1. Spread local awareness of jobs in fast-growing global freelance markets for telework (50,000+ projects offered daily at http://www.freelanceq.com)

2. Set up microscholarships offers residents to update skills via free and low-cost on-demand learning and certification networks (brainbench.com etc)

3. Engaging free/affordable talent to build eGovernment solutions that remove barriers to business growth ( http://www.rewiredstate.org and openworldinstitute.org)

— Mark Frazier, Openworld.com and EntrepreneurialSchools.com

I find little to fault in this concept. Whether one is betting on collapse or simply pursuing a future with a more rational system and a higher quality of life, this presents a seemingly practical starting point for pre-existing community to pursue a shift to localized support networks. I’m pleased to see a much more pragmatic trans-community network model for sustainability here. I think there’s too often an assumption of some sort of absolute self-sufficiency on an unrealistically small scale -something that has probably never existed in human history. Here we see a much more realistic model of civilization evolving out of Industrial Age hierarchies into flat adaptable networks. I see a lot of parallels here to P.M.’s suggestions on the interrelationships between ‘Bolo’ communities. However, it seems to assume a pre-existing coherence of local community that may not exist everywhere or be respected by larger regional and state government -especially in the US. We live in an age where community is a lost and actively suppressed skill set for many industrial societies, only now being rediscovered on-line. Some transitional activities may be needed to reintroduce the societies in existing towns and cities to community and its virtues. It may also assume an urban environment or a structure of small towns that is also rather rare in the US. (what I sometimes call Eastern railroad towns; old -sometimes colonial era- towns relatively close to large cities that still have a physical center associated with proximity to a railway station that were earlier era farm nexuses and mill towns and then, before WWII and automotive ubiquity, hosted the first wave of upper-middle-class suburbanization based on rail commuting. A form typified by towns like Morristown, Hackettstown, Boonton, Madison/Chatham, and Chester in NJ. These forms tended not to survive the automobile, either dying out or bloating into amorphous semi-urban lower-class suburbs -suburban slums- as a dumping ground for ejected urban poor from gentrified regions of the cities)

Concerning the pace of progress in independent industry he suggests, one should bear in mind that there is an assumption here of a compulsion to accelerate this development based on the perceived threat of imminent collapse. (of course, how many people actually perceive this threat and to what degree is debatable. This form of collapse has been predicted since the 1950s and Capital has proven very skillful at keeping the dinosaur on artificial life-support) This would induce not only an acceleration in the pace of tool development but a complimentary redesign of artifacts to accommodate smaller scale tools. Form and function are not independent of production technique. The technology of production is reflected in the design of artifacts independently of function. (the difference in look between electronics of the early 20th century and today has more to it than just a decline in the popularity of Art Deco) But there’s almost always more than one way to do anything. Most of our contemporary artifacts could be accommodated easily with smaller scales of production with lower-overhead technique simply by redesigning them to suit. It’s not automatically true that centralized mass production is the most practical for any artifact, especially in the context of expanding labor and transportation costs. That presumption has just not been tested very often in the past -most often by entrepreneurs seeking ways to crack market hegemonies whose standard production models they can’t afford to buy into. For instance, why is a refrigerator a single appliance and not a kit of parts? In fact, some recent designer refrigerators are kit of parts systems intended to allow one to convert any kitchen cabinets and drawers into functional refrigerators -a tactic popular with some of the New Modernist home designers and which, oddly enough, produces more energy-efficient performance because the kit-of-parts systems have to use more advanced technology to function at all, not just compete with the rest of the normal refrigerator market. Flat Pak furniture is another great example that. It didn’t just make furniture simpler to make and cheaper to ship, it made it possible to pass-off the labor cost of end-production assembly to the consumer. That made IKEA. Many such ‘rethinks’ are possible. Few of them have been explored.

In my documentation of the Open Source Everything project under TMP2, one of the example projects I listed is an idea called Enclosure Profiles. This would be a collection of open source aluminum extrusion designs that are intended to be used as quick-assembled pre-finished enclosures for electronics and machines. You just extrude these tubes in various dimensions like stock lumber or extrude-on-demand. Grooves on their inside hold circuit boards and components and flat cover plates of most any material host bezels for controls/displays, sockets, etc. Some extrusions would come in variants of the same base dimensions. They might have protrusions for legs and fins for heat sinks. Segments of these would be used in combination stacks. You make a case on demand by cutting the tubes to length, mill the ends clean, and then cut your flat stock covers to suit and the whole thing is held together with set-screws. The end result is just like the famous Tivoli Model One radio -a luxury product by current standards. And it’s easy to recycle or reuse. This is actually how a lot of industrial electronics is currently made -they often don’t have production volumes to justify fancy molded ABS cases but can often afford a custom extrusion. Most electronics appliances that exist today could be accommodated by these kinds of enclosures. Very often the elaborateness of production of Industrial Age goods is merely for style or a deliberate attempt to suppress start-up market competition by conning the market into setting the bar on ‘quality’ pointlessly high. Statistics like clock speed, torque, horse-power, 0-60mph ratings, and so on are very often just another form of tail fins and chrome. There’s a stand-up comedian who had this routine where he described how, when he was a child, his mother would constantly fiddle with dashboard controls whenever she was driving him anywhere so that it made driving seem so ridiculously complicated that when he got old enough to drive himself he had no interest in it because it seemed like too much work. This is the psychology behind a lot of product design. This is why houses still use light stud framing, cars have pressed steel welded unibody construction, and personal computers still need operating systems.

One other thing that I see missing from Robb’s outline that would have fit in well is “waste equals food”.

http://www.mbdc.com/c2c_ee.htm

In peer fabrication networks, this is key (even in the earliest academic fabrication networks, like at MIT, this emerged out of necessity).