what about something more like this:

@Dawg

Reading Marcin's 'manifesto' here, he's made clear that he isn't planning on doing extensive organizational or coordination work. He's sticking with his core competency of designing and building stuff. He is expecting others to "step up to the plate" and handle the finances, website, systems engineering, and probably even high-level goals. If you're willing to devote full time to this without pay, that person could be you. Or maybe aneiren can fill one of those roles, if he has the time. This is why it seems so unclear whats going on to the rest of us, because Marcin isn't putting any effort into explaining it. He's expecting someone else to.

We do need leaders...making decisions by committee isn't usually the best thing. We need people who are spending 100% of their time on this to be the best informed, synchronize everyone, etc.

@Dawg - While I can understand your frustrations, I think some understanding and further patience is call for with respect to OSE as an organization.  Since Marcin's TED talk, visibility and participation in OSE has grown enormously.  Surely you can see that it's difficult to grow from a group of a few dozen people to several hundreds of people -especially when that happens in a matter of months.

From what I can see, Marcin and OSE are taking steps to improve things.  There has been a lot of work done lately on how to setup, join, and manage OSE projects.  There have been discussions around documentation standards that should simplify and clarify things.  There have also been a number of discussions with people who want to take on leadership roles within OSE - you know this because you state so above.  While solutions to technical problems can often be implemented immediately, solutions to people problems usually take a lot longer.  We are trying to build teams at different levels of the organization and assembling good teams take time.  Team composition is critical since they need to be able to work together.  A team that can't work together does more harm than good.

You take some exception to the term "collaboration" above.  While I'm sure that there are many interpretations of the word, I view it as "working together towards a common goal".  The existing OSE leadership team is actively working on trying to figure out what it means to work together in an organization that largely consists of volunteers.  They are also trying to figure out what the short term goals are and how to prioritize the high level goals.  Some of those efforts are bearing fruit.  Solar power generation has been identified as a high priority goal, which I note was the original topic of this post. @gregor raises some concerns about Solar Fire that should be addressed, but the conversation has been side-tracked into a discussion of leadership and organization.  May I suggest that such topics might better be discussed as threads in the Organizational Development forum category?

On the topic of ideology, you mention that you are having some differences of opinion with Marcin.  He has stated most of his views on the long term vision for OSE, I'm interested in hearing your views as well.  How do they differ?  Why do that differ?  Are they substantively different, or just different on how to get there?  Why not post them over in Organizational Development?

Criticism is a useful tool, Dawg, but we should recognize that it's a tool that needs to be used carefully.  Ideally, it is a tool that is used for positive change.  Used bluntly it hurts people.  Suggestions are better than blunt statements -as if they were fact.  Questions are even better because they promote discussion, rather than shutting it down.  I believe that you are really trying to figure out where the problems are and trying to make suggestions on how to improve things.  Hopefully we can all work together to achieve the vision that Marcin has shared with us.

- Mark

@mjn - Perhaps you're right Mark.  We've veered a bit off course, topic wise.  But what I am talking about is the root cause of gregor's concerns, so in a round about way, it is on topic. 

As far as being hurtful, keep in mind that much has gone on in the background regarding this.  Marcin and Co knew this was coming.  No one has been blind sided.  I hope no one is feeling hurt in any way.

I appreciate your thoughtful input.

The Dawg

While there may be pitfalls and missteps along the way, the good thing about the whole process we have here is that we'll figure them out and fix them. When it is duplicated at FeF, and equipment is running from it, its going to quickly be evident whether it is the right approach. The most important thing imo is that any mistakes are documented in addition to the successes, so that it can be a learning experience. Covering up failures is the opposite of what we want to do.

Buying PV panels is not an option. We cant make panels (for now) and it doesn't teach us anything.

When I say that PV cell are something we cant make I mean, we may never be able to make them well. The refining and doping process is very difficult.

Here is a video of silver nitrate mirror.

Also, if we use a stirling engine that is, as the whitecliffs people mention, twice as efficient as the steam, the collector is half the size - boom, that makes it a whole heck of a lot easier to meet the price goals even without improving on the solar fire collector, unless the engine cost went  way up, which it won't.

