A collaboration of Do-It-Yourself engineers and farmers is working to design a set of 50 different low-cost industrial machines that has the potential to support a sustainable manufacturing and farming communicty of about 200 people.
The group is called Open Source Ecology, and designs for the machines are offered free on the web. So far the group has designed about eight of the machines in the so-called Global Village Construction Set, including one that can clear land, pulverize earth, and then use the material to make bricks.
Marcin Jakubowski--a physicist by training--is the mastermind behind the project, and recently gave a TED Fellow presentation on the work.
The group's vision statement describes "a world where every community has access to an open source Fab[rication] Lab which can produce all the things that one currently finds at a Walmart cost-effectively, quickly, on demand from local resources."
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