"The thing wrong with the world
is that people don't have instructions."
-- Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah
OSCOMAK supports playful learning communities of individuals and groups
chaordically building free and open source knowledge, tools, and simulations
which lay the groundwork for humanity's sustainable development on Spaceship Earth and
eventual joyful, compassionate, and diverse expansion into space
(including Mars, the Moon, the Asteroids, or elsewhere in the Universe).
Artwork derived from NASA artwork by Rick Guidice on Space Colonization
blended with a modified version of the Land-use plan artwork by Richard Iriga
from the Development Art collection using The GIMP under Debian GNU/Linux
The OSCOMAK project will foster a community in which many interested individuals
will contribute to the creation of a distributed global repository of manufacturing
knowledge about past, present and future processes, materials, and products.
OSCOMAK stands for "OSCOMAK Semantic Community On Manufactured Artifacts and Know-how".
The OSCOMAK project is supporting the OpenVirgle Project for Space Habitats. It was doing that for a time around April 2008 via Semantic MediaWiki pages starting here as an experiment (no longer maintained).
The project's short-term benefits will include:
- technology education,
- historical education,
- sustainable technology development,
- public science literacy, and
- knowledge democratization.
The project's ultimate long-term
goal will be to generate a repository of knowledge that will support the
design and creation of space habitats. Three forces -- individual
creativity, social collaboration, and technological tools -- will join to
create a synergistic effort stronger than any of these forces could produce
alone.
You can read a paper we presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing
May 7-9, 2001, which we have made available on the web:
here. The slides for the presentation are here.
You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.
An unfunded NASA pre-proposal from around 1999 is available in part here.
You can see some older Semantic MediaWiki pages from around April 2008 through a link at archive.org. A local list of all articles from that time is here.