A review of the issues involved to physically produce open designs, by Kevin Carson.

These are excerpts from Chapter Fifteen on his book on Organizational Theory.

Go there for the sourcing of the citations.

Kevin Carson:

Peer production’s transferability to the world of physical production is also a matter of great interest. Open source hardware refers, at the most basic level, to the development and improvement of designs for physical goods on an open-source basis, with no particular mode of physical production being specified. In Stallman’s terms, open source hardware means the design is free as in free speech, not free beer. Although the manufacturer is not hindered by patents on the design, he must still bear the costs of physical production.

As Edy Ferreira described it,

– any piece of hardware whose manufacturing information is distributed using a license that provides specific rights to users without the need to pay royalties to the original developers. These rights include freedom to use the hardware for any purpose, freedom to study and modify the design, and freedom to redistribute copies of either the original or modified manufacturing information. This definition fits what McNamara calls “Open Implementation” hardware, described as “hardware for which the complete bill of materials necessary to construct the device is available.” In the case of open source software (OSS), the information that is shared is software code. In OSH, what is shared is hardware manufacturing information, such as hardware definition language descriptions, and the diagrams and schematics that describe a piece of hardware.

At the simplest level, a peer network may design a product and make it publicly available on an open-source basis; it may be subsequently built by any and all individuals or groups who have the necessary production machinery, without coordinating their efforts with the original designer(s).

For example, Vinay Gupta has proposed a large-scale library of open-source hardware designs as an aid to international development:

– An open library of designs for refrigerators, lighting, heating, cooling, motors, and other systems will encourage manufacturers, particularly in the developing world, to leapfrog directly to the most sustainable technologies, which are much cheaper in the long run. Manufacturers will be encouraged to use the efficient designs because they are free, while inefficient designs still have to be paid for. The library could also include green chemistry and biological solutions to industry challenges, for example enzymatic reactions that could be used in place of energy, and chemical-intensive processes or nontoxic paint pigments for cars and buildings. This library should be free of all intellectual property restrictions and open for use by any manufacturer, in any nation, without charge.

One of the most ambitious attempts at such an open design project for village development is Open Source Ecology, with their experimental facility Factor E Farm.

– We are actively involved in demonstrating the world’s first replicable, post-industrial village. We take the word replicable very seriously – we do not mean a top-down funded showcase – but one that is based on ICT, open design, and digital fabrication – in harmony with its natural life support systems. As such, this community is designed to be self-reliant, highly productive, and suffciently transparent so that it can truly be replicated in many contexts – whether it’s parts of the package or the whole. Our next frontier will be education to train Village Builders – just as we’re learning how to do it from the ground up.

Karim Lakhani describes this general phenomenon, the separation of open-source design from an independent production stage, as “communities driving manufacturers out of the design space”:

– The rise of open source software is a clear example of users innovating and developing products that can out compete traditional manufacturers. But this effect is not just limited to software. In physical products ranging from snowboards to electronic microscopes, users have been shown to be the dominant source of functionally novel innovations. Communities can supercharge this innovation mechanism. And may ultimately force companies out of the product design space. Just think about it – for any given company – there are more people outside the company that have smarts about a particular technology or a particular use situation then all the R&D engineers combined. So a community around a product category may have more smart people working on the product then the firm it self. So in the end manufacturers may end up doing what they are supposed to – manufacture – and the design activity might move to the edge and into the community.

A more complex scenario involves the coordination of an open source design stage with the production process within a large peer organization, with the separate stages of physical production distributed and coordinated by the same peer network that created the design.

Dave Pollard provides one example:

– Suppose I want a chair that has the attributes of an Aeron without the $1800 price tag, or one with some additional attribute (e.g. a laptop holder) the brand name doesn’t offer? I could go online to a Peer Production site and create an instant market, contributing the specifications, a bunch of technical links available online about just what makes this chair so special, and, perhaps a maximum price I would be willing to pay. People with some of the expertise needed to produce it could indicate their capabilities and self-organize into a consortium that would keep talking and refining until they could meet this price — and, if not, they might counter-offer something close. Other potential buyers could chime in, offering more or less than my suggested price. Based on the number of ‘orders’ at each price, the Peer Production group could then accept orders and start manufacturing…. As [Erick] Schonfeld suggests, the intellectual capital associated with this instant market becomes part of the market archive, available for everyone to see, stripping this intellectual capital cost, and the executive salaries, dividends and corporate overhead out of the cost of this and other similar product requests and fulfillments, so that all that is left is the lowest possible cost of material, labour and delivery to fill the order. And the order is exactly what the customer wants, not the closest thing in the mass-producer’s warehouse.

