Ideas worth spreading

Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

1,930,838 views | Marcin Jakubowski • TED2011

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. And that's only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

About the speaker

Marcin Jakubowski

Marcin Jakubowski

Farmer and technologist

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Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing a set of blueprints for 50 farming tools that can be built cheaply from scratch. Call it a "civilization starter kit."

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.