Franz Nahrada reports on the Missouri-based Open Source Ecology initiative of Marcin Jakubowski:

“Marcins goal is to link the two issues of ecological farming and open source in a new and radical way. He plans to establish working prototypes of locally operating production units, based on a kind of apprenticeship model that empowers people with little or no experience in farming, crafts and other essential everyday skills to run through a process of hands-on experience – meaning they can then decide to run their own local businesses and experience centers.

What makes this approach special, is the fact that Marcin has decided to share each and every bit of knowledge, but more than that: develop a complete “pattern language” of interacting tools and devices that would allow to build on maximum synergies of an integrated production
system, which can be easily understood, described and shared – everywhere in the world. He wants to be at the core of a community with practically no limits, do practise, research and development at once, create livelyhood and education at once, allowing us to limit monetary pressure of living costs etc.

In a way the OSE (open Source Ecology) model fuctions in a similar way like Arcosanti, where you have to buy your way in not only through the willingness to do also a good deal of menial work under supervision, but also by initially paying a tutoring fee to show that you are serious. This allows a procedure which creates more and more self-supporting elements of a subsistence lifestyle that can expand in quality and quantity as soon as the global effect of collaboration and shared development takes off. It is not as friendly as Frithjof Bergmanns approach of promising people a way that they can do “what the really, really want” , but it is also not as
autocratic as Matthias von Hermannis stunning “village in Work” in Hohenroda, Eastern Germany. And it shares the same goal: providing a way out of the deep crisis that shatters peoples existence in so many places.

Marcin agreed to share the fate of Open Source Ecology with a trustworthy group – OSPDC Open Source Product Development Consortium.