I’ll be going through the sessions filling in the pages as I go.

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In short, they are building hexayurts in the wee park in the middle of the Pentagon. As part of STAR-TIDES.

I don’t know where we go from here.

Small super-empowered vanguards can, with the use of systems disruption to amplify effort, delegitimize weakened governmental hierarchies and force them into the box of hollow states. However, instead of a pure organic government envisioned by Che, an organic open source insurgency, composed of a plethora of small super-empowered groups (that appeal to primary loyalties of tribe, cast, clan, family, gang, ideology, etc.), form in the vacuum. This open source insurgency will only bring fragmentation and perpetual conflict. The vanguard’s role, is merely as a catalyst for its formation.

John Robb, Global Guerrillas

What if the global guerrilla vanguard was constructive rather than destructive? What if the vanguard was building resilience and autonomy, survival and security instead of chaos and destruction?

Small super-empowered groups can also do potholes as, reportedly, Hizbollah has been able to show in Lebanon. Maybe not global guerrillas but certainly a localized, decentralized model, Cuba’s already gone through their Peak Oil experience and adapted through lots of public transport, bicycles, and local agriculture. In the 70s some of the 60s civil rights/antiwar/feminist/environmental energies of the Cold War baby boomers went into community gardens, farmers’ markets, food coops, feeding programs, local agriculture, sustainability and environmental restoration. These networks still exist.

In the face of oil-funded terrorism, an oil war in Iraq, an overstretched, under-budgeted, corrupt social welfare system, and increasingly expensive natural disasters and emergencies Solar IS Civil Defense can be a logical open source guerrilla response.

For instance, a minimal amount of solar electric photovoltaic PV power charges batteries. Combine that with a hand crank, foot pedal, or string pull generator and you have virtually permanent personal electric power (cell phone, flashlight or reading light, computer, camera…) for emergency situations, just in case.

Before the invasion of Afghanistan, NATO forces dropped solar/dynamo AM/FM/SW radios for the civilian population. After the invasion, they gave away more radios. Unfortunately, the solar/dynamo wouldn’t allow for battery switching. The NATO radios charge only the internal hardwired battery. If the solar/dynamo could charge batteries in the external battery bay, then you could charge one set of batteries while you used in rotation another two or three sets of batteries to operate a cell phone and light as well as the radio. The solar/dynamo would be a source of electricity day or night, by sunlight or muscle power, at least for the lifetime of the batteries, crank, pedal, string, and PV panel. Now add a bicycle.

The Bogolight charges standard size AA batteries and thus does allow for battery switching. The Bogolight is a solar LED flashlight or reading light that provides 4 hours of light for every 8 hours of sunlight. It is very well designed. You buy one for $25 and they donate a second light to various development programs around world. Solar IS Civil Defense at home and abroad.

The human scale combination of solar power with human muscle power allows the human power component to become a kind of Solar Swadeshi. Instead of turning Gandhi’s spinning wheel making thread for khadi cloth, cranking or pedalling or pulling a string, the repetitive practice of personal power producing electricity for an AA battery all the way back to the grid.

Open source global guerrilla vanguard as solar scholar warriors fomenting resilience, cooperation, and the free exercise of the imagination, green ecological designers to save us at the last possible moment, the promise of the Whole Earth Catalog, Woodstock, New Alchemy Institute, the Viridian greens, Burning Man, worldchanging…

Crossposted to http://solarray.blogspot.com/2007/11/solar-insurgency.html

The short answer is that I believe the aims are largely congruent.

I believe that distributed networks, the result of cheap and networked computers, lead to the emergence, and eventual dominance, of non-reciprocal peer production for anything that is immaterial and non-rival. This means: voluntary engagement to directly create social value that is put in a commons.

But this solution can’t work in the world of scarce physical goods, where we need to replenish the resources. So physical production can still use market exchange or other reciprocal schemes.

A preferred solution is therefore: combining open designs with localized digital production, the result of an inevitable lowering of the cost of physical capital, while the cost of transport, raw materials will likely increase. This is concretely what I believe you are working on here.

