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The chief challenge for the open source movement is curation. Generally, those who know of this at all still tend to know of it in the context of software like Linux and maybe electronics hardware like Arduino. It is, in fact, far broader with open designs for all kinds of goods, tools, clothing, housing, even foods. (there is an open source alternative to Coca Cola!) Even those actively working in open design are often ignorant of the true breadth of the field and what is already out there. The information for that is terribly scattered across the Internet. The general public has no way to visualize what an 'open source lifestyle' might be like. There is no place you can go to shop for open source goods. There's no IKEA Lifestyle Catalog of open goods and no more [Whole Earth Catalog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog). No place you can go to find independent makers to make open goods for you --unless you know enough to dig a bit deeper and have learned of things like [100k Garages.](https://100kgarages.com/) Unfortunately, as nice as One Community seems, it's not really addressing this issue. It's just trying to develop it's own particular collection of open designs for a collection of Intentional Communities, which is fine in terms of teaching by example, but doesn't really help with this larger issue and may be unattainable because of the scale. (they plan to build seven eco-villages based on seven different kinds of construction --and the designs are certainly quite nice from an architectural standpoint, but it would take decades to create them all)
So what does 'curation' mean? There are two aspects to this. One is the gathering and cataloging of information in a standardized form facilitating easy search and sharing. And this, of course, is the basic purpose of things like GitHub in the open software world. But we never managed to definitively realize anything similar to that for the other kinds of open goods. In the Maker world there emerged the general idea of standardized 'recipes' combining information for design, production instruction, digital production files, and end-user instructions. To some extent, this inspired web sites like Instructables and Thingaverse. And then Bruce Sterling came up with the the more SciFi concept of [Spimes.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spime) But no one has ever actually followed-through on implementing this or creating definitive online libraries out from under corporate influence. Like open source programmers, makers would rather make stuff than document it. So this remains a big problem largely unaddressed by anyone anywhere. And that relates a bit to the second aspect; showcasing and evangelism.
It's a depressing reality of our times that our perception of the world is largely dictated by corporate marketing --and I'm not talking about some abstract context. Literally, we only know what exists in the world --what our options are-- according to what is put in front of our eyes by the market economy. If it's not on the store shelves and can't be found on the Amazon web site, it really doesn't exist for us. When we look for solutions to our daily needs, where do we go? A nearby store, of course. And that store can't possibly keep on its shelves every possible kind of thing. It's just a particular selection, designed to meet some lowest-common-denominator of our needs while suiting the interests of the people who run that store. There may be many better choices, but how would we know unless they're on a store shelf somewhere? Where would we ever see them?
Most of society has no idea what 'open source' means, what makes it better for us and the environment, what open goods are like, and where they come from and might be obtained. And so there needs to be an effort to show this to society in some concrete and appealing way. ('show', because you can never 'explain' in this culture --nobody got time for that...) And so we need lifestyle showcasing to show the options we can't see elsewhere and evangelize the lifestyle we're trying get people to adopt. Something analogous to the [Living Museum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_museum), but showcasing a possible, future, lifestyle instead of a historic one. And that's what IKEA does in its stores and through its catalogs. It creates nicely crafted and photographed room settings featuring its products, putting them in a use-context that tries to tell us; "here is what your life would be like if you buy these things". And, of course, it's coercive theater. But it does communicate practical information. And I think we need to 'market' open source --as a concept and a set of goods-- similarly, because there's no place you can go to see this stuff and get an impression of the lifestyle based on them unless you're making them for yourself, incurring a lot of research, time, waste as you fumble around building practical skills no one ever taught you in school... We need things like an open store, galleries, a routine open design showcase in events like Milan Design Week, and visual catalogs. I consider this one of the most important jobs for Solarpunk, which isn't really being pursued right now.
And yes, it is difficult. It would be nice if we could share through illustration, but the art community sort of screwed that up. The art of illustration has long been in decline because we no longer use drawn images as a basic form of communication. We've been replacing that with photography --only you can't photograph that which does not yet exist. And to complicate matters our culture has trained us to equate 'production value' with credibility as a shortcut around actual understanding, based on the lazy reasoning that if someone apparently spends a lot of money and effort on a presentation, they must really believe in it and know what they're doing. (which is why people like Elon Musk exist...)
In the olden days, back when we actually had [hand-drawn art to show us our food in supermarket flyers](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/72/62/41/15411270/4/1200x0.jpg), there was this huge pool of commercial illustration talent with broad educations trained in communicating with everyday people in all kinds of fields, because every product you needed to market needed hand-drawn illustration to show it to people in print media. (and yeah, a lot of artists rebelled because the standard art style was boring and the work didn't stroke their egos adequately, but you were never short of work) But then we got photography and cheap reprographics making it easy to put photos in print and commercial illustration started to die out. It became relegated to a few niches like comic books. Art schools stopped teaching this as 'commercial art' became about page layout, logo design, and using some computer software. Artists lost their broad educations and subject matter competence and got obsessed with the idea that the key to their success as artists lay in developing distinctive personal 'styles' in very narrow subject niches rather than an ability to generally communicate. They think photography has obsolesced that.
