I started exercising again. With the two foster care boys we had for almost six weeks we got into survival mode and dropped things that weren't essential.
This morning I moved the laptop to be in front of our elliptical and watched Marcin Jakubowski talk about Open-sourced blueprints for civilization. Open source is well known in the technology world for the creation of Linux. Thousands of software engineers around the world have worked together to create a powerful platform for computing.
Last month I wrote about Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir, which is kind of an open source approach to singing.
Marcin Jakubowski is taking this distributive collaborative approach in a different direction. He wants to make freely available the plans and instructions for building fifty key machines for civilization. His hope is that they can design basic rugged machines that can be used in third world nations to allow them to boot strap themselves. Long term Marcin would like to make the plans available on a CD. I would buy the CD.
Here is his talk:
For more information check out: Open Source Ecology.
2 comments:
I've been reading about them for a year or two, and they are really getting interesting these days.
It will be interesting to see just how far they go. A common theme in Science Fiction is some colony on another planet loses touch with Earth and regresses in their technology. Something like this would make sure it never happened.
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