We have assembled a growing body of material at P2Pfoundation.net, 5,000 pages and growing, on how open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented approaches are emerging and growing in every human field of activity.

The key ideas are explained in this foundational essay here at CTheory.

If you really want original, but more controversial insights, on how peer to peer fits in with the trend to localized digital production efforts, then this is a good reference.

I’m basically arguing that our current system is both hitting limits in ‘extensive’ growth, because of the ecological crisis, but cannot convert simply to intensive market growth in the immaterial sphere. This situation is very similar to the situation of Rome, and led to a reconfiguration to the feudal system, which was very different from their slaveholding empire. Our current system has it backwards, it believes nature is infinite (pseudo-abundance), and that non-rival goods should be made artifcially scarce (pseudo-scarcity), thereby both destroying the biosphere and slowing down the necessary social innovation needed to solve the challenges. We must therefore simply overturn this mad logic into recognizing both the natural limits, and the natural free flow of digital information.

I try to explain that the market can only grow on the periphery of an immaterial and abundant digital commons, here .

But, as such profound shift takes time, I attempt to give a timeline for this transition, here .

What this all means for politics is explained here .

How do our projects ‘fit’ together:

- your movement/network represents a key player in terms of the concrete realization of the potential for globa-localized digital fabrication, while the p2pfoundation attempts to be the knowledge gardener of all the congruent attempts in all social fields. In other words, we attempt to build bridges, first through knowledge linking, then through internetworking individuals, later hopefully with some more powerful means, i.e. creating mechanisms for permanent dialogue.

As a person, I try to do two things: 1) be the librarian of the movement(s); 2) attempting to permanently synthetise all that this happening into a coherent vision of social change. Of course, we are no longer in a period where individual ‘intellectuals’ can understand complex realities of their own, in other words, the ‘next buddha will be a collective’, but, I hope to use my skills as best as I can, together with a global cyber-collective which may construct such understanding together.

Of course, I/we will not be the only people doing this, and that is fine.
Again, in terms of complementarity, I will not and cannot compete with your work in organizing a global network of people invested primarily in open AT and personal fabrication, BUT, I hope I can create a platform that can draw people in other fields to your specialized resources, and to integrate the real and concrete progress (and learning from difficulties) that you are making, into an overall vision that also looks at what other movements are achieving.

Take a look - all feedback more than welcome!

(Mind you, a lot of things sound good when you first hear the reports, but are more problematic in practice. This needs looking into.)

What would make it even better:

• Turn it into a composting toilet (without compromising public health).
• Open at the bottom (where it is far enough from water sources, and far enough above the water table), so that later on it can be covered over and a tree planted above all that nutritious… stuff.
• A no-mix style of toilet bowl, to direct at least some of the urine away, to improve the digestion or composting of the waste.
• Make it cheaper, to enable widespread deployment. The older model BiPu was quoted at A$320 (US$290) which clearly makes it only an option for well-funded emergency programs. Even then, that adds up to a substanial sum of money when dealing with a large displaced population.
• Make it from locally available materials. (For rapid deployment in emergencies this is less important that the fact that it can be flat-packed and kept on stand-by; but using local materials means it’s easier for people anywhere to use it and adapt it however they wish.)

Note that there may be a conflict between strict public health priorities and strict composting toilet requirements - in particular the water flush is likely to make it more of a septic system, rather than a composting system. But in an emergency, preventing cholera is more critical than fertilizing the crops.

Recent information isn’t easily found - when I head to Aceh (Sumatra) soon, I’ll check out how the BiPu systems there have worked out.

See also: WASTEWATER TREATMENT / DISPOSAL IN DISRUPTED STATES EAST TIMOR (MILITARY & CIVIL), Robert Patterson, (inventor of the BiPu/FSDS) (2001)

• wiki, called by some the Encyclopedia of Influenza. (There’s quite a lot of stuff on wikipedia, but of course there’s not that much room there for talking about future events with scenarios and ideas governments dare not think about in public.)
• and forum, where a number of so-called “flubies” congregate to follow the news and see how we can prepare, and help their communities (and the whole wide world) to prepare, for the next influenza pandemic.