But it would definitely be a good idea to have a decent design, correct?  Prototyping is expensive and time consuming compared with being a little more thoughtful at the design stage.

There is no point in rushing into something that we already know has no chance of working.  I think some people tend to be very tempted to simply go build, and when I had a basement to tinker in, in retrospect I think I did that far too much.  It is more efficient, and in fact faster overall, by far to get a reasonable design down first.  Do some computer simulations and some cost estimates.  That has not yet been done.

i think the solar fire could be a good test bed for different types of generators/turbines and stuff.

@gregor  wrote "MJN, from your wiki activity you seem to be part of this team:  Is it
the case that the homework has been done but not posted to the wiki or
has it just not been done (which would seem quite a hole in the
planning)"

While I am not directly a part of the Solar Fire team, I have been following it's development.  Thought it may not be obvious from the wiki (yet), Solar Fire was developed by Eerik Wissenz (of Finland).  Earlier versions of Solar Fire have been built and are in use in India.  When Eerik became aware of OSE, it made a great deal of sense to merge development efforts.  That merger is largely complete in concept, but there are a large number of details that remain to be worked out.  In particular, there is a body of documentation and information that needs to be transferred to the wiki - this has not been done yet.

As often happens, there is a conflict between doing and documenting the doing.  There is a large push on to install a prototype Solar Fire installation at Factor e Farm this summer and use it to drive a steam engine for power generation (which explains my involvement).  Focus of effort is on getting ready to build another installation, rather than justifying it's efficiency.

what do you think or next course of action should be?

@mjn - As usual Mark, some great points.  I think the root cause of the concerns is lack of communication.  Your efforts are aiming to correct this.  Thank you.

Any chance that someone more familiar with Physics could look into the limits of efficiency for this process?  Lets say the theoretical thermodynamic limit is 45%.  Then an efficiency of lets say 30% doesn't look quite so bad in a way.

One could also argue that because the energy being captured is "free" that efficiency is less of a factor.  Not sure I would agree but it's something to think about.  Either way, if there is some solid data to chew on, people are then in a position to decide for themselves if it makes sense for them to get involved in this particular project or not.

The Dawg

@mjn - Mark said: "The documentation is important, of course, or else it really isn't open
source"

To be honest, I think it is doubly important to document in Crowd Funded Open Source projects.  People are sending Marcin money to complete "the dream", not build himself a nice facility for free.  Keep in mind, this is not a brand newly created project.  OSE has been around as an entity since at least 2008, maybe earlier.  How long does it take?

Now, before calling me just plain negative....:) allow me to be Devil's advocate for another moment and say "explain to me how we tell the difference between an up front organization and a freeloading one".  One way might be to gauge the level of documentation and open sharing that is going on.  This would include the sharing of crowd funds also.  I might add a few other things like accountability and cooperation/collaboration on important decisions.

To my knowledge, non of this is being done.  Knowing this, when do I start asking hard questions?  At what point do I start sounding like a bitter contributor?  You get the idea.

Ok, this dead horse is now dust....:)  If anyone would like me to share more on this, just send me a private message.

The Dawg

I have an idea that might help to solve both these problems at once:

An adversary system.

1. On the solar concentrator page, there would be a section "Potential designs for prototype II"
in that there would be several subsections such as:
==Engine-focussed==
===Organic rankine based===
===Steam based===
===Stirling based==
==Collector-focussed design==
===Trough collector===
===Array of flat heliostatic mirrors===

(of course they cannot be designed in complete isolation, but people working on the steam can look at what is happening on the collectors and say "well the cost estimate is in for the extruded trough collector one and the tables on the page show that the 100x conc ratio one with half insulated absorber tube, for which the efficiency vs. temp table shows that when combined with the linear steam engine, when combining the cost estimates we did last week, looks like it should produce electricity at (shows estimating method) maybe $X per watt materials cost and Z person-hours of assembly time with tool capital cost of W - not bad!")

( I wouldn't add all the ones you can think of all at once, let people add them as they spin out of the rest of the design processes as interesting options)

We have to divide the design approaches into groups somehow, and engines and collectors is reasonably natural.

