They are a group, currently backed by about 100*10$/month of donations, developing the means to living off of local resources (sustainably) with minimal work needed, with a view to ending artificial scarcity. They advocate a truly free distributed (p2p) economy outside the bounds of patents and copyright law.
So far they have developed open hardware for building housing and machines that make machines.
I personally believe (and put my money where my mouth is
, that their development effort will start something great. They are already filling orders for machines on the order of several thousand dollars, more machine shops should follow soon. 