In either case, whether physical production is coordinated with the design stage or organized independently, it may take place in comparatively heavily capitalized factories (likely owned by workers’ cooperatives in a post-capitalist society), by outsourcing the production of specific parts to more modestly capitalized small shops, or to even cheaper emerging small-scale production facilities like the multimachine, or to a combination of some or all of the above.

Clearly, as we saw in Chapter Fourteen, the emergence of cheap desktop technology for custom machining parts in small batches will greatly lower the overall capital outlays needed for networked physical production of light and medium consumer goods.

The availability of modestly priced desktop manufacturing technology (coupled with the promise of LETS systems, mutual banks, and other forms of alternative credit) has led to a considerable shift in opinion in the peer-to-peer community, as evidenced by Michel Bauwens:

– I used to think that the model of peer production would essentially emerge in the immaterial sphere, and in those cases where the design phase could be split from the capital-intensive physical production sphere. Von Hippel’s work is very convincing in showing how widespread the model of built-only capitalism already is. However, as I become more familiar with the advances in Rapid Manucturing and Desktop Manufacturing , I’m becoming increasingly convinced of the strong trend towards the distribution of physical capital. If we couple this with the trend towards the direct social production of money (i.e. the distribution of financial capital, and the distribution of energy ; and how the two latter trends are interrelated, then I believe we have very strong grounds to see a strong expansion of p2p-based modalities in the physical sphere.

Kevin Kelly argues that the actual costs of physical production are only a minor part of the cost of manufactured goods.

….material industries are finding that the costs of duplication near zero, so they too will behave like digital copies. Maps just crossed that threshold. Genetics is about to. Gadgets and small appliances (like cell phones) are sliding that way. Pharmaceuticals are already there, but they don’t want anyone to know. It costs nothing to make a pill.

This is essentially a restatement, from a less gushy point of view, of Tom Peter’s observation that the bulk of product price is “ephemera” or “intellect,” rather than nuts and bolts and labor. Or as I put it in Chapters Ten and Eleven, much less nicely, most of the price of manufactured goods is embedded rent on artificial property rights like “intellectual property.” When physical manufacturing is stripped of the cost of proprietary design and technology, and the consumer-driven, pull model of distribution strips away most of the immense marketing cost, we will find that the portion of price formerly made up of such intangibles will implode, and the remaining price based on actual production cost will be an order of magnitude lower. In a world where commodity price consists entirely of labor and material costs, without rents to useless eaters with grants of privilege from the state, we can likely maintain the existing standard of living with an average work week of one or two days. The other three or four days of work, as I argued in Chapter Twelve, go to fixing Bastiat’s broken windows, digging holes and filling them back in, and supporting idle rentiers.

In any case, there is a common thread running through all the different theories of the interface between peer production and the material world: as technology for physical production becomes feasible on increasingly smaller scales and at less cost, or the lower the transaction costs of aggregating small units of capital into large ones, the less disconnect there will be between peer production and physical production.

* P2P can arise not only in the immaterial sphere of intellectual and software production, but wherever there is access to distributed technology: spare computing cycles, distributed telecommunications and any kind of viral communicator meshwork.

* P2P can arise wherever other forms of distributed fixed capital is available: such is the case for carpooling, which is the second mode of transportation in the U.S…..

* P2P can arise wherever financial capital can be distributed. Initiatives such as the ZOPA bank point in that direction. Cooperative purchase and use of large capital goods are a possibility….

Franz Nahrada writes in the same vein, affirming Bauwens’ distinction between cooperatives and peer production, but nevertheless arguing that

– at the same time it is imagineable that cooperatives work out arrangements that lead to a circulation of material goods and therefore enable mutual supply in a circular process, to some degree eliminating the need for monetary income. This economy would work in a biomorphical way, the surplus on one point being the input on others…. Once we really get a grasp of really efficient home production, the rules of the games will change drastically. In this respect I share Stefan Mertens optimism, although I hate to bring it all down to the notion or image of the fabber. There are very interesting intermediate schemes which work at community level – technologically possible, but neglected from the point of view of capitalist production.

In effect, the distinction between Stallman’s “free speech” and “free beer” is eroding. To the extent that embedded rents on “intellectual property” are a significant portion of commodity prices, “free speech” (in the sense of the free use of ideas) will make our “beer” (i.e., the price of manufactured commodities) at least a lot cheaper.”