[Discuss] Open Source Ecological Housing

[Matt Maier]

Here are thoughts as they occur to me:

I feel like you should lead with this stuff.
http://openbuildinginstitute.org/buildings/
It's easy to get excited about the technical details you had to get working
to make the project functional, but customers aren't going to care until
they want to live there. So tell them stories about how nice it is to live
there.

I'm interested in the infrastructure necessary to get a serious open source
hardware project working, but not many other people are. There are a lot
more people interested in cheap, efficient microhouses, and a whole lot
more people interested in green tech, and even more interested in small
living spaces.

Don't use a screenshot of the kickstarter video with "play" on it as a link
to kickstarter. If it looks like a button to start a video it should start
an embedded video.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure what the kickstarter campaign is
funding. You already build the house, and you don't seem to be trying to
build a bunch more houses, like for a community in Africa or something. I
feel like maybe "you're funding a source of all the knowledge and skills
you need to design and build a house yourself" is the primary value
proposition, but it's kind of buried. Oh, okay, there it is. The list of
what the campaign is funding is a quick set of bullet points at the end of
the video. It's also buried in the about/roadmap and contribute/support us
on kickstarter sections of the website. I'm pretty sure I saw it somewhere
on the kickstarter page too. It seems like it should be a lot easier to
find out exactly what is being funded.

Do you think the open source documentation will be detailed enough for
someone to build everything without paying to learn how? The implication
from the description is that people are expected to offset the cost of the
build by charging people for the knowledge they acquire during the build.
I'd be interested in following how general contractors and builders
incorporate this as an option in their business.

Also, in general, it feels like you could summarize and cut the text down
by at least 50%. The diagrams take up a lot of space but don't necessarily
illuminate much. The "we offer/you can" diagram takes a couple minutes to
understand (the fonts aren't helping).

The video's already shot, but as I parse out what's being funded it struck
me that you might not want to characterize your location as "in the middle
of nowhere" when a big part of the plan is to build a facility people are
supposed to travel to and use. Maybe something like "the perfect place to
live efficiently" or "the opposite of NYC" would be better marketing. Along
similar lines, it seems unnecessarily misleading to compare the cost of
your microhouse to an average $360K house. It took about 30 seconds of
googling to find that the costs you're estimating are right in line with
microhouses https://padtinyhouses.com/how-much-does-a-tiny-house-cost/ and
I doubt you're poaching anyone who was planning to build a brand new 2000
square foot McMansion to switch to building a microhouse. Even if you do
get some of them, they'll compare yours to other microhouses. Oh man, and
you buried something towards the end to the effect that you're crowdfunding
part of the costs and bootstrapping the rest; that should be near the top!

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 8:53 PM, Catarina Mota <catarinamfmota at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Dear fellow open sourcerers,
>
> We just launched a new project that has been many years in the making.
> It's called the Open Building Institute and it's an open source initiative
> to make affordable eco-housing accessible to everyone. The project is
> based on collaborative rapid-builds, a modular system, and open source
> machines.
>
> Check it out: http://openbuildinginstitute.org
>
> Any feedback and collaborations will be greatly appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
> Catarina
>
> _______________________________________________
> discuss mailing list
> discuss at lists.oshwa.org
> http://lists.oshwa.org/listinfo/discuss
>
>
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