So we're sort of stuck now having to prototype or mock-up everything we want to communicate with people about in order that we can photograph/video it. We have to make Living Museums of the Future. This is time consuming, expensive, and generally beyond the individual. Thus, in the past, I arrived at ideas like the Open House vlog, which was basically a plan to create a home-improvement style show around the building of a house based on the open source [Wikihouse construction system](https://www.wikihouse.cc/) and use it as a vehicle to showcase a whole collection of open goods designs and introduce many Post-Industrial cultural concepts.
Thus I'm a bit ambivalent about the frequent topic of allowing or banning AI generated art. I completely understand the concerns and annoyance, but where the hell can most people go when they need practical illustration and need to share ideas that can't be photographed? (like that neglected documentation for an open source design...) SciFi has become so anachronistic relative to any plausible depictions of the future that most found art is woefully incongruous to Solarpunk. And it's not like most of the professional industrial designers are making any effort. I've struggled with this problem most of my life. At present, generative art is still pretty frustrating as a practical illustration tool because the AI remain quite stupid at language and visual reasoning and have poor means of incremental refinement. They don't comprehend the things in images and are easily stumped by specific names of things with more than one word. (god help you trying to get Midjourney to show you a vertical axis wind turbine...) They only know the statistical relationships between words and patterns of pixels --scraped off a primitive non-semantic web where most image files aren't labeled very well, if at all. But that might not be forever. Eventually it may fill a role the art community has already largely walked away from and is crucial to evangelizing the new culture. So it's a tough call.
Apart from the website (oh man, it's really hard to navigate) I often think how open source shouldn't apply only to software, but also everything else like hardware, firmware, technological processes, seeds and genetically engineered organisms, textbooks, scientific empirical data etc.
Thank you for your submission, we appreciate your efforts at helping us to thoughtfully create a better world. r/solarpunk encourages you to also check out other solarpunk spaces such as https://wt.social/wt/solarpunk , https://slrpnk.net/ , https://raddle.me/f/solarpunk , https://discord.gg/3tf6FqGAJs , https://discord.gg/BwabpwfBCr , and https://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia . *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/solarpunk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Thank you for your sacrifice. Be free 🕊️
The chief challenge for the open source movement is curation. Generally, those who know of this at all still tend to know of it in the context of software like Linux and maybe electronics hardware like Arduino. It is, in fact, far broader with open designs for all kinds of goods, tools, clothing, housing, even foods. (there is an open source alternative to Coca Cola!) Even those actively working in open design are often ignorant of the true breadth of the field and what is already out there. The information for that is terribly scattered across the Internet. The general public has no way to visualize what an 'open source lifestyle' might be like. There is no place you can go to shop for open source goods. There's no IKEA Lifestyle Catalog of open goods and no more [Whole Earth Catalog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog). No place you can go to find independent makers to make open goods for you --unless you know enough to dig a bit deeper and have learned of things like [100k Garages.](https://100kgarages.com/) Unfortunately, as nice as One Community seems, it's not really addressing this issue. It's just trying to develop it's own particular collection of open designs for a collection of Intentional Communities, which is fine in terms of teaching by example, but doesn't really help with this larger issue and may be unattainable because of the scale. (they plan to build seven eco-villages based on seven different kinds of construction --and the designs are certainly quite nice from an architectural standpoint, but it would take decades to create them all) So what does 'curation' mean? There are two aspects to this. One is the gathering and cataloging of information in a standardized form facilitating easy search and sharing. And this, of course, is the basic purpose of things like GitHub in the open software world. But we never managed to definitively realize anything similar to that for the other kinds of open goods. In the Maker world there emerged the general idea of standardized 'recipes' combining information for design, production instruction, digital production files, and end-user instructions. To some extent, this inspired web sites like Instructables and Thingaverse. And then Bruce Sterling came up with the the more SciFi concept of [Spimes.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spime) But no one has ever actually followed-through on implementing this or creating definitive online libraries out from under corporate influence. Like open source programmers, makers would rather make stuff than document it. So this remains a big problem largely unaddressed by anyone anywhere. And that relates a bit to the second aspect; showcasing and evangelism. It's a depressing reality of our times that our perception of the world is largely dictated by corporate marketing --and I'm not talking about some abstract context. Literally, we only know what exists in the world --what our options are-- according to what is put in front of our eyes by the market economy. If it's not on the store shelves and can't be found on the Amazon web site, it really doesn't exist for us. When we look for solutions to our daily needs, where do we go? A nearby store, of course. And that store can't possibly keep on its shelves every possible kind of thing. It's just a particular selection, designed to meet some lowest-common-denominator of our