ArkFab Innovation Foundation

Leveraging the Power of Crowds and Commons to Provide Access to Sustainable

Technologies

Liam Rattray, School of Public Policy

1.0 The Problem

We now live in a complex world. Over the past 200 years globalization has
increased our interconnectedness while industrialization has increased our inter-
dependencies. The global division of labor between and within nations has created
a diversity of economic and social roles for humanity never before seen and by
compelling us to leave our natural habitats the city now claims the majority of
Homo sapiens. Humans and the environments we fundamentally rely on for our
survival are now struggling to keep up and adapt to the difficult implications of
these changes.
Sustainable technologies offer an opportunity to aid the transition towards
more resilient communities but physical hardware alone is not sufficient. Successful
adoption, operation and maintenance of sustainable technologies in at-risk
communities requires both the physical hardware and the local competences of
individual and social capacity, knowledge and know-how.1 Providing these
communities economic and social access to the technologies they need to improve
their resilience is arguably the most critical problem in the field of sustainable
development. We must renovate or establish organizations that better coordinate
and leverage the innovative, entrepreneurial and adaptive power of all individuals
especially those individuals who are most at risk.

1.1 Sustainable Technology Gridlock

In 2007 the problem of sustainable technology gridlock was brought to

worldwide attention at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change (UNFCCC) Congress of Parties 13 (COP13) in Bali, Indonesia. This impasse is
one of many that must be resolved for a bipartisan international climate treaty to be
signed. There are serious disagreements over the role of intellectual property in
providing access to sustainable technologies between developing nations who
argue that intellectual property regimes are a barrier to sustainable technology
implementation and OECD nations, such as the USA, who maintain that weak
intellectual property regimes in major developing countries are the main barrier to
the export of sustainable technologies.2 However, neither side is incorrect because
the current intellectual property regime which guarantees monopoly on sustainable
technologies acts both as a driver, by mitigating risk for development firms, and
barrier, by generating high transaction costs, to sustainable technology diffusion
and adoption in different regulatory contexts. For many developing countries and
deprived communities the World Trade Organization administered Agreement on
1
 Metz, B., et al. 2000. Methodological and Technological Issues in Technology Transfer. A Special Report of IPCC 
Working Group III. Cambridge University Press. http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/
tectran/ (accessed December 9, 2009).
2
 ICTSD. 2008. Climate Technology Meeting Highlights Developed­Developing Country Divide. Bridges Trade 
and Biological Resources News Digest, Vol. 8(20). November 14. http://ictsd.org/i/news/biores/33669/ (accessed 
December 9, 2009). 
Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) and patent law in
general constitutes an overwhelming barrier to local development, adoption and
implementation of sustainable technologies.3 4 Gridlock can occur when the
knowledge necessary to be synthesized into innovation is fragmented between
many owners and results in often insurmountable transaction costs to the licensing
and commercialization of new innovations.5 Furthermore, the US position on
sustainable technology exports highlights another tension in which developing
countries and communities do not wish to act solely as importers but wish to
develop local capacities for sustainable technology development. These problems
compound already high barriers to sustainable technology access and climate
change adaptation for countries and communities lacking significant financial or
human capital while further delaying climate change mitigation.

2.0 Open Source Product Development

An open source product development, licensing and

financing/commercialization regime for sustainable technologies complements our
current intellectual property regime and overcomes the transaction costs of gridlock
and provides a full portfolio of options for sustainable technology access through
commons-based peer production. The open source product development model
provides an open environment that encourages local competences in individual and
social capacity, knowledge and know-how while providing necessary licensing for
hardware and promoting local entrepreneurship and small business creation. This
model is exemplified by the Wikimedia Foundation that coordinates the immensely
successful Wikipedia encyclopedia and the Apache Software Foundation that
coordinates the Apache HTTP Server project which comprises a core competence of
the majority of information technology firms and has been the most widely used
server software since 1996 with over 100 million corporate, government and
individual users.6 All projects are maintained by a core team that coordinates
contributions from thousands of collaborators from around the world. The open
source business then facilitates the manufacture and distribution of the end product
while allowing any other entity to use the open source designs and methods. Often
private business finds that the benefits of an open development community
outweigh the costs of not having a proprietary monopoly on the product’s
intellectual property and they decide to leverage the power of crowds and the
commons.

