hi iām Mikey 
hereās my story of what brings me here:
- In 2012 - 2014, lived in Cloyne Court, a student housing cooperative of 150 people
- Was a member of a hackerspace, Ace Monster Toys
- In 2013, inspired by hackerspaces and community infrastructure, conceptualized a ecosystem for local production, Unbazaar
- Production equipment like 3d printers, laser cutters, and CNC machines were now accessible to be in households and community spaces, but aside from occasional projects most of the equipmentās time is idle, which is a huge loss of equipment potential
- Unbazaar was to connect consumers (owners of production equipment) with local consumers (designs of things to produce)
- āwe want to make it easy for anyone to fulfill any role (producer, consumer, distributor, vendor, etc) within the marketplaceā
- In 2014, met Bob and Lynn of Mikorizal and started the project Value Flows with them
- āA vocabulary for the distributed economic networks of the next economyā
- āletās help a lot of alternative economic software projects that are solving different pieces of the same puzzle be able to work togetherā
- Was trying to write software for housing cooperatives, but was a naive uni student with no business experience, no understanding of how to run a software company
- In 2014, joined Enspiral
- In 2014, started contributing to Scuttlebutt
- Later started Peach Cloud and the Sunrise Choir sub-projects
- In 2014, got amongst the Open App Ecosystem
- From 2015 - 2019, needed to work as a software developer to maintain employment for my New Zealand visa, so started Root Systems, a workersā cooperative doing tech consulting
- In 2019, sorted my visa through EHF, now my visa no longer tied to employment
- Decided to focus on my fundamental visions
- To build infrastructure ecosystems
- To raise a family in a village
- While driving through New Zealand, had a realization that trailer parks could become a framework for solarpunk villages
- Housing system is f**ked, too expensive to live by yourself, too difficult to live in community
- Heaps of people building tiny homes and converting caravans in order to live cheaper, but each tiny home and caravan is a bespoke custom-made design
- Want to apply open source principles to tiny homes, caravans, and other living structures
- Enable open sharing of fractal (macro and micro) designs
- How can we do upfront engineering to provide protocols for structures
- Support well-engineered, modular, interoperable, and re-usable construction systems
- How can we provide specific top-down constraints to better support bottom-up micro-utopias.
- How can we provide tangible value that flows back into the overall movement
- Less unconstrained macro-utopias (as they continue to fail), more constrained pragmatic business plans, clear boundaries, and specific prototype to support micro-utopias
- For example: an #ecovillage requires too much upfront privilege, the whole system is dependent on self-actualizing visions, and there are unmitigated risk when conflicts inevitably arise
- Another example: the Burning Man org (and regional burn orgs) is actually authoritarian, but the authority is very limited in scope (e.g. where you are allowed to camp), which enables each camp to be their own anarchist micro-utopia
- Our first product is Grid Kit
- Clear and constrained: the idea already exists, has been proven through decades of prototypes, and is documented into a book. We only need to focus on production, distribution, marketing, etc
- Pragmatic: helps achieve the first step towards a universal protocol for living systems, helps us learn how to build a micro-factory, helps us
- Something something solarpunk micro-factories everywhere
happy to get amongst, everything is intertwingled ! 
