Narya Forum and Project Incubator Developer's Introduction

The Narya Project is intended to create a free-designed hardware community centered around needs for a free future in space, developed by individuals for individuals. The idea is to have a fun place to work on ideas for stuff we're all going to need on the new frontier, with a particular focus on maximizing the amount of equipment that settlers will be able to use, repair, and build on the spot from commodity designs. Having a ready-made body of such design information will greatly reduce risks of settlers associated with manufacturer non-disclosure at costs that don't require a national development program to fund.

We are currently re-evaluating a lot of our original decisions about architecture and software to use, in the interest of getting a working site sooner. Our initial target is to produce:

• Plone based forum and content management site (for discussion and collaboration).
• GForge based project management site for "software-like" project materials (this is the free branch of the software behind Sourceforge).
• Subversion for version control (change management).
• Narya Bazaar will need to be developed as a Plone Component.

We may consider either developing a Zope 3 package to replace this arrangement, or contribute to upgrading these packages for interaction with Zope 3. We're definitely not going to try to compete with GForge in its home-territory of managing software development, and since this is likely to be a big part of Narya projects, we think the sensible thing is to provide a GForge server.

We certainly have no shortage of ambitious ideas for services beyond these -- but our focus now is on creating the basics.

"Spinoffs"

The Narya project has produced a couple of smaller packages that are of general use:

VarImage

VarImage is a product for Zope which provides on-the-fly image scaling based on URL commands. The package provides efficient caching so that commonly requested dimensions are not any slower than ordinary Zope images. It is secured against obvious denial-of-service attacks and implements various modes of HTTP_REFERER blocking (which cuts down on abuse of your bandwidth).

BuildImage

BuildImage is a build tool which uses Skencil to create bitmap sets (as for skins, themes, buttons, icons, etc) from vector graphic originals. BuildImage's behavior is modelled on the ubiquitous "make" utility, and is designed to be used in build scripts. It greatly reduces the burden of making small changes to images in a project.

Towards a Free Matter Economy

This series of articles in Free Software Magazine describes the Narya project in a somewhat generic context, focusing on the new economics of community-driven collaborative production. In it, I talk about how a free-licensed design community can interact productively with commercial manufacturing, and the future of the "matter economy", particularly with respect to the coming interplanetary era:

Towards a Free Matter Economy I: Information as Matter, Matter as Information

This paper approaches the idea from an abstract perspective, comparing matter and information economics, and defining what it might mean for a matter economy to be "free" in the sense of free-licensed open source software. Donor/customer driven requirements for Narya Bazaar are spelled out.

Towards a Free Matter Economy II: The Passing of the Shade Tree Mechanic

This paper approaches the problem from a practical perspective, looking at repair culture, and the processes by which we have historically built and repaired the matter products that we use. The benefits of free-licensed design are presented, and the role of contract manufacturing services is examined. Vendor-driven requirements for Narya Bazaar are spelled out.

Towards a Free Matter Economy III: Designing the Narya Bazaar

This is a design paper for Narya Bazaar, drawing on the requirements laid out in the first two papers. Project-driven requirements are spelled out, and the overall design specification is described.

Towards a Free Matter Economy IV: Tools of the Trade (in press)

Money is not the only reason why free-licensed hardware design has not taken off. There is also a serious lack of professional-quality free software design authoring tools. The primary obstacle -- good general purpose 3D CAD/CAM systems are examined in the most detail, and I identify some low-risk strategies for developing the needed tools.

Towards a Free Matter Economy V: Discovering the Future, Recovering the Past (in press)

Here I address the needs of an archive and retrieval system, as well as look into the existing sources of legacy free-design data that should be mined and made more retrievable. Process

Towards a Free Matter Economy VI: Legal Landmines (in draft)

Examination of the legal environment, focusing on intellectual property and "forbidden technologies" regulations which may hamper development of free design for space development.

Towards a Free Matter Economy VII: A Free Future in Space (in draft)

What's it all for? This paper looks at specific examples of space development technologies that would benefit from a free-licensed design bazaar.

Slide Presentation for ISDC 2002

Addresses the point that amateur developers can and have contributed to space development. Identifies areas where open-source development model can help, and defines the rough spec for what Narya needs to do.

Slide Presentation for ISDC 2004

This presentation focuses on Bazaar, and shows how we propose to raise funds for hardware development, without interfering with the social dynamics of open-source and in a way that is highly beneficial to donors, project leaders, and vendors alike.

2003 Progress Report Paper (PDF)

This paper was contributed to the same ISDC as the above presentation, but it contains more information about the object refactoring that I decided was necessary in 2003. This cost quite a bit of time, but is essentially complete now, and the effort appears to have been worthwhile.

History

• Graphics and Technical Content Management.
• An improved social environment (i.e. more forum-like features).
• The ability to raise money for materials for projects that need them.
• Improved permanent document library features for aiding research.

Looked at from a certain point of view, Narya is designed to provide an enterprise manufacturing support system for people who can't afford one. By making all these normally complicated procedures easy, we hope to greatly accelerate the progress that amateurs and semi-professional developers can make in areas such as our core focus on space colonization/settlement technology.

Conventional wisdom about project management would have us believe that space development is impossible outside of the large corporate or government contractor environment, simply because of the huge infrastructure requirements. But it was only about 10 or 20 years ago that conventional wisdom said that about software development. And although it may not be generally known outside the field, the writing is on the wall for the end of the large corporate software developer as an innovative force -- this has become the new conventional wisdom among software developers themselves, for about the last five years. While certain niches, such as launch vehicle development are liable to remain out of reach for Narya projects for a long time, there are many other technologies for which it is very appropriate, and existing successes of amateur satellite developers suggest it is quite feasible for significant progress to be made.

Although an argument can be made that this is because of the "pure-information" nature of software, there is a strong case to be made for an alternate explanation proposed in Eric Raymond's The Magic Cauldron that it is because of software's generally very high "use value" compared to its "sale value". And that argument is equally true for space technology development -- there are far more people who want to use such technology than who want to buy it. Finding a way for them to fund and contribute to this "public good" themselves and collectively, is therefore a sound, logical strategy for funding it, and possibly far more effective than either high-stakes entrepreneurship or government-funded programs.

This is nowhere more important than in the development of basic survival technologies for the frontier, which must be maintained on site in order to be useful, and thus require the user to have access to the kind of deep knowledge that free-licensed design makes available.

Please contact Terry Hancock if you are interested in working to the project. I can also be reached via SourceForge. We also will be co-sponsoring ISDC 2007, and intend to have some materials available for those who are interested in participating in the Narya project.

Narya is an Anansi Spaceworks free software project being developed as a service to the worldwide community of amateur and professional space developers and enthusiasts.