Let's Help Create the Open Source Economy!

Open Tech Forever is helping create the Open Source Economy: a collaborative society that shares its knowledge, skills, technologies, and resources to overcome artificial barriers and achieve abundance and prosperity for all.

We're Building an Open Source Factory

We have a 40 acre permaculture site 15 minutes from downtown Denver. This campaign will fund the construction of an Open Source Factory to kickstart our open hardware cooperative: 

• Open Hardware R&D - we are collaborating with people around the world to design, prototype, field-test, and share open source technology.
• Open Hardware Documentation - we actively teach others how to acquire new skills and build/use open hardware. We create state-of-the-art digital learning resources with pictures, videos, text, animations, interactive multimedia, and more - that anyone can use, edit, improve, remix.
• Open Agriculture - we are adopting a mixture of permaculture, aquaponics, and organic farming practices.
• Open Business Models - we are adopting and incubating new, transparent business models that entrepreneurs can use anywhere in the world.
• Public Workshops - we will provide hands-on learning programs for the public to help grow new businesses and support the development of sustainable communities.
• Commercial Products - we sell open source products as an open, transparent, replicable business.

Our Values

Our values are honesty, transparency, free information, and collaboration. Sharing skills and technology is the most effective thing we can do to create a world of freedom.

Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Statement of Principles 1.0

"Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware’s source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it. ...

Open source hardware gives people the freedom to control their technology while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of designs."

Our Team

We're a team with years of experience with an open hardware company called Open Source Ecology, and there we've honed our skills developing and documenting open source hardware and collaborative business models. We're ready to share and apply our learnings and insights on the next level with Open Tech Forever.

• Aaron Makaruk served as the Director of Development at Open Source Ecology (2011-2013) - see his Tedx Talk on the open source economy, co-founder of Youth on Record in Denver (now with Flobots.org), and co-founder of the Atomic Anvil, with history as an apprentice blacksmith and metal fabricator. He has a decade of experience working with non-profits such as Amnesty International, the Traditional Support Caravan, the Boulder Housing Coalition, and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
• Yoonseo Kang is a former Technical Developer at Open Source Ecology (2012-2013), 2011 International Baccalaureate recipient, 2012 Thiel Fellow, and speaker at the 2013 Seoul Digital Forum for ECollaboration.
• Johnathan Yelenick is a trained soil scientist and organic farming entrepreneur, has a Molecular Cellular and Developmental Biology degree from the University of Colorado, Boulder, attained his Advanced Permaculture Training at the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute in 2007, and graduated cum laude from Colorado State University with a degree in Soil Science.
• Tristan Copley Smith is a former video communications director at Open Source Ecology (2012), former director/DP/editor/producer at WikiLeaks, and has had his work featured on WIRED, Popular Science, and Boing Boing.

More about the team on our website.

Perks

Factory Cost Estimate

Why Should We Do This?

We can achieve humanity's potential of prosperity for all.

We can empower society with the knowledge and skills to regain control of our world.

We can collaboratively develop and produce open innovation - high performance technologies that don't break and keep working, easy to use, fix, maintain, and modify.

We can make it easy to invent and innovate, to start businesses and create value, to do things ourselves and help each other more effectively.

We can restore the ecosystems of the Earth.