3
 Srinivas, Krishna Ravi. 2009. Climate Change, Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property. RIS Discussion 
Paper Series, RIS­DP #153 2009. 
http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/01539/_res/id=sa_File1/IP_Climate_TechTransfer_RIS.
pdf (accessed December 9, 2009).
4
 Murray, F., and S. Stern. 2005. Do Formal Intellectual Property Rights Hinder the Free Flow of Scientific 
Knowledge? An Empirical Test of the Anti­Commons Hypothesis. NBER Working Paper no. 11465. Cambridge, 
Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research. Http://www.nber.org/papers/W11465 (accessed December 9, 2009).
5
 Heller, Michael. 2008. The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, 
Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives. New York: Basic Books.
6
 Netcraft Inc. 2009. November 2009 Web Server Survey. Netcraft News. 
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html (accessed December 9, 2009).
2.1 Not Just Software

Today, as part of the open design and open source hardware movement
many projects and developer communities exist to develop hardware. These include
the popular Arduino microelectronics prototyping platform, Potters for Peace’s $15
nanosilver water filter, Sun Microsystem’s OpenSPARC T1 multicore processor and
Factor E Farm’s Liberator, a hydraulic-ram compressed earth block press for rapid
sustainable building construction using local materials that is sold for one fourth the
price of the leading competitor’s proprietary press. The unconventional savings of
open source hardware are due to the gratis nature of the product’s development
and the lack of rent charged for the proprietary knowledge embedded in the
product.
Open source products are developed in collaborative communities, free to
use and remix by other for-profit business, low-cost relative to their proprietary
competitors, and foster innovation and entrepreneurship.

3.0 The ArkFab Innovation Foundation

The ArkFab Innovation Foundation harnesses an emerging global network of

collaborative expertise and open source sustainable technologies development to
provide local entrepreneurs access to the tools and resources they need to rapidly
adapt their communities to continuously shifting landscapes of risk in our complex
society. The Foundation’s community innovation system stimulates commons-based
peer production in at-risk communities with cost effective local ArkFab Innovation
Centers. These community innovation centers are comprised of

• ArkFab Power, a locally sourced carbon-negative power generation

system
• ArkFab Lab, a digital flexible fabrication prototyping, manufacturing
and cloud supercomputing facility
• and the ArkFab Endowment, a revolving loan fund that provides
mesofinance start-up capital for new for-profit environmental
enterprise while funneling incoming returns on investment towards
research and development grants, educational and vocational
programming, and local not-for profit social enterprise

By building a global network of distributed ArkFab Innovation Centers that

provide access to the resources potential entrepreneurs and innovators need we
create a system of community innovation that will generate locally relevant and
culturally and economically appropriate technological and business. The ArkFab
Innovation Centers focus primarily on developing local knowledge and financial
independence with programming with our local partners that encourages
entrepreneurship, small business development, cutting-edge vocational training,
and high-tech infrastructure development for the community. For example, we work
with local technical colleges to provide vocational training in small-scale flexible
digital fabrication and design and small ecological manufacturing business
management.
 Figure 1 Flowchart for the ArkFab Innovation Center

3.1 ArkFab Power

ArkFab Power is an open source distributed electricity generation system for

each individual ArkFab Innovation Center. ArkFab Power can be tailored to suit the
local context, using different arrangements of technologies and local energy
resources to create a low-carbon or carbon-negative power system. Our current
model, designed for use in urban areas of the United States burns waste wood
biomass from local arborists with public municipalities and private business.
Currently waste wood chips are liability for these institutions. ArkFab Power uses
this waste to produce carbon-negative electricity and high-value organic fertilizer
for on-site application and community use.
ArkFab Power uses the Open Source GEK Imbert Downdraft Wood Gasifier
developed by All Power Labs in Oakland, CA to generate a wood gas functionally
similar to natural gas. Wood chip biomass waste from local arborists is batch-loaded
into the gasifier which generates both biochar and gas. The gas is then burned in an
off-the-shelf 670cc Honda V-twin four-stroke Otto cycle engine to generate
mechanical power used to operate a 10kW ST generator or is stored in 25kW
Flywheel Accumulator Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) matrix developed and
sold by Active Power when the demand load is low.
ArkFab Power sequesters CO2 emitted from its operations by routing the
clean exhaust gases through an on-site algae photobioreactor. This bioreactor
sequesters CO2 in algae biomass. The biomass is then recombined with the biochar
from the wood gasifier and a microbial composting solution is added to aid
decomposition. The result is a high-value organic fertilizer amendment that
sequesters the CO2 from the process into soil which is applied to an on site orchard.
ArkFab Power can generate approximately 1.7 MW of carbon-negative
electricity or enough to power five average suburban homes for a week using one
truckload, or 10 cubic yards of wood chip biomass with 15% moisture. This is more
than enough to power the ArkFab Lab and other operations at the ArkFab Innovation
Center. Early cost estimates for ArkFab Power suggest that $30,000 would be
sufficient for the initial capital expenditures.
When deployed in developing nations ArkFab Power offers an opportunity to
generate carbon negative power and incentivize polycropped woodland coppice to
provide wood for the gasifier while also allowing for intercropped high-value
woodland medicinal and food plants.