2. The community votes on which they think should be chosen. This is only an information gathering tool which is used by the leadership and the community, there is no risk of poor decisions due to bias by a mob of redditors that shows up or something because the leadership would notice and prevent such issues from affecting their judgement.

 It could be done through the wiki too, with the vote of each contributor correlated with their activity on the wiki and maybe team culturing info, then different statistics could be produced: results of the voting within only the people that added to the pages at some point (and therefore are more likely to know the issues), are engineers (from team culturing info), the population size-corrected opinions of  different groups (to compensate for biassing of the results due to an influx of certain enthusiasts who might not have really read the pages carefully) etc.  I think the wiki supports polling.  The voter correllation data could be scraped with a perl script then dumped into a database from which stats can be extracted if no existing solution is available.

The community can explore the design-space, and in detail.  By design space I mean the problem space that includes all possible designs.   

There are some rules that must be followed for this to work:
1. Design criteria and guidelines specific to this particular tool should be available at the top of the page, and in reasonably compact form.  These are the all and the ONLY criteria that decisionmakers will care about in their decision making, and they should not change much after the word go, if possible.  The compactness need conflicts with the latter to some degree of course, but the best compromise that can be found.  

2. At the time the design is chosen by the dictator, all and  ONLY the information on the page and maybe 2 links deep or something (so references can be verified) may be considered, except in the cases where information cannot be shared in it's entirety publicly due to copyright (in which case the argument such documents contribute needs to be made as available as possible to the other contributors by quoting sections etc. and the docs should be available to the maximum legal extent to those who ask for them).

This makes sure contributors can have confidence that their time spent contributing accomplishes something, which will encourage contributions.   They know they see the entire body of existing work so they know what does and does not need still to be done, etc.


There are at least 2 things that need to be done for this approach or some variant of it to be implemented:
 1. Get the existing design documents up so that we can pick up where the design was left off.
2. Leadership needs to send the right signal that the decision to use the approach has been ratified, if it is.

This could accomplish many things in one go:
1.  It integrates documentation directly into the design process.
2. It allows ready collaboration within the entire community.
3.  It gives contributors confidence their time spent contributing is well spent.  In the hardware design communities there is not currently the same culture that exists as there is in the software community.  We need all the help we can get bringing in contributors.
4.  It gets the critics off the backs of the people in the building and on the project post-design.  The most ardent and useful critics are the ones that are critisizing because they want to see the project be done well.   If someone says you are doing it wrong, tell them how the design process goes, and when they see that they have in fact an effective route to correct the design deficiencies of the current prototype that they see, with such improvements being incorporated in to the next prototype if it does turn out to make sense to do so, hopefully they will go make their argument well, in detail and preferrably quantitatively, on the wiki.  Therefore being more useful and easily integrated into decisionmaking.  

How it could fail:

Just wanted to clarify that when I say dictator I am referring to the established benevolent-dictator-for life model that is proven in software, it is not a criticism at all, just the term used.

@gregor
While the organized collection of information is to be encouraged, one question I have is,"Why do we need to make a choice?"  The three engine designs mentioned (Rankine, Steam, and Sterling) each have their advantages and disadvantages.  As you pointed out above, the Steam Engine will be useful regardless of how it is specifically used.  I feel similarly about the Sterling Engine.  One of the powerful aspects of open source development is the parallel exploration of ideas.  Personally, I encourage the exploration of all of these approaches - all the way to prototyping.  Let's get real experience, real OS build plans, and compare them.  Let's learn what they might be best at - rather than guessing.

While I picked on the engine designs, the same applies to solar concentrators, too.  Trough designs are likely to be substantially simpler to build than parabolic, but less efficient, too.

About the only argument that might be presented against parallel development efforts is the lack of resources.  Tis a silly argument, IMO.  People will vote with their time, energy, and money.  Personally, I put my time into developing the steam engine.  I know of at least one person who is similarly passionate about the Sterling Engine.  No one has stepped up to push a Rankine engine - which doesn't mean that it lacks merit, it just lacks someone to pursue it.  There are already dozens if not hundreds of people involved in OSE right now.  Properly motivate, we can do anything.

- Mark Norton