The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. We’re developing open source industrial machines that can be made at a fraction of commercial costs, and sharing our designs online for free.

We are developing a lifesize, scalable, modular LEGO construction set.

The GVCS in itself consists of many other Construction Sets – as we build not individual machines, but construction sets of machines. As an example, the Fabrication Construction Set component can be used to build any of the other machines. Our goal is lifetime design, and low maintenance so only a few hours of maintenance per year are required to keep any machine alive.

We have built the first machine in 2007 – the Compressed Earth Brick Press. Since then, we have been moving forward steadily, improving the performance and production efficiencies of our machines. We have achieved a landmark One Day production time of the Compressed Earth Brick Press in 2012, and we intend to bring down the production time down to 1 day for each of the other machines. In 2013, we used our tractor, brick press, and soil pulverizer to build a comfortable home – the Microhouse. We continue to dogfood our tools in agriculture, construction, and fabrication – as we build our facility up to a world-class research center for open source, libre technology and decentralized production. In 2014, we will be moving to a replicable workshop model of production – integrating immersion education and production – where we intend to scale by distributing our open enterprise models far and wide. Our goal is to demonstrate how these machines contribute to creating a world beyond artificial material scarcity – by creating an open documentation, development, and production platform – towards the open source economy.

Our metric of completion is demonstrating a replicable, open source, social production model for a given machine. We call this the Learning Factor-e model. The main steps are a proof of concept, first prototype, full documentation, a working prototype, and an open enterprise model.

In 2018, our status of completion for the machines is about 1/3 done:

By using simple, modular, scalable design and open source collaboration, we are breaking cost barriers. Here is a sample comparison of our price point goals – compared to industry standards – for the same productivity performance machine: