The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

CheapID - Rights Respecting Biometrics

Links to the paper, the Drupal implementation, and so on.

Factor e Farm update 10: taking dirt out of the ground, making bricks, hexayurts

They’re financing this on a community supported model - we send them our money and they do the work that the Government should be funding.

I really want to stress that: this is work that should be government funded, the most natural channel being university research funding. But universities have narrow cultural mandates, do not tend to do this kind of full spectrum innovation, and otherwise just have not been tackling these problems in this kind of extremely involved, hands-on, live in your own gear kind of way. We can’t pool money through paying our taxes and get this sort of work done. We have to pool our money by sending it to Marcin.

The work they did in putting together and documenting a reasonable approach to making a hexayurt using conventional building materials has really been an enabling step for the Hexayurt project. I was going to take a crack at it in Iceland about three months ago, but the costs were prohibitive. So it was undone, until Marcin and the team got down and dirty and made one. Here’s a picture (and click it for a little of the story.)

They documented carefully. We have a gig and a half of files, mostly video showing the process of the build and structural details. Unfortunately I’m flat out right now and I don’t have the resources to turn this into a proper video - we all need video editing help because it takes a lot of time to get the good stuff online for people.

So, bottom line: I’m Vinay Gupta, and I endorse Marcin and the Open Source Ecology team as worthy recipients of your money for four big reasons:

* They work they are doing is great. It’s important, practical research in vital areas. It’s broad, it’s integrated, and the team doing the work is credible.

* You can see progress. If you watch the last 10 episodes of the Open Source Ecology Factor e Live updates, you’ll see that tangible goals are set in one episode, and three or four shows later, that built system is being casually used to work on the next task. That’s what Marcin promised, and that’s what Marcin and the team has delivered. Steady, real, documented progress.

* The work is not being funded by public sources or by conventional NGOs. If we want it done, we have to finance.

* It’s useful to me, personally, that Marcin and the crew continue to do this. The plywood hexayurt work was great, really enabling for us, and not something I could do from here. That research was done for everybody, including for the Hexayurt Project itself by the Open Source Ecology team. So… you like this, you want it to keep going, you send them money
Here’s the donation link: FUND MORE OPEN TRACTOR RESEARCH

We’ve been working on this stuff a while too, and if you’d like to throw us a bone, you can give a few dollars to dreamhost to cover our web hosting bills.

Right now, in terms of funding ongoing practical research, Marcin’s team is where you send the dollars.

What I’m doing right now is work like this:

Our business model is to sell the service of doing this kind of training work to organizations that need it - NGOs, government, business - so the materials are fully open but if you want us to turn up and teach you these things, you pay for our time. That work is happening at The Open Toolbox. As we stabilize more free and open source appropriate technologies into systems that can be deployed at a town, city and county level, we’ll expand and upgrade the service offering. So if you want to support us, find us some clients. We can also handle on the ground implementations of things like conversion of tent cities to hexayurt cities, proactive planning for disaster response, risk assessment and many other services which are useful for larger organizations and government.

Long term management of funding issues is going to be key to funding engineering research. Here’s the conclusion of a short monograph I wrote on this a few years ago

So what we need is a new class of entities - not a charity, not a business, not a conventional educational institution. The closest models we have are free/open source software projects where many people throw in a little of their time or money to create something together.

In free/open source software, the risk is absorbed in two ways. Firstly, the licenses mean that your work is never absolutely wasted because, even in the event of project failure, the code remains available for other uses. The second risk absorber is that people invest spare cycles in free/open source projects most of the time, rather than working on it with the expectation that it will oe day take care of them.

The big issue is this: for the most part, nobody is dying waiting for their free/open source software to be completed, so spare cycles are enough to get the job done. Plus big companies have the ability to profit from some kinds of free/open source activites, so they are willing to pay and to absorb risk.

So What Do We Do?

