Produce Cosmo-Locally

Many peer production advocates call for "cosmo-local" production in which "light" knowledge and design are shared globally via P2P teaching or via the Internet, and "heavy" physical things, like machinery, cars and food, are produced locally.

"If it's light, share it globally -- if it's heavy, produce it locally."

Discussion: in fact this is a widespread practice, System of Rice Intensification works that way, Masipag, the Campesino a Campesino Programms throughout the world, html ; i don't think that "sharing through the internet" is a necessary element of cosmo-local production; it's just "sharing knowledge globally through whatever means available".

OBI - summarizing some basics of Cosmo-Local-Prodcution. source

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation html , a leading theorist, divides cosmo-local production in three distinct processes:

# On the input side

"we have voluntary contributors, who do not have to ask permission to participate, and use ‘open and free raw material that is free of restrictive copyright so that it can be freely improved and modified. If no open and free raw material is available, as long as the option exists to create new one, then peer production is a possibility."

# On the process side

"it is based on design for inclusion, low thresholds for participation, freely available modular tasks rather than functional jobs, and communal validation of the quality and excellence of the alternatives"

# On the output side

"it creates a commons, using licenses that insure that the resulting value is available to all, again without permission. This common output in turn recreates a new layer of open and free material that can be used for a next iteration."

In general, open design & manufacturing have profound implications for reducing the material "throughput" and carbon emissions that capitalism has become accustomed to.

In a 2017 report, "Peer to Peer and the Commons: A Path Toward Transition: A matter, energy and thermodynamic perspective," Celine Piques and Xavier Rizos argue that "mutualization and relocalization" are "answers to the problem of nonrenewable materials," and that "a shift to 100% renewal energy globally is feasible today" as a technical matter.

add the links to the quotes

# Storify

# Examples

There are many open design and manufacturing projects which heavily rely in internet-based sharing:

Arduino electronics html Blender Institute open source film animation html CLeBer Oggun open source tractor html Farm Hack open source agricultural equipment html Open Building Institute, Ecobuilding toolkit html Open Desk open design furniture html Open Source Ecology, open source agricultural equipment html Public Lab, citizen science monitoring tools html Open Spim, Open Lightsheet Microscopy, wiki RepRap 3D printer of plastic objects html WikiHouse, open design house Wikispeed, open source car html

More "traditional" examples of Cosmo-Local Production are:

# See also: Fab Labs A Manifesto for Global Design and Local Production The Triarchy of Cosmo-Local Production html P2P Foundation html , "Sustainable manufacturing" at P2P wiki Michel Bauwens (2010): "The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing," html Eric von Hippel (2006): Democratizing Innovation, The Mit Press html Jacques Paysan (2015): Open Spim A High-Tech Commons for Research and Education, html Open Design wiki Product Hacking wiki Tristan Copley-Smith (2015): "The Growth of Open Design and Production" html Bas van Abel et al. (2011): "Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive", html