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OSE in One Sentence
  • I have been reading up on OSE since I discovered it a week ago, and it is in accord with ideas I have had for a long time, but there are 49 "core values" listed on the http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/OSE_Specifications page. I think that is too complex when you are first trying to get the attention and interest of new people. So my idea is to compress as much of the key ideas into the shortest text for the purpose of getting interest. Once someone gets interested, then they can follow links and learn more details. Here is my attempt at one sentence and one paragraph, but I would like to see what other people can come up with:

    "Liberation by working up the value chain and satisfying your own needs in an efficient, low cost, ecologically sound way."

    In developed cultures most people do not satisfy basic needs of shelter, food, etc themselves. So they depend on a source of income, like a job working for someone else, to trade for those needs. This is risky (you can lose a job), and makes you dependent on those who supply the job and the various needs. It is also inefficient in that most people have overhead in the form of profit, interest, and taxes on their labor that goes to someone else. By acquiring and using productive tools to satisfy basic needs yourself, you can reduce dependency, risk, and overhead, and increase personal freedom. As you step up the value chain from buying tools, to building tools, to making the parts and materials, costs go down. A single machine run by a single person that could take care of everything is not currently possible. As a community gathers skills and tools to share and trade locally for more of their needs, the community as a whole becomes more liberated. OSE is dedicated to helping people free themselves by designing and freely sharing the plans and methods for an ecologically sound, integrated, durable, low cost set of tools that can be used on a local scale.
     
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  • Hi Daniel.

    Great idea. One of my business mentors likes to say that you should have three pitches for every project: a five-minute pitch, a one-minute pitch, and an "elevator pitch". Imagine an investor gets on the elevator with you; you have about ten seconds to explain your idea to him. Do you have something ready to say?

    I think we need to gather different one-sentence explanations of OSE and pick the best one to use in publicity materials. My submission:

    "ENABLING ANYONE TO BUILD ANYTHING"
     
  • "Equality and Freedom by making Capital ubiquitous."
     
  • Daniel, I agree with you completely, a simple one sentence idea would be quite valuable. Barring that, we could combine several into a nice limerick.


    The first one that comes to mind is:
    Open Source Ecology seeks to provide humanity with the intellectual tools necessary to obtain the independence necessary to grow and the integration required to have an impact.

    I had to restrain myself from going punctuation crazy and making it a massive run-on sentence.
     
  • I think Conor's is great. Since I can't think of anything better right now, I'll go with "Enabling anyone to build anything." :)
     
  • How about, "Giving you the tools to survive"
     
  • for a much longer version Maybe a truncated form of the following from John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids.
    "There won't always he those stores. The way I see it, we've been given a flying start in a new kind of world. We're endowed with a capital of enough of everything to begin with, but that isn't going to last forever. We couldn't eat up all the stuff that's there for the taking, not in generations-if it would keep. But it isn't going to keep. A lot of it is going to go bad pretty rapidly. And not only food. Everything is going, more slowly but quite surely, to drop to pieces. If we want fresh stuff to eat next year, we shall have to grow it ourselves; and it may seem a long way off now, but there's going to come a time when we shall have to grow everything ourselves. There'll come a time, too, when all the tractors are worn out or rusted, and there's no more gas to run them, anyway- when we'll come right down to nature and bless horses-if we've got 'em.
    "This is a pause-just a heaven-sent pause-while we get over the first shock and start to collect ourselves, but it's no more than a pause. Later we'll have to plow; still later we'll have to learn how to make plowshares; later than that we'll have to learn how to smelt the iron to make the shares. What we are on now is a road that will take us back and back and back until we can-if we can-make good all that we wear out. Not until then shall we be able to stop ourselves on the trail that's leading down to savagery. But once we can do that, then maybe we'll begin to crawl slowly up again."
    He looked round the circle to see if we were following him.
    "We can do that-if we will. The most valuable part of our flying start is knowledge. That's the short cut to save us starting where our ancestors did. We've got it all there in the books if we take the trouble to find out about it."
    The rest were looking at Coker curiously. It was the first time they had heard him in one of his oratorical moods.
    "Now," he went on, "from my reading of history, the thing you have to have to use knowledge is leisure. Where everybody has to work hard just to get a living and there is leisure to think, knowledge stagnates, and people with it. The thinking has to be done largely by people who are not directly productive-by people who appear to be living almost entirely on the work of others, but are, in fact, a long-term investment. Learning grew up in the cities, and in great institutions-it was the labor of the countryside that supported them. Similarly, we must become big enough to support at very least the leader, the teacher, and the doctor."
     

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