We need activity directed at building engineering solutions for the developing world, from entities which are not among the current classes of social infrastructure we have (.gov, .mil, .edu, .org) because these bodies have had at least 20 or 30 years since the discovery of appropriate technology, and have done very little to actually roll out the solutions we all know are on the table, hidden somewhere in the laws of nature themselves.

These new entities provide risk management solutions to engineers who wish to dedicate their lives to working on free/open technology solutions to the pressing and urgent needs of the developing world.

I want your help defining what such an entity would look like, and then building one.

Right now, Open Source Ecology is the group closest to the model I proposed in this piece. Let’s fund them to make it a success, and then move forwards together to revolutionize how engineering, charity and aid are done.

Proceed!

Blog Action Day: Poverty - Ending Poverty with Open Hardware

I gave this talk - about how appropriate technology can save billions of people from the worst effects of poverty - in Reykjavik earlier this year. Here are the slides from the talk and a link to a discussion thread on Global Swadeshi, a poverty alleviation / appropriate technology social network. (gv link)

If you’re new to the site, check out The Hexayurt Project - our open source disaster relief sheltering system.

Another great Pentagon picture

I’m liking those little combined wind/solar units in the background, too.

Right now, at the Pentagon, they’re building Hexayurts (in the courtyard.)

From the STAR-TIDES image stream on the STAR-TIDES twitter.

Thanks, Daniel!

The Open Toolbox for Domestic Disaster Response - new company, new paper

The Open Toolbox for Domestic Disaster Response

The Open Toolbox is our new brand. It’s a consulting company which is focussed on getting open source appropriate technology (OSAT) into commercial supply chains, using a “Red Hat” approach - consulting, custom engineering, service contracts, and all the other stuff that companies and governments need to have in order to buy an open source solution to their problems.

We’ll start with Hexayurts - it’s what we know best - but more to come. Check out the press release to discover more about the venture.

We hope that this will grow rapidly. There’s a ton of amazing technology out there, from incredibly simple systems like SODIS through to the entire Open Farm Tech line of tractors, and brick machines and bioplastic factories. Scaling things globally is very, very different to inventing them, as I’ve found with the Hexayurt, and I hope that my lessons-learned can inform the work of the company and help other people over the hurdles that we’ve seen so far.

Enjoy the paper, and more as we continue to make the picture clearer and more high res.

The First Annual Open Sustainability Network Conference - 18/19 of Oct, 2008

http://www.appropedia.org/Open_Sustainability_Network

And they’re having an event next week

========

OSNCamp is the gathering for all those interested in openness and knowledge sharing for a “just sustainability”. It is also the first gathering of the Open Sustainability Network.

What’s it about?

Thousands of organizations and millions of people are currently working to effectively tackle a set of profound global challenges through the creation, adoption and commercialization of sustainable approaches and clean technologies. Our efforts are fragmented. It is time to promote a culture of working together while maintaining our own special niches by leveraging shared and openly licensed solutions.

Join us for the first Open Sustainability Network unconference as we explore free content and knowledge sharing in sustainability, international development, appropriate technology and solutions to poverty.

The basics

Open Sustainability Network (more information)
http://opensustainabilitynetwork.org/
October 18-19, 2008
8am-4pm (tentative)
Jack Adams hall
Cesar Chavez building
San Fransisco State University
1600 Holloway Ave
San Francisco, CA, 94132 USA

Come play

Join our thriving international community of scholars, makers, thinkers, and world-shakers - the event is open to all with a willingness to contribute and a desire to work throughout the weekend to make change happen. Registration is free and travel scholarships may be available to those with financial need (depending on sponsorship).

Register at: http://osncon.eventbrite.com/

The Hexayurt Project and the Global Swadeshi Network are members.

Please cut and paste this and send it around. Let’s really launch this thing!

The Gupta Option is Open for Business

The Biz.GuptaOption.Com site is now open for business.

Anybody interested in commercializing my work, or meeting those others who are interested in commercializing my work, please drop me an email. The site is private, for the moment, although I will discuss opening it up fully with the key players once the site is up and running. There is a wiki, a forum, and there will be a mailing list if there is demand for one, plus the usual tools.

