[Discuss] Open Source Ecological Housing

[Emilio Velis]

So I have this project I'm interested in making happen here in El Salvador
and am getting a lot of people involved to fund it and make it happen. Very
much worth it.

I'll stay on the loop and keep you posted soon! Thanks for sharing!

On 29 June 2016 at 13:42, Matt Maier <blueback09 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
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