3.2 ArkFab Lab

The Innovation Center's ArkFab Lab is a flexible commons-based peer

production facility. The ArkFab Lab is comprised of a digital flexible fabrication
workshop and a low-cost cloud supercomputer. The cloud supercomputer is
responsible for managing the Center's power systems and CNC machinery while
also providing computational power to other intensive modeling and rendering
projects.
The digital flexible fabrication workshop is open to the public and provides
anyone interested in prototyping an idea the tools to do so. From this point they can
utilize the endowment and business incubator to find a market for their idea and
start a small-batch production schedule. An example of this process would be
someone wanting to start a natural building construction business. They would
come to the ArkFab Lab and download the open source designs for the Open Source
Ecology Compressed Earth Block press described previously and proceed to use the
digital fabrication tools to manufacture the press.
The digital flexible fabrication workshop utilizes open sourced tools and
machinery that can be manufactured in any other similar workshop. Such open
sourced tools are currently being developed in garages and university labs across
the country. Open source tools are often 50% cheaper than their proprietary
counterparts and contribute to the overall cost-effectiveness of the ArkFab
Innovation Center. The RepRap is one notable example. The RepRap is a 3D printer
that can print out parts to build other RepRap printers. The plastic 3D models can
then be used to create molds with which to cast metal parts to, for example, build a
lathe. Other tools to be included in this workshop are listed in Figure 1. MIT's
proprietary based flexible digital fabrication lab cost them $150,000. The cost for an
open sourced lab is estimated to be $50,000.
The cloud supercomputer is a low-cost solution for intensive and parallel
computing applications. It utilizes 20 used and repurposed dual core laptops
running parallel to create 40 virtual cores running with 60 GB of memory at
approximately 52GHz. This solution also provides a microloading power
management system utilizing the laptops individual batteries networked using
vacant lines on the laptops ethernet cards. This provides 2.9kW of on-demand
power for low-load power withdrawals such as lighting and projection. Broken
laptops can be refurbished in-house to provide a supercomputer and power
management system for approximately $6,000.

3.3 ArkFab Endowment

Our centers and programming are supported by a crowdfunded angel

investment network that underwrites the ArkFab Endowment in return for open
source low-cost technology research and development for their own private
businesses, social and ecological returns for their community and the benefit of
boosting their region’s economic competitiveness. A revolving loan fund in the form
of a non-profit endowment, the ArkFab Endowment, functions as a financial
instrument with which to integrate both open source sustainable technologies
research and development grants and open source sustainable technologies
commercialization in target communities. Such a fund would make equity
investments similar to a venture capital fund in for-profit enterprise that utilize open
source sustainable technologies. Equity returns would then be used to maintain the
endowment and provide social enterprise, education and research grants. Our
donors know that the ArkFab Innovation Foundation provides the maximum
multiplier for each dollar invested because each dollar is recycled through our
revolving loan fund to work for their community every year.

Figure 2 Flowchart for the ArkFab Endowment and Business Incubator

 Open source developer and contributor communities are networked through
the internet and globalization in general. The internet and communications
technologies offer great advantages in the provision of digital instruments to
improve participation in decision making, thus making decisions made by
institutions more legitimate and democratic. Decisions on the allocation of ArkFab
Endowment grants and start-up investments could be complimented by two online
decision support services.
One, every donor to the endowment would have a vote on grants and
endowment investments through an online website. This website would provide all
necessary information on the grant and start-up investments. Voters would also be
encouraged to provide suggestions on how to improve business models for start-up
investments and what their needs were in order to tailor grants. This would provide
for another avenue of information in the localization of sustainable technology
access, a democratic compliment to decisions made by ArkFab Endowment Board,
and a degree of local legitimacy.
Two, the behavior of voters as they interact with grant and start-up proposals
would be statistically analyzed over time to generate a predictive algorithm of the
likelihood of success that a proposal might have. This predictive indicator would
change over time as attention and interaction with proposals by voters and their
social networks was analyzed. This indicator could be a useful aid for the ArkFab
Endowment Board.

