Inspiration can be many kind. There are the super cars, the yachts, the futuristic gadgets and expensive gear. And there are people, whose mission is to improve the life of those who have less and just develop tools for living. Marcin Jakubowski and his ambitious GVCS project is one of the latter and we are more than happy to get all the world's engineers involved.
The project's goal is to build 50 different industrial machines that enable building small civilizations from scratch. Eight of the machines have reached the prototype phase, but there are tens of more waiting to be engineered and built.
All the machines are listed on the Open Source Ecology site, and we are very excited to announce that GrabCAD will be involved in this project by giving the hand of thousands of engineers to solve the engineering problems of some of the machines. The first one - LifeTrac, a low-cost, multipurpose open source tractor is up for a challenge now.
The GVCS itself describes what kind of help they are looking for: '... people who are interested in building the world's first replicable open source self-sufficient decentralized high appropriate tech permaculture ecovillage.' Sounds about right, not to mention exciting.
We all encourage you to take a look at this project and having any free time left over, to contribute and get involved in this rather impressive challenge. There are no prizes in terms of money. It's rather the opposite as any kind of contribution to the project is more than appreciated. The GVCS actually raised money on Kickstarter not long ago. However, should the input and challenges really take off, the entire engineering crowd in GrabCAD will be under spotlight and the involved engineers have their moments of well-deserved acclaim.
It's really a worthy cause and instead of buying gifts, spending a few hours by helping this open source project out would make any Santa jump for joy.
Read more about the LifeTrac challenge and check out the videos where Marcin Jakubowski is telling about this ambitious project.
And then get involved!