Why “the next flu pandemic”?

• There have been 10 pandemics in 300 years, about 10 to 50 years appart, the most recent about 39 years ago, so why not this century?
• There’s a new virus (H5N1) which can make humans ill, though it hasn’t managed to go efficiently human-to-human … At least not yet, but it’s in flu viruses’ nature to mutate a little every time they replicate inside animal cells, and also to swap genes if another influenza virus is present inside the same cell … so why not soon?

Now, what about severity? It may vary across a wide range. Scientists are not sure that H5N1, if it becomes pandemic, needs to reduce its ability to kill (61%). Though of course they don’t know if H5N1 will become pandemic. (Yes, it could be some other influenza virus.)

In any case, the next pandemic may be severe because of lethality or disruption or both. Some even think in our highly interconnected and just-in-time’d world there’s can’t be such a thing as a mild pandemic (and maybe we just don’t know, because it’s a wicked problem). Yes: we’ll learn how to sneeze in our elbow pretty quickly, but there may be some (unexpected and sometimes somewhat fun) shortages too.

All of this adds up to a conclusion: This panflu business, among a number of others, is one specific “WHY” for the appropriate, sustainable, plain cool and sensible technologies others here are writing about. Things like Vinay’s hexayurt basic services. For millions (which is tricky). At home, and sooner rather than later. Just in case.

Wishing to learn more from you all. Thanks!

The Watercone® is a solar powered water desalinator that takes salt or brackish water and distills it into freshwater. It is simple to use, lightweight and mobile.

Designed to produce 1.5 liters a day, it provides a child’s daily needs for fresh water and reduces the number of children who die as a result of drinking unsafe water, currently estimated to be 5000 or more each and every day.

The WATERCONE® is a long lasting UV resistant Poly Carbonate product and can be used up to 5 years daily. The material is non-toxic, non-flammable and 100% recyclable. The black pan for the saltwater is already made out of 100% recycled PC. Even when the WATERCONE® becomes old and tarnished, it can still be used to collect rain water, as a roof panel or container for other goods.

The Watercone® project is looking for investors and companies to initiate mass production tooling and distribution. So the Watercone can be manufactured for a lower price and become affordable to the people in need…

Single products are not available at the moment!

The Watercone® was tested in Yemen in 2004 and in the Lake Baikal region of Russia in 2005.

Thanks to Ecogeek for bringing this design to my attention.

Until everybody who needs one can get a Watercone®, you can pasteurize water in clear plastic bottles by exposing them to the sun.

The Solar Water Disinfection (SODIS) process is a simple technology used to improve the microbiological quality of drinking water. SODIS uses solar radiation to destroy pathogenic microorganisms which cause water borne diseases.

SODIS is ideal to treat small quantities of water. Contaminated water is filled into transparent plastic bottles and exposed to full sunlight for six hours.

Sunlight is treating the contaminated water through two synergetic mechanisms: Radiation in the spectrum of UV-A (wavelength 320-400nm) and increased water temperature. If the water temperatures raises above 50°C, the disinfection process is three times faster.

You can raise the temperature of the water in transparent bottles by putting them in the sun against a dark background.

Simple Solar Rules:
Dark heats up
Light reflects
Clear keeps off the wind

As suggested above, years from now, when your Watercone® wears out, you can use it to collect rainwater for the gravity drip irrigation system exhibited at the recent Design for the Other 90% show at NYC’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

Change the color of the gravity drip bag to black and you have a solar hot water heater. [See Simple Solar Rules above.]

There are lots of other things you can do with sunlight and plastic containers.

I plant my garden a month or six weeks early by practicing Recycled Solar. Place a ring of plastic bottles on the soil, fill them with water, plant seeds of your choice (I’ve grown tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, beans, and greens with this technique) in the middle, and cap it with another bottle with its bottom cut out. This makes a solar heated coldframe or cloche.

Solar IS Civil Defense.