One of the exercises we tried during our meeting in Berlin was to think about possible scenarios or goals which we would like to accomplish with OSCE over the next 10 years.
What projects or resources should exist? What impact should we have had on society, policy, education, and the rest of the circular economy movement? We took 5 minutes to each jot down a few ideas on post-it notes, and these were the first ideas that we came up with:
SOCIETY / OUTREACH / POLICY
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Open Circular Economy contributions are widely recognized
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Body of Knowledge on OSCE - Make it simple - so everyone can understand it!
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Open & circular products can be bought in the supermarket
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The social/people side of supply-chain transparency is interlinked with Circular Economy
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the issue of consumption is addressed in both Open Source and Circular Economy
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Rather than today’s focus on individual designers, ownership of ideas and product design, the thing to be is a creative, community and collaboration designer.
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A policy precedent established somewhere, along the lines of existing governmental F/LOSS policies, for example: “Funds earmarked for Cicular Economy, or government projects focused on Circular Economy, must use and produce open source solutions wherever possible. Where apparently not possible, documentation and explanations must be provided to back up such claims.”
OSCE NETWORK / ORGANISATION
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We come up with a better name than OSCE
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the network/foundation has a sustainable income (beyond grants?)
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a space for people to develop non-commercial or alternative projects on sustainability/open source
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a crowdsourcing/collaboration platform for people working on OSCE
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OSCE is a decentralized, autonomous organization
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Active, sustainable local chapters in 100+ towns & cities (or 500+ ?)
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people are enabled to make a living with OSCE projects
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OSCE is forkable! that OSCE-like projects/communities can emerge with their own identity and focus
SCIENCE/EDUCATION/OUTREACH
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Educational toolkit/curriculum - open source resources for anyone to learn and teach (which are actually used!)
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University-level curriculum about OSCE
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Scientific research tools, papers, resources and datasets available to all, to enable citizen science
PROJECTS
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Meaningful projects, global reach
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Toolbox for sustainability in Makerspaces
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a Git-like distributed version control & documentation system exists for Open Source Circular Hardware
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an open Cradle-to-Cradle database (either theirs is opened, or we create our own)
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Software solutions to enable every level of manufacturing (hobby to industry) to measure, publish and exchange inputs and outputs.
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examples of large-scale, industrial collaboration on open source circular hardware - eg “the Linux of OSCE”
This is of course just a beginning, a quick discussion to get us thinking in the long term, also to inform discussions on what we could do right now, with the time and resources we have available, to make the most useful steps towards these goals. Obviously some of these ideas are more achievable than others, some require very different skills and approaches. That’s okay! We have no idea how things might develop, but we think it’s worthwhile thinking about this topic, even if it’s very difficult to imagine that far in the future.
I don’t find myself quoting Bill Gates very often, but I like this idea: “people always overestimate what change can occur in two years, and always underestimate what can occur in ten years”
How do you see OSCE in 2025? What form does it take? What role or impact does it have?