[edit] This site was an experiment and as of April 7th, 2009 is no longer accepting changes. It is kept up for archival and reference purposes. New work is ongoing in the direction of having a Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop instead of a Halo Semantic MediaWiki.

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"The thing wrong with the world

is that people don't have instructions."

--Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah

The OSCOMAK project fosters a community in which many interested individuals 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 Settlement via Semantic MediaWiki pages starting here: OpenVirgle.

The project's short-term benefits include:

  • technology education,
  • historical education,
  • sustainable technology development,
  • public science literacy, and
  • knowledge democratization.

The project's ultimate long-term goal is 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. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository. We also develop related software tools.

You can read a paper presented on this project in the Proceedings of the Thirteenth SSI/Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing May 7-9, 2001, which is made available on the web: here. The slides for the presentation are here.

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).

You can read an essay on how to to find the financing to create a "Star Trek" like society here.

A flow into foundations of $55 trillion is expected over the next 25 years: Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?

And TV watching is consuming 2,000 Wikipedias per year: Mining the Cognitive Surplus

So no one should seriously suggest the absence of money or time for R&D and deployment is the problem for making either Spaceship Earth or Spaceship Mars (OpenVirgle) work for everyone, even at the same time. It comes down to issues like ideology and imagination, not "resources".


Other projects similar to OSCOMAK:

It is expected that over time these various projects will merge or blur into a Semantic Wikipedia or a Social Semantic Desktop

But that is no reason not to get working now making free content on any of them. The textual content here is all under the same license as Wikipedia for compatibility. Other content like images or CAD files or programs may be under other free licenses.

Consult the User's Guide for information on using the wiki software.

Getting started