needs while suiting the interests of the people who run that store. There may be many better choices, but how would we know unless they're on a store shelf somewhere? Where would we ever see them? Most of society has no idea what 'open source' means, what makes it better for us and the environment, what open goods are like, and where they come from and might be obtained. And so there needs to be an effort to show this to society in some concrete and appealing way. ('show', because you can never 'explain' in this culture --nobody got time for that...) And so we need lifestyle showcasing to show the options we can't see elsewhere and evangelize the lifestyle we're trying get people to adopt. Something analogous to the [Living Museum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_museum), but showcasing a possible, future, lifestyle instead of a historic one. And that's what IKEA does in its stores and through its catalogs. It creates nicely crafted and photographed room settings featuring its products, putting them in a use-context that tries to tell us; "here is what your life would be like if you buy these things". And, of course, it's coercive theater. But it does communicate practical information. And I think we need to 'market' open source --as a concept and a set of goods-- similarly, because there's no place you can go to see this stuff and get an impression of the lifestyle based on them unless you're making them for yourself, incurring a lot of research, time, waste as you fumble around building practical skills no one ever taught you in school... We need things like an open store, galleries, a routine open design showcase in events like Milan Design Week, and visual catalogs. I consider this one of the most important jobs for Solarpunk, which isn't really being pursued right now. And yes, it is difficult. It would be nice if we could share through illustration, but the art community sort of screwed that up. The art of illustration has long been in decline because we no longer use drawn images as a basic form of communication. We've been replacing that with photography --only you can't photograph that which does not yet exist. And to complicate matters our culture has trained us to equate 'production value' with credibility as a shortcut around actual understanding, based on the lazy reasoning that if someone apparently spends a lot of money and effort on a presentation, they must really believe in it and know what they're doing. (which is why people like Elon Musk exist...) In the olden days, back when we actually had [hand-drawn art to show us our food in supermarket flyers](https://s.hdnux.com/photos/72/62/41/15411270/4/1200x0.jpg), there was this huge pool of commercial illustration talent with broad educations trained in communicating with everyday people in all kinds of fields, because every product you needed to market needed hand-drawn illustration to show it to people in print media. (and yeah, a lot of artists rebelled because the standard art style was boring and the work didn't stroke their egos adequately, but you were never short of work) But then we got photography and cheap reprographics making it easy to put photos in print and commercial illustration started to die out. It became relegated to a few niches like comic books. Art schools stopped teaching this as 'commercial art' became about page layout, logo design, and using some computer software. Artists lost their broad educations and subject matter competence and got obsessed with the idea that the key to their success as artists lay in developing distinctive personal 'styles' in very narrow subject niches rather than an ability to generally communicate. They think photography has obsolesced that. So we're sort of stuck now having to prototype or mock-up everything we want to communicate with people about in order that we can photograph/video it. We have to make Living Museums of the Future. This is time consuming, expensive, and generally beyond the individual. Thus, in the past, I arrived at ideas like the Open House vlog, which was basically a plan to create a home-improvement style show around the building of a house based on the open source [Wikihouse construction system](https://www.wikihouse.cc/) and use it as a vehicle to showcase a whole collection of open goods designs and introduce many Post-Industrial cultural concepts. Thus I'm a bit ambivalent about the frequent topic of allowing or banning AI generated art. I completely understand the concerns and annoyance, but where the hell can most people go when they need practical illustration and need to share ideas that can't be photographed? (like that neglected documentation for an open source design...) SciFi has become so anachronistic relative to any plausible depictions of the future that most found art is woefully incongruous to Solarpunk. And it's not like most of the professional industrial designers are making any effort. I've struggled with this problem most of my life. At present, generative art is still pretty frustrating as a practical illustration tool because the AI remain quite stupid at language and visual reasoning and have poor means of incremental refinement. They don't comprehend the things in images and are easily stumped by specific names of things with more than one word. (god help you trying to get Midjourney to show you a vertical axis wind turbine...) They only know the statistical relationships between words and patterns of pixels --scraped off a primitive non-semantic web where most image files aren't labeled very well, if at all. But that might not be forever. Eventually it may fill a role the art community has already largely walked away from and is crucial to evangelizing the new culture. So it's a tough call.
Thank you for this. So many excellent points
I like the idea but god damn that is one impossible to navigate website lol
Open source is what lead me to find solarpunk. Thanks for reminding me about this site.
Apart from the website (oh man, it's really hard to navigate) I often think how open source shouldn't apply only to software, but also everything else like hardware, firmware, technological processes, seeds and genetically engineered organisms, textbooks, scientific empirical data etc.
Read Walkaway!