The Global Village Construction Set – Open-Source Blueprints for Civilization

Our goal is a repository of published designs so clear – so complete – that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit.

It’s hard not to find the above concept compelling. Even with the internet, the idea that the essential knowledge of several thousand years of human progress can be collected, collated and distributed so completely as to be considered “a civilization starter kit” is amazing. This is the goal of Marcin Jakubowski and Open Source Ecology.

OSE is a maker-like collective of engineers, farmers, and various other interested parties whose goal is to distill the technological necessities of agriculture, building, and manufacturing down to the smallest point possible; ideally allowing a small group of people with access to nothing but basic tools and scrap materials to build or rebuild a sustainable and viable, modern civilization from scratch. It’s incredibly ambitious, unwaveringly idealistic, and truly has the potential to unleash a massive amount of change across whole swaths of the planet.