the tools the technology we have if we can go around the moon and make microchips you know that's we've got issue it's now the human element so the um so i think it you know the main the main things this is just like keep on pushing forward to educate people to uh and and then i think this cordless drill challenge is gonna be something that's going to catch attention as well obviously you guys going to be and i'm going to try to help out as well with with um you know blasting it is all over the place and and making it making it uh appealing to people and and and have a conversation around it i think you know what what you need is something that's just so so sexy that people are like oh my gosh i have to be part of that and yeah no i think uh yeah that's coming that's coming and it's it's just um you know the the difference between vision and execution this is an entrepreneurial quest and you just got to get really good so for me it's all about upping my entrepreneurial skill set on all levels so i'm like growing like crazy right now right right you know about yourself the imagery that comes in to my mind right now is when you say that you know this this is this is still in the inception it has still had to catch on and and everything there was this video on youtube and i think i mentioned this on some other podcasts where where uh just imagine this lawn everybody's picnicking out there's a bunch of people and this one guy just gets up you probably saw that video you you may have seen it and it's like this guy yeah this guy starts he starts like dancing like crazy and people are just like looking at him like well jeez look at this crazy dude like you know and then and then he has a first follower someone who like you know had enough courage to like hey i'm gonna i'm gonna join this dude and he starts dancing and they go wild and crazy just totally you know blissful about it and then a third guy you know a third person joins them and then another person another person and now suddenly the people that were in majority are in the minority they are looking at all these people dancing now it's a crowd this this leader started it right this crazy dude started all of that and now it's like a huge movement and now all those people who are initially like whoa that's just weird like i don't want to be part of that now they're like man i should probably be part of that because like i'm out over here and and so i think that's kind of the same thing that that's going to happen with open source hardware it's like that shift of mentality is going to happen when that critical mass is going to build up where you're going to have enough people doing it that everybody else is going to be like oh yeah sure of course it's yeah that's how we should do things you know but that's you know you're at the you're the visionary you are the at the inception of it you are the the guy who's like still pushing something that's that some people are just like so entrenched in standard thinking what uh and you can you can't blame them i mean this is what we've been you know um cultured into in a sense that that you know that the people are just can't even see beyond it it's only by example so i'm looking really forward to when you guys gonna have some you know that that drill cordless drill uh because i think that's gonna make a huge splash so you mentioned that this is a trillion trillion dollar uh economy um i think that should get people excited where do you get that number from trillion dollar economy is um it's actually more like 30 trillion or so as far as the hardware economy what is the overall economy it's about 100 trillion what is the size of the first primary and secondary sectors so primary is the extraction of all the materials the rocks and plants and those things that the modern civilization is made from second sector manufacturing all the production so those are the sectors that lend themselves to open hardware so you've got extractive um and of course in a of sense the circular economy extraction of resource circular circular cycling and then manufacturing those are the two sectors about 30 of the economy the rest rest about 70 is the service sectors and all that so um the economy that open hardware will undoubtedly take over is about 30 trillion so that means production of common things that we use every day so you you live in a house you've got you know trees that were cut down or concrete that was made or the metal for the car that you drive that's 30 of the world that's 30 trillion so we were talking about the um the economy how how big the economy uh is in open source hardware so i think that should get people excited about this because like with you know let's say even forget about the 30 trillion dollars you know one trillion dollars is a massive number that's that's a huge number so i'm hoping that whoever is listening to this will check out open source ecology they will open up your your uh your work and just get excited about participating uh let's kind of start wrapping up with things how do you want um how people can get involved with with what you're doing what do you need right now to to make this uh to make this a uh a success to the next step yeah i mean biggest thing right now is the biggest initiative is instructors joining the steam camp program so basically if you're interested in learning how to collaborate on real product design of technology that matters yeah join it so attend the camp and then learn to be an instructor that's if you want to go into the deep dive otherwise we have regular workshops so you can of course sign up as a participant if as we say in our promo video if you ever want to design or build something but did not know where to start well if that describes you then this program is geared to address exactly that issue so basically getting hands-on skills to go from conception to cad to 3d printing or other machines to realize your your products that's a very broad kind of a project and the thing to keep in mind there is we're trying to create a what we call the i mentioned the open source everything store the idea of this collaborative product development mastermind so if you're an entrepreneur i mean we'd like you but but the thing is um we're we're trying to nail down our target market that's one of our like uh biggest things we're trying to do because we know that the people we're trying to find here are kind of the five-legged dogs because you got to be entrepreneurial collaborative open source uh a teacher like if you want to teach the camps and what's the fifth one you have to be able to build things that's if you're looking to be the instructor right but if you're talking about open source product development in general yeah it's it's an entrepreneurial kind of an endeavor where people have to say okay well there's all these goods that we get in the store but if you're excited about saying okay i can now collaboratively develop a real thing an open source micro factory in my own community i mean the market for that is huge but it's it's that initial gap of how do you start this whole enterprise that's what we're working on we've got a few early adopters being very aggressive about pursuing the steam camps to continue training people and just keep building it right um you know the thing that got me excited and when we were talking about when i was at your um when i was at your uh um place is that you know if we if you build a model where people can take what you're doing at the headquarters and then just kind of can do it in their own communities and the community can see how beneficial that is because it's it's it's a stepping stone the first thing is well before before people will before like this open source hardware and this