February 21, 2012
from PreventDisease Website

Marcin Jakubowski, a young technologist thought about which 50 machines would be needed for life to exist such as tractors, bread ovens, circuit makers, and many others that anybody can build through open source blueprints.
 

He wanted to create open source designs for the most crucial machines "Do It Yourself" (DIY) versions that anyone can build and maintain at a low cost. The goal of the Global Village Construction is to create a repository of designs so complete that a single DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit.

Jakubowski stated:

"If we can lower the barriers to farming, building, manufacturing... then we can unleash massive amounts of human potential - that's not just in the developing world"

"From what I've seen, this is only the beginning. If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant - a greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally sound supply chains and a newly relevant DIY maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity."

Declaring that,

"We can lead self-sustaining lives without sacrificing our standard of living,"

...Marcin Jakubowski believes that only by opening the means of production can we achieve abundance for all. Though he has a Ph.D. in fusion physics, he became dissatisfied with its remoteness, and turned back to the earth as a farmer and social innovator.

He is the founder of Open Source Ecology, which is creating the Global Village Construction Set, the blueprints for simple fabrication of everything needed to start a self-sustaining village.

At Factor e Farm in rural Missouri, he's been successfully putting those ideas to the test.

Taken from the Open Source Ecology's website:

Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY (do it yourself) fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

 

The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.