OSE-US critics

(backup from OSE US' wiki entry due to Marcin's deletions)

Apart from the well documented positive criticism OSE gets (TED, True Fans, ...) we hereby want to give negative critics a chance to be heard. Some of them seem very constructive and might help us and OSE as an organisation to become better:

It is worth noting that OSE is hierarchically structured and that direct democracy is completely absent from its values. Folks should push for a democratized OSE/FeF giving participants democratic control over the group.

There were developers who left because there is no profit sharing for development work and labour when stuff got sold. ie, you put a lot of time and effort improving the GVCS, and the piece gets sold, you get zilch of the net after material expenses. All went to OSE/Marcin.

All I see lately is voting to win money, etc. I understand the crowd funding thing didn't take off as envisioned. So no more bi-weekly ose mail? no updates anywhere (meaningful updates)

(...) there have been "ragequits" all the time over several years. Note how Yoonseo said he left also due in part by certain behaviour and comments by Marcin.

• Statement from Brianna, who was on site developing and fabricating GVCS products for 5 months as stated on http://forum.opensourceecology.org/discussion/comment/5310#Comment_5310:

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As for me, I left for a few reasons.

(1.) Money. I was working out there for $10 per hour. Very small for the type of work I was doing- design and fabrication of the ironworker. I saw Marcin unwilling to pay even the most skilled labor more than $2k per month. If you aren't even willing to pay that, how on earth can you expect any quality results? At best you will be getting college students, like me, wanting to contribute, who don't have the skills to make a quality product. Or, you will be getting people doing it as a side thing, guaranteeing no results. I saw the bank accounts, and knew the organization had more than $400k in the bank. As a result, there was nobody there designing the machines. I didn't feel qualified to be designing this stuff. I felt like there should have been experts out there designing it so I could built it. There was nobody. I felt like I was defrauding the investors.

(2.) Lies about the quality of the products. The brick press produced shit for bricks. They didn't have one flat surface on them. I personally built 4 of these, which were all shipped out without proper testing. One was shipped out a year after it was supposed to be. The power cube worked for a week AT THE LONGEST.

(3.) Unsafe living conditions and insufficient infrastructure- when I was there, the well water was contaminated, and Marcin refused to fix it. There was literally algae the water tanks, and he was doing nothing to fix it. We had to either buy all water at the store, or drink from the RO system, which I had to personally install. The RO hardly produced 1/2 gallon per day to be spent among 15+ people because of the low pressure coming from the pump at the well. The well was also not producing enough to accomodate all the people there, so we could only use toilets to poop, and had to have VERY short showers.

(4.) Everyone I talked to who was working there had told me, independently, that they had felt "decieved" at their recruitment. That they had been lied to to get to come out there.

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• The CAD drawings seem to be inconsistent and lacking quality: http://forum.opensourceecology.org/discussion/915/ceb-press-iv