But the key to this is the community: there’s much to do here, from ultratechnology CheapID which may enable companies like VISA to issue credit cards to tribesmen, through to the humble Hexayurt and associated infrastructure, with a ton of unexplored territory in infrastructure, in resilience training, and in a dozen other areas.

The one common denominator in this work is that I am a bastard to deal with. I, myself, have foregone wealth, physical comfort, years of time I could have spent doing other things, any number of not-quite-right business deals and many other thing to give my work away to the public in a series of websites and public domain works.

I take this “free science and technology in the global public interest” thing seriously. Money can be made, indeed, it must be, but my ability to compromise with the ethical and social demands of the conventional business environment is minimal. Some 30 million people a year are dying of poverty right now, and anybody sitting on top of a pile of money greater than it would take to finance their own heart transplant out of their own pocket is murdering people by inaction every single day. So, yes, there is money to be made, but the existing order is murderous and I expect anybody who doesn’t understand that implicitly to have a very hard time dealing with me because I have dedicated my life to doing something about this and the natural tension between those who want to accumulate, and those who want to save is very, very strong around me.

From the intro message:

Whatever Happens We Have You Covered

I really want you to think about this phrase. It came to me today as the essence of my work - an unconditional guarantee of safety from inclement weather, bad circumstances, and maybe even evil people. It’s about knowing where you stand, who you are working with, and what is at stake in the terribly safety critical environment of real life.

Roughly 30 million a year die from poverty. That’s a high number - FAO quotes 36 million as “malnutrition-related” but their definition is very lax. For sure, without a doubt, at least 5m go down from problems related to clean water and indoor air quality and the lack-of-appropriate-shelter deaths are hard to count, but this world has an awful lot of doorways, and an awful lot of people losing their resilience sleeping in them.

Worse, we’re in a position where we all know that a financial landslide could topple the global economic order and, worse, the global infrastructure provision systems. If you can’t haul diesel or turbine parts, you can’t power vehicles or generate electricity. In the very wealthiest countries it is unlikely to result in blacked-out cities, but places like Mexico City could very quickly lose their stable access to electricity affecting tens of millions of people - pushed from a nearly first world standard of living back into developing world conditions.
I don’t know if that will happen, but I know that it might.

The question is how far, how fast, and what will be affected. This is a gradient - light scenarios result in small changes, heavy scenarios clean the board. These people have money and they will fight falling back into poverty as their lives are affected, possibly infrastructure first. They are a market which needs access to the kinds of machines we can build to stay afloat.

You know the shelter story or you would not be here. That is very urgent too, but technologically much simpler than the infrastructure systems. It’s also much closer to market. But, as we really get started on what could be 10 years of catastrophic collapse in some areas of the world let’s try and keep one eye on the infrastructure side of this so that, when it is time to move, we can lay down the law there too. http://smallisprofitable.org needs an implementation team, and the time is right or very nearly so.
Gupta

PS: Note to the wider community. If you’re among my friends, and you want to come and see who’s around and maybe pick up partners and funding for your own projects, come on in. Keep it reasonable, keep it real, and we’ll grow an empire together, ok? You get rich first, you hire me

It’s that time of year again: STAR-TIDES at NDU

Click here for more pictures, Click here for more information.

Next week - STAR-TIDES at the Pentagon. That’s when everything changes.

Disaster Shopping with Gupta

So there’s a very real possibility that civilization as we know it is about to crash. God knows, Iceland is. Here’s one way to think about this.

1> Estimate the possibility of general systems failure:

1%
5%
25%
100%

2> Multiply what’s in your bank account by that number.

3> That’s about how much you would rationally spend on things to help you survive the crash scenario right now because, well, if you need stuff at the same time everybody else needs stuff, your money’s no good. These are mostly fringe items and will sell out immediately in a sudden crash scenario.

What should I buy?

