STANDARRD is a network of mutually supportive sustainable/appropriate technology activists. It’s open to anybody and we’re inviting you to join.

STANDARRD provides a space for us to learn from each other, discover our respective projects and how they help transform the world, and dialog about how to be more effective agents of change.

The name has some history. It was originally proposed as an alternative name for the “Expedient Infrastructure for Transitory Populations” project, which is currently going forwards under the name “TIDES” (Transient Infrastructures for Disaster and Emergency Support.) TIDES is a fairly heavyweight group with a lot of involvement from National Defense University, the American Red Cross, and various other .gov and .mil groups. They’re really working hard on demonstrating and learning about a whole new generation of appropriate technologies.

STANDARRD has a broader vision that TIDES. STANDARRD is about the whole picture - poverty, environment, infrastructure, information technology, health and medicine - everything. That’s because it is not about systems or technologies, but about people and processes. I’m convinced that the same kinds of radical, break-out successes that we’ve seen in software are coming to the world as a whole, in engineering, in farming, in every other field.

Open Everything, as they say. That’s not to say that there’s no role for private enterprise or profit - somebody has to keep the world running - but Openness is a philosophy which is about more than intellectual property. It’s a way of seeing life.

STANDARRD stands for:

S ustainable
T echnologies
A cceleration
N etwork for
D evelopment
A ssistance and
R apid
R elief
D eployment

That is to say, a group of people who are working together to speed up how quickly we develop and deploy sustainable technologies. Then there’s the DARRD part.

This is a bodge. DARRD originally stood for something like “Development Assistance and Rapid Relief Deployment.” It’s all much the same territory as TIDES, because TIDES is very closely allied with the Hexayurt Project, which is my main activity. So, for now, consider DARRD to be a hangover from the hexayurt-centric birth of the network. I’m open to both new acronyms and totally new names, but for now, let’s get off the ground and we’ll figure out names as we go if we grow discontent.

The hexayurt is a project of synergy. Sometime I’m going to draw a map of all the ideas and pieces that had to come together to make the Hexayurt Project happen - it’s huge. Because we focus on whole systems, we can integrate “off the shelf” blocks of capability, like solar water pasteurization or the wood gasification stove. We don’t mind if it’s commercial or Free/Open, although there has to be a viable Commodity or Free/Open alternative for us to be comfortable with any given system to ensure continuity of supply.

But that focus on synergy, and on combining many small systems into something useful, is the experience that is guiding me towards STANDARRD. When we put all of our pieces together, and share news and views about our work on these projects, I think we’ll see the outline of a whole that is otherwise invisible.

So, welcome to STANDARRD. May god bless her, and all who sail (blog) in her.

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