4.0 Research and Educational Partners and Programming

The ArkFab Innovation Foundation intends to support local stakeholders in the

sustainable economic development process by providing local access to technology
resources and by fostering local human capital. Again, innovation networks and
human capital is key to economic competitiveness and success. The ArkFab
Innovation Foundation intends to establish our Pilot Innovation Centers in Southwest
Atlanta, Georgia, an area of historical disenfranchisement in the economic and
political processes of Atlanta. Grants from the ArkFab Endowment will be used to
provide research and development funding for emerging sustainable technologies
and ongoing educational and vocational training in conjunction with local partners.
We will support the exchange of institute expertise with community innovators
and emerging entrepreneurs by working with Georgia Tech Research Centers, such
as the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Research Center, Georgia Tech Sustainable
Industrial Systems for Urban Regions, the Systems Realization Laboratory, and the
Sustainable Design and Manufacturing Program. Georgia Tech has a long 50 year
history of working in small manufacturing business development in Georgia through
the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Program and the ArkFab Community
Innovation Center offers a local step forward for this program.
In addition to small manufacturing business development the ArkFab Community
Innovation Center will work with local agencies and departments to offer
educational and vocational training programs. ArkFab will work with the Atlanta
Technical College, located in Southwest Atlanta, and the Atlanta Workforce
Development Agency to develop an integrated Green Manufacturing Jobs curriculum
that provides cutting-edge vocational training in prototyping and flexible fabrication
methods providing the structurally unemployed with flexible skills useful for all
aspects of manufacturing and entrepreneurship. We will also offer programming in
conjunction with the Fulton County Board of Education in k-12 Science, Technology,
Engineering and Science (STEM) education.

5.0 ArkFab Innovation Foundation Roadmap

ArkFab Innovation Foundation intends to scale our operations by scaling out

not scaling up. Our plan envisions establishing networked ArkFab Innovation
Centers in every small town and city around the world to provide open access and
financial opportunity to all potential entrepreneurs and innovators, not just those
who have the privilege to enter the university system or those who have access to
traditional avenues of capital investment. Our collaborative innovation network will
provide the latest in innovative sustainable low-carbon and low-cost technologies
and open source business models for creating resilient community.

• Solicit a Board of Directors

• Secure Strategic Partnerships in local government and educational
institutions
• Establish the ArkFab Endowment
• Develop and Publish the ArkFab Endowment Web Interface
• Establish the Carbon-Neutral ArkFab Lab Supercomputing Service, $10k
Crowdfunding
• Assemble and begin exhaust tests on a 10kW Open GEK Wood Gasifier
Genset
• Build ArkFab Lab's Cloud Supercomputer
• Begin providing carbon-neutral computation services powered by the
gasifier, first revenue
• Spin off socio-ecological decision support services, first for-profit
business
• Establish ArkFab Power, $30k Round 1 Funding
◦ Develop an alternative, carbon-negative, STEM educational curriculum for
k-12, first social non-profit endowment grant
◦ Build a prototype algae photobioreactor in collaboration with Algae Labs in
Oakland, CA.
◦ Begin small-scale production of carbon-negative electricity and organic
biochar/algae fertilizer
• Establish ArkFab Lab's Workshop, $50k Round 2 Funding
◦ In partnership with Georgia Tech research centers and Atlanta Technical
College begin a green manufacturing jobs vocational training program,
first Green Jobs training program
• Continue with returns from sale of algae photobioreactors, ArkFab Power
systems, and open source machining equipment manufactured in-house.
◦ Continue providing for-profit start-up funds, spin off more small Atlanta-
based business
• Sponsor the first community supported community development project,
build and ship an ArkFab Innovation Center to Haiti
Liam Rattray is a social entrepreneur, computational sociologist and ecological
designer. He studies climate change, economic development and innovation as a
fourth year undergraduate in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. Rattray started his career as a social entrepreneur in high school by
establishing STEM programming in robotics, rocketry and alternative fuels in Dekalb
County and continued this passion in university through his work with the social
media start-up, Green Options, consulting work with IBM and Public Broadcasting
Atlanta, research into the sociology of collaboration for the National Science
Foundation and building a sustainable food system for Atlanta with the Atlanta Local
Food Initiative and Georgia Tech. He has volunteered on many different projects
including installing community low-power FM radio stations, building biodiesel
reactors, working on organic farms and managed coppiced woodland, and
constructing a floating city in the harbor of Copenhagen in preparation for the
COP15 this past December.

In Memory Of Dr. Ralph Buice

A Promethean torch bearer who kept the light burning