Disastr.org is the simple, easy to remember resource on the “Networked Domestic Disaster Response” plan.
Beginning to put up some diagrams, there may even be some real detail going up there in a visual form in the next few weeks.
On August 19th-24th the Fourth International Fab Lab Forum and Symposium on Digital Fabrication was held at the University of Chicago and the Museum of Science and Industry, in Illinois. Now the fallout has mostly subsided but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
The talks and presentations from the symposium have been made available online. To quote Vinay, “And, ye gods, is there a lot of stuff going on at the FAB thing.” Check it out.
This site is where I’m going to begin to organize material for the oft-mentioned, never begun book, roughly entitled “How to Save The World And Not Die Trying” (title subject to change.)
Gupta Option’s first piece is about the limits of American government spending to impact the very poor, from a risk management perspective. It’s pretty rough and ready but I wanted to break new ground today - there’ll be a bunch of “Greatest Hits” from the archives of the last year coming up in the next few weeks, in greatly revised and edited forms of course - and it was important to me to start building the context for updating those works in public.
I’m convinced that this business model problem: charities can’t absorb risk, and risk is how we do engineering, is at the core of the next steps of solving global problems.
Nobody has solved it for music, yet. Maybe it takes a bigger problem. How do we split the risk of investing in expensive development projects without large, centralized, slow agencies in the middle grinding progress to a halt?
Silicon Valley is our model here - what’s the Appropriate Technology Silicon Valley?
By the way, I only just figured that out. Some of you may have known for a while.
Thanks first of all to Vinay for setting up this blog.
For any of you who have been following the development of the SleepBreeze personal cooler story on my BreezeBlog we’ll be updating the story a bit more this week. We’ve been working on prototypes of the final component - one that has caused us much angst, frustration, … over the summer. This knocked our product launch schedule back - but if we hadn’t set a target release date, then hey - we’d probably have been sitting here come Christmas 2010 still prototyping!!
Jill and I also became proud parents again 2 weeks ago. So, we’re now juggling all the things we need to finish before product launch with round the clock feeds!
In between all this we did manage to put a poster for Burning Man together last week and Lindsey kindly picked it up in Reno. And, as we understand it, someone set fire to “The Man” early, making access to the Hexayurt and viewing of the poster a little tricky. Well, at least our product is fire resistant!
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.