What kind of time and effort investment are you expecting in this discussion?  It sounds like you've been in the in interest and professional space to have spent several thousand hours more thinking and reading about these subjects than most people have.  That is a pretty daunting learning curve.

Hi DavidIam, I Yes that is true. But I guess I feel the same about the technical/ fabrication side of it.  I suppose we all have to throw into the mix whatever we have. I am an academic ...and although I grant you there is often a long lead time for ideas to filter through into concrete policies or politics there has always been a three-way exchange between activists and social experimenters, politicians and policy makers and academics in a variety of disciplines. Right now the degrowth movement is being 'serviced' by many academics moonlighting to an extent as well as publishing formal papers. If nothing else assembling a digital library of relevant papers would probably be a useful exercise in itself.  I hadn't really thought about time/investment. It depends on who signs up and is interested. Possibly no-one.   What I do know is that there are serious issues and complex trade offs which may not be immediately apparent but would certainly become difficult to avoid with any attempt to scale up this experiment.  Right now I only have questions.

I can understand the appeal of thinking about these things, but I'm unconvinced that any amount of effort put into it is anything more than premature optimization - we know that the power structures of this world already results in a state of being that has sucked on many levels.  Further, there is a very long and contorted road between GVCS/OSE and mass *anything*.   The collection of papers and thoughts on the subject is, indeed, something to do - so I can only say 'it would be a valuable thing for you to curate a valuable collection of thought on such issues'.  But there is no priority, there is no fund, there is no resource from the OSE direction that likely will be provided for it, I think.  You can do it for the community, but it is, insofar as you're the one with the vision, your thing to spend time on or not, resources or not, as they come available to you.  In other words, don't let our lack of active contribution stand in your way.  We can say, ra ra, that is a good thing I have no time or inclination to pursue.  Which may not be as encouraging as you would like.

You do know that Mao let 1000 flowers bloom so he could identify those who opposed him and whom he later killed?

That is A very bad analogy

see

Wikipedia 100 flowers campaign

link fixed

Thanks Metz. I did know that. It is not an analogy. It is a phrase that is part of the English language use of which no more suggests an affiliation to Maoism any more than 'there is nothing new under the sun'  implies an affiliation to the old testament - especially when used with pretty obviously implied inverted commas. For the record I was brought up in a Quaker-household, I don't have any guns or baseball bats and I happen to believe that life is complex and politics of any kind involves trade-offs and compromises - whether acknowledged or not. Best wishes
Steve

SteveQuilley, if you stick to these very basic principles I don't think you can go wrong:

I should also add that there is a strategic rationale for considering the OSE project from many different angles. At least as far as I can see a great deal will depend on how quickly not only the idea but the practice of open source fabrication goes viral.  As with other complex systems there are probably threshold numbers of fabricators, fabricating and purchasing communities, open-source designers etc. above which it becomes progressively easier to get projects off the ground.  If twenty universities adopted OSE as the basis for an undergraduate programme or 20 NGOs used OSE in working with disenfranchised communities in global south mega-cities or as the basis for village-level development in India perhaps...or even one nation-state supported the development of an open source university from ground-up -- it is inconceivable that the funding and co-opting of local partners for all these projects would succeed on the basis of a doctrinaire ideological commitment to a single political or economic philosophy.  Rather in the spirit of open-source itself, people will inevitably combine ideas and justifications to make projects feasible and palatable to specific local audiences and policy makers.  And yet such an enormous proliferation of working examples would clearly make all successive experiments more likely to succeed. Initiating a conversation about how internet-mediated OSE in the 21st development might be relevant to Gandhi's vision of rural development based on autonomous villages might open doors in India in a way that it might not in England or the Sudan. OSE might be a powerful tool, but only one component in any vision of society.  It is heartening that it meshes so well with Eukreign's political philosophy and vision of community. It may mesh equally well with others. Ideological pluralism will more likely lead to viral replication and draw out the greatest potential from what is clearly a unique and powerful experiment.  For my part, I certainly hope to persuade at least one university that skills in open-source fabrication might complement a more traditionally academic approach to undergraduate programmes in environment and sustainability.

Hi Steve,