Marcin Jakubowski has identified the fifty industrial machines required to build a civilization, and he wants everyone to be able to create these machines.
The Open Source Ecology project is designed to develop plans and methods to build these fifty machines, and do it as one collaborative effort. In his TED Talk he confessed that after completing a PhD in Fusion Energy he felt useless. There was no practical knowledge to be used in the world to implement change.
http://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski.html
He went off on his own and started a farm to live away from the world for a while. Marcin's story explains that he bought a tractor, it broke, he paid for repairs, it broke again, and the cycle continued until he was broke. Sustainable tools to start a sustainable farm and settlement did not exist.
Tools needed to be robust, modular, highly efficient, optimized, low cost, made from recycled materials, and able to last forever. No engineer should be surprised that commercially available machinery and equipment could not meet these requirements.
Necessity was the inspiration for Marcin's plan, and the process is underway and will continue for decades. After developing a few machines he published the three dimensional designs and drawings, electrical schematics, instructional videos, bills of material, and budgets for his machines.
As news of the project grew and the open source community started to flourish contributors would show up to Marcin's compound and help to build during dedicated prototype visits. The project focuses on hardware because of its ability to change peoples' lives in large scale tangible ways.
The big picture idea is to unleash massive amounts of human potential. The hope is that any maker, farmer, builder, entrepreneur can now start a construction business, manufacturing business, larger scale farm or generate power and sell it back to the grid. Forward thinking idealism tells Marcin that a single burned dvd sent to an individual could be a civilization starter kit.