[ox-en] Eric Hunting comments on Open Hardware Roadmap in [p2p-research]
- From: "Franz Nahrada" <f.nahrada reflex.at>
- Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:31:28 +0200
an interesting comment.
F.
----- Ursprüngliche Nachricht -----
I'm not familiar with this specific project -it looks very new- but it's
clearly one of the many recently created attempts at an open hardware
repository or catalog akin to the Sourceforge site for open software.
There are a number of groups and projects working on this, though they're
in a competitive mode and don't collaborate. A lot of people are cluing
into the need for this but they are still rather up in the air about how
to go about it in any concerted way. None of them are in all that much
better shape than the Open Hardware Roadmap. These are similar to my own
proposed Open Source Everything project (one of, if not the, first of
these devised about 5 years ago and focused on creating and cataloging
open equivalents to all the domestic technologies on which a western
standard of living is based and devised as a Post-Industrial cultural
cultivation program under the Foundation phase of The Millennial Project)
and the later Toolbook project. (intended to use an independent 'Maker'
publishing cooperative -an open O'Reilly, so to speak- as the basis of a
community research cooperative seeking to concatenate, consolidate, and
catalog the full body of industrial knowledge in accessible open source
form, self-supported by its for-profit media output) Most of these open
hardware catalog projects have failed to achieve any sort of critical mass
due to a lack of concerted recognition by the still rather loose and
disorganized Maker/Open Manufacturing/Fab Lab movements (who, frankly,
aren't even all that well aware of each other!), a lack of definitive
architecture for the structuring and organizing of highly diverse
technology information/knowledge/recipes, and because of a common lack of
recognition of the actual scale of the concept. (Toolbook, for instance,
assumes this to be a 'community' venture to the point where it must find a
way for its participants to continuously earn a living at it as a career
-and to this end it relates to my proposed Vajra project -an advanced Fab
Lab centered Maker Incubator/Ashram community that would provide a place
to live with a cultural and aesthetic focus on this hugh task. I seem to
be the only one so far -except maybe Cory Doctorow with his 'outquisition'
concept- who's recognized the scale of this idea is such that it,
literally, takes a village -or a monastery of sorts)
As the 'skeleton' for this Open Hardware Roadmap shows, they have the
right idea and sentiment but don't come anywhere close to being
comprehensive in the necessary breakdown of industrial technologies and
have no templates for the standardization of information they intend to
catalog. And that's understandable given the origin of this particular
project with the MITRE group and because, really, even our best engineers
today are not all that 'industrially literate' because of the compulsive
specialization and compartmentalization of technical knowledge and have
never given this all that much thought before. Every area of science,
technology and industry has cultivated its own ways of communication, it's
own language and idioms, as a means of securing market propriety and
professional class specialness -which goes right back to when scientists
and guild craftsmen used to write everything in secret codes out of fear
of competition. I was just reading today, catching up with Michel's recent
discussions on a P2P Urbanism Atlas, how a Cold War is emerging between
New Urbanists and Landscape Urbanists trying to usurp the academic and
political power of the New Urbanism movement by inventing a new more
flowery and sophisticated design language with which to impress the
politicians, bureaucrats, executives, and upper-echelon of academics with.
(and who, really, can't get far past the relative slickness of graphics
anyway...)
We live in a techno-industrial Tower of Babel and the challenge comes down
to defining standardized media forms and information architectures that
can bridge the barriers between disciplines and ultimately between human
and machine knowledge representation. We need a new common applied
knowledge media model. This is pretty much how I define 'singularity'.
Crack that nut and you're home free. But it's a tough one that gets into
strange and unexpected areas, like the history of comic books and how they
relate to the evolution of technical illustration as applied in the
development of DIY literature. (there's a hell of a lot going on in a Lego
instruction manual...) I've adopted this notion of the 'recipe' from
culinary arts as a basic analogy for spacio-temporal representation of all
technical/industrial process and have been toying with a concept of
digital Taylorization (after the infamous Frederick Winslow Taylor)
through the simulation-based temporal-topological modeling of systems and
'recipes' producing high-level 'Taylor Programs' that are then interpreted
to the bytecode programs of specific multi-machine shop networks. It's a
very rough notion for how we might some day bridge that human/machine
knowledge gap while, in the process, bringing the languages of science,
technology, industry, and craft down to a universal applied knowledge
standard that can cultivate universal technical and industrial literacy.
But, alas, I think we have a very long way to go with this. There's still
not a good comprehension of the nature of the problem/task. And many of
the key forms of media and art important to this -literary illustration
for instance- are now largely dead art forms waiting to be rediscovered.
People still think the Maker and Open Manufacturing movements are about
making stuff. It's really about re-appropriating and liberating knowledge
and the invention of new media forms to do that with. Things like the Make
blog and Instructibles are our most sophisticated open laboratories right
now for this -and they don't even know that's what they are.
Eric Hunting
erichunting(AT)gmail.com
On Sep 26, 2010, at 11:17 AM, Michel Bauwens wrote:
I've cc"ed eric hunting who may know more,
Michel
On Sat, Sep 25, 2010 at 8:55 PM, Franz Nahrada <f.nahrada reflex.at>
wrote:
I saw this website and I think its a great idea but still in its very
infancy. (a wiki born a few days ago)
http://www.ohroadmap.org/
The Table Of Contents sounds ambitious:
http://www.ohroadmap.org/table-of-contents
but all the respective pages are empty.
Jim Barkley and Sam Sayer, both of The MITRE Corporation, own this wiki
domain.
MITRE is described here: http://www.mitre.org/about/index.html
An impressive and very resourceful organisation with a heavy bias into
military technology ;-)
anybody ready to challenge them about the whereabouts?
here is the respective discussion that led me to the site.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/da4088efbb12cd25?pli=1
IMHO we do indeed need a technology roadmap (including a huge amount of
technologies to be redone in a better way) and I am advocating this from
the beginning of oekonux, but we are facing the problem that we either
have resources - or credibility and moral influence. Almost never these
two factors converge. Maybe this will change soon.
Franz Nahrada
GIVE - Globally Integrated Village Environment.
Vienna
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