ecology kind of grows into like what's accepted globally as a status quo the first step is like how do we teach kids how do we teach adults how do we teach all those who tinker who build who want to modify uh things and and those makers creators um make a living out of this and i think the model is like they can take the the structure that you have in open source ecology and replicate it replicate a shop at their local uh um in their local communities and then people can come in kids can come in adults can come in they can learn everything from scratch which is what you what you have at your steam shops right steam camps right now which is like hey we'll teach you cad we'll teach you this we're going to build a 3d printer then you're going to with a 3d printer you're going to build parts with those parts you're going to build all the things that that we're building and collaborating on and you're going to learn collaboration everywhere in between all of those steps and i think that you see such a valuable skill set and such a valuable as a set of uh an interest mindset change as well that once that's going to get replicated locally in a lot of different communities that's when you're going to have that biosmosis type of awareness that people are like wow okay this works and it's clearly beneficial because i want my kid to learn sciences i want them to learn you know uh uh practical things and and everything can be tied into sciences into math and and all these uh you know subjects and and and so that's what i'm excited about and we talked about that i'm excited that you're you're you're pushing forward to that i want to be one of your instructors as well i'm going to be coming out to you to uh uh to your headquarters and and uh and and start co-teaching some of the things over there and getting on that path i'm super excited i would love to do that over here as well in utah and get people involved there is a maker community it's just that i think that maker community is more of uh oh let's go to a shop pay 20 bucks a month so i have access to a 3d printer or something like that and and kind of leave it at at that point i think the next evolutionary step is what you're doing which is which is uh teaching everything from sort of from a to z and then make it profitable to teach other people and then communities recognizing the value of those instructors in their communities doing these workshops and teaching people to to do that and participating in in open source hardware and building that community globally well i think to add on to that it's not only about teaching there's it's a teaching and production model so with the people that are produced in these camps we're about open product development we start certain projects like the raspberry pi tablet or a cordless drill or a vacuum robot those are the kind of projects we start during the camp and then let's talk about the open source everything store the the collaborative product development mastermind where we all join that and then build that micro factory in your community you can produce you can teach there's a solid economic base for making that happen so that's so you mentioned about okay let me go you use the word maker i don't particularly like that word i like the word entrepreneur more maker is typically a hobbyist yes and we're trying to say no this is not about hobbies this is about the next industrial revolution and a change of global paradigm right so if you are listening and this speaks to you if you're the five-legged dog with those five qualities i mentioned before email me yeah let's do this that's exactly what i'm responding to right now there's certain people that are uh in fact one email i got was hey i'm one of the five-legged dogs you're looking for so we're looking to work together yeah fantastic um well listen it was uh uh it was really great uh uh seeing you again and talking to you i'm excited for you what what what's happening in in in your domain how you're pushing this forward i definitely want to be part of it i'm going to be talking about it i'm going to be actually reaching out to some communities over here locally in in utah and see who would be interested in taking the journey of this because i would love to kind of run the shop over here in utah there's a lot of there's a lot of growth that's happening in the state there's a lot of creative minds over here they just don't they just don't know where to start so i think what you just said is hey have you ever wanted to build something make a living out of it this is this is your this is your chance this is your place where you can do that so are we going to be we're going to be talking about that over here and and uh i'll get back to you with uh what i what i found out over here i'd love to have you on the show again thank you for introducing me to all the ted fellows this it's it's a it's uh you know uh i only talked to uh sherbandu right now but there's a couple of others that you introduced me to so i'm i'm gonna revisit them and see if uh if i can have them and i'm gonna just end with um one thing which which i started talking about then we got cut off which is like how shibano adopted your open source hardware model open source uh model in his business with uh with growing high density trees in people's backyards i mean that just blew my mind when he was telling me about that wait i thought he had more of that mindset already did he say that that he actually adopted more of it since he met him yes sir he since he met you yes yes yes yes watch the podcast and you're going to see he he says it that you know we did it in a standard standard way a standard business uh practice you know fifa service and things like that and then we said like no if you want to hire us this is this is the price and but if you want to negotiate somewhere in between we don't do that you can have it for free and it's in its open source and so he adapted he adopted uh you know and he said that after talking to you and spending time with you and planting your trees over there so yeah so you've had that impact in a totally different discipline so to speak and so it's phenomenal that that's it's catching what you know what you're doing is growing like crazy here too i'll send them i'll send them a link to this uh to this podcast so you can kind of uh um listen to it to this as well uh again thank you so much um i'm pre-inviting you to the next podcast because i want to talk and we're going to talk maybe a little bit more in more details you're doing phenomenal work over there and a lot of it so um put me on the calendar somewhere so we can so we can chat a little bit more i want to know like the details and the in the lessons learned that you've learned and you want to share from the steam camps that you've uh that you've been uh um teaching and coordinating i think that's gonna be our next podcast where we're gonna talk about that so those who would want to get involved in doing this they will get a little taster of what it is what does it take to make this a a successful um event and um and then that's going to probably be interesting to them and um and that's going to take us on so thanks a lot that's awesome and then after that so make sure we do one around the incentive challenge time which is september 2nd or september 1st so around that time we're launching but we should talk about that because we'll have everything up on the website and all that so look forward to it fantastic thank you watching thanks for listening to a podcast with interesting people please subscribe and leave a review or comment and support us by sharing our episodes on social media we really appreciate it and for more information visit us at a podcast dot com thanks