Our congratulations again to Marcin Jakubowski, who spoke for us last year, on his TED fellowship. His TED talk is now available for viewing.

The Bay Area Community Exchange presents John Robb, author of Brave New War and originator of the concept of “open source warfare” which predicted many of the patterns of conflict observed in the recent revolutions sweeping North Africa and the Middle East. Now he turns his attention from the future of war to the future of peace and presents the “open source venture” and his related startup, PictureThis, done in collaboration with bettermeans of Oakland.

Read his blog at globalguerrillas.typepad.com and his coverage of the ongoing revolutions at twitter.com/johnrobb.

Seats are limited; please reserve one at johnrobbatsfbace.eventbrite.com (even if you wish to make no donation, so that we can still assure you a place).

Donations will be accepted to cover event expenses and to fund BACE operations.

Marcin Jakubowski, whose work was featured in our previous project roundtable, writes to inform us of his progress:

We’ve been making good progress on the Economy in a Box – the infrastructure tools for post-scarcity, resilient communities. This is aligned with the economic localization efforts of BACE. Our work focuses on the integration of flexible fabrication with resilient communities. Subsilience is the result: the combination of resilience with modern day subsistence – a high quality of life free of compromise, which is feasible with modern technology.

Over the last 3 months, we have managed to scale our progress twofold. We’ve seen full product release of the open source CEB press, The Liberator, and we’ve had significant progress on the open source tractor, LifeTrac Prototype II. We also deployed the first prototype of the heavy duty, open source drill press, which we’re now using as part of our fabrication infrastructure. We just reported on Prototype I of the 150 ton hole puncher .  These are two additions to the open source, self-replicating Fab Lab, or RepLab. We also got the first working prototype of Hexahatch, the automated chicken incubator, in operation. We also deployed Prototype I of a honey extractor. Plus, Sean is on-site for the summer gathering documentary material, and his LifeTrac II update is choice. People are beginning to talk about us in mainstream books.

Please view this blog post for further details on the above.

The video from Marcin Jakubowski’s presentation at last month’s project roundtable is now available.  Marcin describes it here, and you can watch it here. Thanks to Marcin for coming out and presenting and to Andrew Hasse of East Bay Pictures for producing the video.  We look forward to Marcin’s return to the area in October and will have updates on the events of his next visit as they take shape.