OpenNMS I was migrating toward biodiesel. Biodiesel is a cleaner burning renewable fuel that is made from fats, oils, and greases. I was making the stuff in my back yard, and signed up for the fledgling Bio-Fuels program at Central Carolina Community College.
I was busy scaling up biodiesel, and scaling down my life in the technology sector. Technology was making me narcoleptic. Biodiesel was lighting my fire. Tarus and OpenNMS went on to build an open source success story, while I abandoned them for a fifty-five gallon drum and a canoe paddle.
I jumped in with Leif and Rachel (my instructors at the college), and together we founded Piedmont Biofuels. We had some early successes making fuel and were immediately confronted with a critical decision: Should we tell the world what we had learned or should we keep it a secret in order to parlay our knowledge into cash?
We decided to take an “open” approach, and instead of applying for patents, and sealing our lips, we published our successes and failures on Energy Blog. Our work was free for the entire world to see.
At the time the biodiesel industry in America was in its infancy, and as such it was shrouded in proprietary secrets and great advances, and complicated licensing schemes.
Our work stood in stark contrast to an evolving industry, in which charlatans came and went, and “black box” solutions regularly emerged and disappeared. It was the Wild West for biodiesel and no one was sure what stories to believe.
Piedmont’s notion of “open source biodiesel” immediately got traction in the grassroots biodiesel community and became the standard for how small projects should interact with one another. We had our flops. And we had our successes. And we published them all.
In no time we found ourselves with an active consulting business. Our rates went from being a member of our Coop ($50.00 per year) to $50.00 per hour to $100.00 an hour to $200.00 dollars an hour in order to slow things down a bit. I’ve often thought, “Tarus would be proud.”
As public money started flowing into our project in the form of grant awards, we stuck to the knitting. We offered free tours, and free information to anyone. Interest in our project built rapidly. Part of our message to public funders was that we would tell anyone anything they wanted to know.
The fact that we were open source appealed to those with public money. I’m not sure any of us clearly knew what it meant, but funders wanted to know that if they bestowed grant money upon us, our stewardship of that money would benefit others. As a result we accidentally became a frequent recipient of both federal and state grants.
But our commitment to open had a broader benefit. The biodiesel industry has had a bruising ride since its inception. The public doesn’t really understand biofuels, and the industry doesn’t tend to be “open” in an effort to make itself clear.
When we were making fuel in the backyard we were quirky. For a moment there, when biofuels were going to save the world, we were sexy. We had a moment as rock stars. But when global commodity markets climbed to record highs in the summer of 2008, the whole food vs. fuel debate came to the fore and biofuels became evil. That’s when our industry made the cover of TIME magazine as a sham. And that’s when the United Nations accused those responsible for making biofuels of being guilty of “crimes against humanity.”
We went from quirky to sexy to evil, and we continued to publish our stories along the way. As a result we had credibility that allowed us to survive where others died. As biofuels projects collapsed under the weight of “evil,” we persevered on the strength of our transparency alone.
We have been “open” at every step along the way, and we feel that our openness has been critical to the success of our enterprise.
At Piedmont Biofuels we have a lot of “firsts.” We have a number of breakthroughs under our belt. And we have shared both our “firsts” and our breakthroughs freely with the world along the way, and we have watched our industry rise and fall as it fumbles about with policy decisions that will determine the role of biodiesel in our energy mix.
By some measures it is fair to characterize community-scale biodiesel as an industry that is open. Surely we receive as many good ideas as we contribute. And there is no doubt that we have benefited greatly from the community of small-scale producers.
Just as the small open source software company can successfully compete with much larger proprietary rivals, our small biodiesel company looms larger than life because of its many contributions to industry knowledge.
Which might not matter in the least. We still haven’t figured out how to eat fame. And we are still paying off the vast “tuition” we have paid as pioneers in the biodiesel industry. But we are resilient. And we are “open.” And we wear both of those monikers with pride.
We came for the fuel, and after a few sharp detours, found ourselves intact because of all the divisions along the way. When fuel production was down, design-build was booming when design-build was soft, our research and analytics would sometimes carry the day. We’ve diverged. We’ve held on. We’ve innovated. And we feel that our accidental diversification is rather the way things occur in nature, and that it is a critical reason we are still alive.
ON ANY GIVEN FRIDAY a visitor to the plant who happened by at noon would hear the dinner bell ring and would be invited to stay for lunch.
Lunch would be prepared by a team of three to five volunteers who would have banded together throughout the week to put on an amazing spread for fifty to sixty enthusiastic eaters.
The food tends to come from across the street. Or sometimes from the other side of town. It has become an over-the-top study in excess, where giant platters of Eliza’s sausage, or slabs of mahimahi caught by Jacques and his kids are passed about by the meat eaters, while exquisite dishes of homemade tempeh and seitan are relished by the vegans in our midst.
We chose Friday as the lunch day because it was the day after the Pittsboro farmers market, and we wanted to ensure that the volunteer teams could avail themselves of local food.
But hyper-localism soon kicked in, and people started labeling where each ingredient came from, leading to snide remarks like, “These are remarkable new potatoes, Matt, where did you get them?”
“Doug grew them. They came from 100 yards from the kitchen.”
“Nice. What’s with the far-away ketchup?”
Peer pressure, and sport, and conviviality have descended on “Local Food Friday,” and it has become a durable institution on our project. Surely there are potlucks over at Oilseed Community, and on the bend in the Moncure Road, and there are a myriad of “family” dinners across project, where people persistently dine together without being “family” at all, but Local Food Friday is one place where almost all of us gather once a week.
Those who participate go through considerable effort to collect and prepare enough food for fifty, and then eat every Friday for free for eight or nine weeks after that. Teams form, people float from team to team based on food they procure, teams break up and reform, and it moves along.
Because there are humans involved, frictions
