I have been holding on to this nugget for a few weeks now. Jon Thompson of Thompson Young Design turned me on to this TED Talk after he sat in on one of our early design reviews. Jon has been a great critic in the past three reviews he has been involved in, and I think the concept of Open Source Ecology is something we should strive for this semester. Marcin Jakubowski describes in the video below his concept of open-sourcing a set of blueprints for 50 farming tools that can be built cheaply from scratch. He call’s it a “civilization starter kit.” Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, Marcin is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. It has always been the intention of Studio V to Create a set of GAP Shed construction documents that Harry Crissy, our partner with the CIECD, could distribute to small scale upstart farmers in South Carolina aiding them in making their own shed to achieve GAP certification… But why stop there? It seems that our GAP Shed could be a valuable resource in making a global difference, just like Marcin’s Global Village Construction Set.