vitiral
commented
2 years ago I'd like to contribute to this project as it's something I often think about - if we built a small commune / community, how "off the grid" could we get? Topics like carpentry, husbandry, farming / gardening, ceramics etc are well covered, but where I always get stuck is computing and transistors, which a lot of "civboot"-aligned projects seem to discuss ( this person has some cool stuff going on glass).
Awesome, welcome! I agree, computing and precision engineering are definitely the hard problems, which is why I'm targeting them.
Anyway though, you mention a warehouse, though I'm unclear whether a civboot is the warehouse, or the instruction book on how to build the warehouse. I feel like the latter, as an instruction book can build many warehouses.
Both.
The thing to understand is that you can't build a computer (or precision engineering) unless you already have both. It's just like the chicken and the egg, where we didn't get either without the iterative cycle of breeding (after selecting the initial birds from the wild of course).
A Civboot therefore has to be a warehouse which can build a computer, precision engineering tools etc... whatever is needed to build another Civboot. Without this "simplest base" it is impossible to have anything like a "full grasp" of the complexity of our technological underpinnings.
The core question is: how many warehouses do you need to be able to build another Civboot? Currently the answer is probably approximately: a warehouse the size of China. At best: a warehouse the size of Silicon Valley.
Regarding the rest of your "braindump" as you put it, I think you are on the right track :smile: My intent was to incorporate libre knowledge into the Civboot as I went along.
komali2
yarivaltean
I'd like to contribute to this project as it's something I often think about - if we built a small commune / community, how "off the grid" could we get? Topics like carpentry, husbandry, farming / gardening, ceramics etc are well covered, but where I always get stuck is computing and transistors, which a lot of "civboot"-aligned projects seem to discuss ( this person has some cool stuff going on glass).
Anyway though, you mention a warehouse, though I'm unclear whether a civboot is the warehouse, or the instruction book on how to build the warehouse. I feel like the latter, as an instruction book can build many warehouses. On that note then, what needs to go into such a book? What's the table of contents? Based on "Must include all working knowledge..." its going to be at least as thick as an large encyclopedia, which makes sense. Basically, it's starting to sound like a large chunk of the book is going to need to be a schooling curriculum. I see that Open Source Ecology has a fantastic set of models of many tools, but no information on how to measure length, or map using geometry, or how to calculate load, gearing, etc.
In short I sense a gap, that may readily be closed with libre curriculum. Portions of "The Civboot Book" could be asynchronously compiled by many experts, and the nature of a book could make for a good organizational tool in terms of determining what the project TODOs are, and as well as a framework for discussing what's relevant to the project's goals.
For example, imagine the civboot project proposes the following (truncated) "Table of Contents":
Volume 1: Baseline Educational Requirements
Section A: Mathematics
Chapter 1: Elementary Math
Someone could pipe in and say "actually, I don't think exponents are necessary to the goals of the project." Someone else could say "Here's a libre elementary math textbook we can drop wholesale into the project." And so on for other Chapters / Sections / Volumes.
Other advantages include:
Thanks for leaving space here for me to braindump. I'm very interested in feedback for any willing to provide it.