After a weekend workshop to further explore the ideas in his book From Exchange to Contributions , Christian Siefkes proposes a next step, i.e. the elaboration of a Universal Production Set.

Here’s the announcement, but go to the original Keimform blog entry for the full details and links.

Christian Siefkes:

“A weekend workshop on peer production and the peer economy took place during the last weekend (29-31 August) in the nice little town of Hiddinghausen in the German Ruhr Area. A detailed three-part report on the workshop, which was a fully self-organized event with about 30 participants, is available in German. The first part of the workshop was dedicated to my proposal of how to generalize the principles and practices of commons-based peer production into a full-fledged peer economy; in the second part we discussed ways of growing the range and versatility of peer production that are possible here and now.

For this English-language documentation of the event, I’ll focus on this second part.

As a first initiative for facilitating the peer production of physical goods and services, I proposed to set up a “Universal Production Set” (UPset): an integrated collection of free or open design. The goal of the UPset would be to provide designs, blueprints, and other production know-how for all areas of life, but with a a special focus on things that are essential for people to live a good life.

I envision the UPset as an “integrated meta-project.” It shouldn’t merely be a repository listing free design projects (a freshmeat-for-design) nor a hosting platform which allows running many projects but doesn’t provide any integration point or general overview for them (a SourceForge-for-design). And it shouldn’t try to replace existing free design projects (such as Open Source Ecology, Appropedia, Instructables, and open source hardware projects such as Arduino and Openmoko), but rather integrate (through linking) relevant projects and solutions in order to provide a comprehensive overview that allows people finding and sharing free designs for all areas of life.

Technically, the UPset can be realized quite simply by setting up a wiki where people can collectively share and edit designs and instructions as well as links to relevant projects. In the long run, a more complex solution may become necessary, but using a wiki would be a simple way to start. I’ve already reserve the domain up-set.org where the project could reside.”