OSCOMAK

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"Every truly great accomplishment
is at first impossible."
-- Chinese proverb

The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products. OSCOMAK stands for Open Source Community On Manufacturing Knowledge.

The project's short-term benefits will include:

  • technology education,
  • historical education,
  • collaboration,
  • sustainable technology development,
  • public science literacy, and
  • knowledge democratization.

The project's ultimate long-term goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the design and creation of space settlements. Three forces -- individual creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce alone. We hope to use the internet to produce an effect somewhat like that described in "The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix).

We will develop software tools to enable the creation of this knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We will also seed the repository, interact with participants, and oversee the evolution of the repository.

You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web: here. The slides for the presentation are here.

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.

OSCOMAK via the energy of the OpenVirgle Project will support this purpose: "To support a playful *learning* *community* of individuals and groups chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations which lay the groundwork for humanity's eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space (including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe)." But OSCOMAK is also intended to have on Earth benefits as well, such as self-replicating machines to bring an end to the age of scarcity and bring about post-scarcity via exponential growth.

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?

And TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year: Mining the Cognitive Surplus

So no one here should seriously suggest the absence of money or time for R&D and deployment is the problem for making either Spaceship Earth (Sustainability) or Spaceship Mars (OpenVirgle) work for everyone, even at the same time. It comes down to issues like ideology and imagination, not "resources".

Other projects similar to OSCOMAK:

OSCOMAK is also similar to the under development SKDB, an infrastructure design geared towards not only open source manufacturing knowledge, but also well-defined projects, the interface to automated (reconfigurable) machinery, and designed for people to collaborate on projects that otherwise would be socially inaccessible due to various 'scarcity-age' issues that, frankly, can be abolished.

It is expected that over time these various projects will merge or blur into a Semantic Wikipedia or a Social Semantic Desktop

But that is no reason not to get working now making free content on any of them. The textual content here is all under the same license as Wikipedia for compatibility. Other content like images or CAD files or programs may be under other free licenses.

[edit]

Interpretation

On Thursday 24 April 2008, Eric Hunting <erichunting@gmail.com> wrote:
> These are intriguing ideas. It looks like you're going one step
> beyond the concept of a Open Source Everything database as I had
> described in TMP2. I was basically concerned with the concept of
> having a formalized document structure for developing and cataloging
> 'recipes' for the independent fabrication of artifacts. But here you
> seem to be going farther by putting that kind of information into a
> very specific semantic structure that can then be reduced to machine
> control software. This parallels the vision of Jacque Fresco, which
> I've been reading about lately. Deriving from the mid-century
> expectations of Total Automation, Fresco's notion of 'cybernation'
> -the wedding of social and economic structures and global information
> gathering to Total Automation, would, of necessity, involve
> formalized semantics that can be reduce to machine code. Looks like
> all these ideas of group Open Source knowledgebases and their
> integration into specific systems may be reaching some sort of
> critical mass. Perhaps the Internet is finally coming into its own
> ultimate purpose at last.

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