The basic premise, distilled through a lot of experimentation, is that a 700-square-foot starter home, including an aquaponic greenhouse, could be constructed in five days for less than $25,000 in materials. While that budget puts the actual construction in the hands of the owner, the Open Building Institute has plans to train builders to organize apprentice laborers to handle the modular, rapid-build projects. It’s a good, old-fashioned, community-based barn-raising for the 21st century that could even be staged as a workshop. OBI’s hope is that this “turnkey service” will add a mere $10,000 to the price tag of the starter home.

Eco options included in the OBI design package are solar panels with a grid-tie inverter, LED lights, biofiber insulation, rainwater collection systems, and much more.

Jakubowski (founder of Open Source Ecology) and Mota (founder of the Open Building Institute) have recruited a group of world-renowned advisors and contributors from all over the world to help things along. Still, they are hoping to raise $80,000 via Kickstarter to pull the toolkit together.

The goals of off-grid, closed-loop, self-sufficient living is similar to the RegenVillages project, which has gotten a lot of press recently including here on Shareable, but is fully committed to making all technology open source.

Cross-posted from Shareable.net

The post Open-Source Toolkit Aims to Make Home Building Cheap, Easy and Green appeared first on P2P Foundation.

That’s why it’s heartening to see OpenMedia, a digital rights organization based in Vancouver, publish its guiding principles. Among other things, the piece outlines why the organization chose crowdsourcing as its primary digital organizing strategy:

Our processes and methods of crowdsourcing are based on our belief that the best ideas come those most impacted by our work, and that the challenges we face are really the result of a democratic deficit in governing institutions. In short, we believe that if citizens rather than lobbyists are in the driver’s seat of government decisions we’ll have better outcomes to the most pressing issues of our time including digital rights.

So what is crowdsourcing? We’ve all heard it in the context of fundraising platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but it refers to the general process of obtaining services, content, resources, and/or ideas by soliciting contributions from a large group of people. While this concept has been around since the dawn of civilization, the internet has revolutionized it, and empowered all kinds of new participatory projects.

OpenMedia relies on crowdsourced civic engagement to tackle issues of access, privacy, net neutrality, and other key digital issues. It views its community as busy and intelligent, and emphasizes the importance of meeting people where they are at. Since its campaigns are so collaborative, it also makes sure to share ownership and decision-making in the organization with its community as much as possible.

What does this look like in practice? OpenMedia maintains an ongoing dialogue with its community on its website by asking for input on specific issues. It also has open chat channels to stay connected on a continual basis. The organization often embeds comments received by its community in its blog posts and reads them out loud in face-to-face meetings with policymakers.

The group’s report is an honest reflection of its methods. By publishing it, OpenMedia is further acting upon its principles, which is itself an extension of how it wants the internet to operate — open, participatory, and collaborative. In other words, it’s using the strength of the internet to save the internet.

Top photo: OpenMedia / CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 CA

Cross-posted from Shareable

The post How OpenMedia is Crowdsourcing its Activism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“If Oculus turned into a billion-dollar company on their own by selling hardware, publishing software, and forging strategic alliances with other companies, I don’t think I would have given my Kickstarter money a second thought. But that’s not what happened to Oculus. Instead, the money given by me and my fellow Kickstarter backers served as bait for venture capitalists, who invested three rounds of $29 million and $85 million apiece, leading to an eventual sale to Facebook for $2 billion. “

There is a standing presumption when one backs a Kickstarter project: you may lose your money. But there’s a new—or at least now proven—angle to consider, in light of Facebook’s acquisition of the virtual reality company Oculus: people may use your money to make a lot more money without ever properly starting a successful company in the first place.

I have a lot of emotion tied up in Oculus, I’ll admit. As one of the first 9,500 backers of the original Kickstarter—not to mention the backer of the very first successful Kickstarter ever—I put up $300 of my own money to have access to one of the first development kits. I don’t feel ripped off by that transaction, in and of itself. I’ve written publicly in various outlets about my ardor for the Rift and virtual reality. And I remain convinced that VR is going to be a huge new format for media and interactivity in general.

If anything, I am frustrated with a narrative, not the mechanism of a Kickstarter campaign. It’s implicit when you back a product-based project that they will turn into a profitable company, if their idea and execution are solid. If Oculus turned into a billion-dollar company on their own by selling hardware, publishing software, and forging strategic alliances with other companies, I don’t think I would have given my Kickstarter money a second thought.

But that’s not what happened to Oculus. Instead, the money given by me and my fellow Kickstarter backers served as bait for venture capitalists, who invested three rounds of $29 million and $85 million apiece, leading to an eventual sale to Facebook for $2 billion. It’s safe to presume that the VC involvement accelerated a sale to Facebook; surely Oculus could have gotten a product to market for $100 million, but no sane VC is going to turn down a 20x return on their investment.

The fact that everyone involved made a rational choice to sell out isn’t what I find frustrating, I don’t think. (I don’t even particularly care that Oculus sold to Facebook and not, say, Microsoft. Ultimately a sale is a sale, even if Facebook is the worst possible partner for Oculus of any of the large technology companies.) It’s that I, as a consumer, bought into the narrative that underpins almost every Kickstarter project: that without my contribution, something novel would not exist. And while that remains true—and is a reason that Kickstarter’s owners continue to underline that their goal is to fund “creators” and not “products”—Oculus’ sale to Facebook also highlights the disparity inherent in the current capitalist and investment structure, where small investors are excluded from returns by regulation, but investors with more capital can quickly extract more capital by pushing a quick expansion into untapped markets, even without proving that those markets actually, truly exist.

I mean, I don’t even get to claim my contribution to Oculus on my taxes as a charitable deduction.

At a certain practical layer, caveat emptor still applies. I spent my $300 with no promise of equity in Oculus, only the (not legally binding) promise that I’d get a development kit with which to screw around. Even if they turned my $300 into what was eventually a roughly $250,000 return (by my quick estimation*) they still delivered what they initially promised, which was a fully functional dev kit. (Pity those who donated cash at levels that returned no reward but a “Thanks!” Many backers on Kickstarter are not pleased, to say the least.)

But I still feel as if circumstance removed me from an opportunity to turn my speculative belief in the future of VR and Oculus’s role in it into real money. Their story—a genuine garage hacker does what billion-dollar companies would not—didn’t imply its eventual end: that the barefoot, teenage founder would sell his startup to a giant technology corporation before they sold a single retail product. No injury, perhaps, but plenty of insult.

Until the regulations change to allow venture investments of any amount—something Title III of the JOBS Act, when implemented, will put into place; opposed to the current system, which limits equity-based crowd funding to “Accredited Investors,” or people who make over $200k a year—I won’t be backing any more Kickstarter or crowd-funded projects. It’s not that the risk is too great; it’s that the potential reward is too little.

* People more intelligent than me, from the European equity-based crowd funding company Seedrs, calculated something more like $20,000 on a $300 investment after dilution from the VC rounds.

The post When Kickstarter Becomes a Charity For Venture Capitalists appeared first on P2P Foundation.