My approach to these things has always been a bit idiosyncratic. I used to be a hobo (literally rode freight trains) and I’ve spent a lot of time dirtbag camping. I used to have gear, then I stopped having gear, and my quality of camping experience didn’t change much, not because I was ultralight, but because I was generally lucky. Poor gear and good gear work the same when things are OK. Good gear sometimes works when your life depends on it.

This is a “poor gear” list. Not much is military quality, it’s all useful consumer crap that you can buy cheaply and easily that’ll really help if things Go Wrong.

Item One: Food
Go to Sam’s Club or CostCo and buy cheap calories in cans. Tuna, beef stew, hot dogs. Nothing that you can’t eat cold, and not vegetables. You want the cheapest raw calories you can find. In an immanent disaster where I knew the food supply was just going to stop, I’d be buying lard and cooking oil, not rice. Cannot stress this too strongly, spend your budget on calories. With moderate care, one person’s food for a month is $100. Including beef jerky. You’re not going to live on this stuff for more than a month or two unless you kill your neighbors, this is about comfort, not survival. You’re buying this stuff to feed your family and best friends for two weeks, not yourself and your dog for a year.

Calories per dollar is your guide. Calories per dollar. If you are hungry, you will eat it. (for a few weeks - for months, you need variety and nutrition.)

Item Two: Communications
Two items: keeping your cell phone working through power outages, and keeping track of your family in a no comms crisis.

If you don’t have a transistor radio around the house, buy this one or spend $10 at wal-mart. Shortwave is a nice feature, though. You want that, if you know what it is.

For your cell phone, you need power. You could buy a solar powered cell phone charger - there are many good enough brands out there. This, however, is a onesie. It does one thing, and it’s not very flexible, adaptable or resilient.

Instead, try a solar powered batter charger, and something to adapt (a key word) that power to the needs of your cell phone. There are two ways to go with solar batter chargers: overkill and underkill or worst.

That Accumanager 2020 (the overkill option) is the world’s greatest battery charger, by the way. I miss mine (sob!)

Now let’s turn your charged batteries into a charged cell phone with a little widget. A few bucks, you could do it with a wire, but this works. And has lots of adapters so you can charge your friends phones. For $10 each.

Disaster economics: it’s not price gouging it’s financing expedited access to critical infrastructures, mate.

Ah, you say, but now the damn cell towers aren’t working any more. And you don’t want to leave the house to forage for wood because you want to be at home in case of news. Well, now you need walkie talkies. There are tons, you want two things:

1> GMRS, not FRS. And a good brand, which has decent reviews, and works.
2> It should take 4AA batteries.

These Midland radios are perfect. There are some roughly equivalent Motorolas. You’ll get two miles out of them through most situations, which is a half hour walk, or a 10 minute run if you’re fit. 5 miles on a good day, which is an hour’s walk. You want these.

Why is 4AA the ONLY CHOICE? Because AAA batteries cost three times what AAs cost for the same energy storage, and you need three times as many of them for your devices. AAA batteries are the scourge of the earth, and you should shun all devices which subsist on this scum. AA! Only AA.

These low-discharge NIMH rechargable batteries are all roughly the same. The number refers to battery capacity, but you’d rather have 12 decent quality 2200 than 8 excellent 2900s. Low discharge is really nice - they stay full in storage, rather than gradually going empty. That’s nice.

Buy one set of batteries per device, plus two extra sets per person, plus one set for the charger.

That is a lot of batteries, but what you’re talking about is running your life on these for weeks or months if the grid goes down for a while, or for three years until the cells die if you’re in a TEOWAKI scenario.

Buy batteries.

Also note that’s three, different, incompatible devices - transistor radio, cell phone, walkie talkies. Interesting how communications is so complicated.

Item Three: Conveniences

AA LED Headlamp. You’ll get used to this: NOT AAA! NEVER EVER AAA.

Pick one that suits your budget. Then buy a backup from Wal-Mart for $12 and be amazed how bright it is. The one you paid $40 for is waterproof, though.

For your heavy lighting needs, also consider the world’s best price/performance flashlight. Runs on AAs, of course, either on two or one. 6 hours of light equivalent to a big maglight. Voltage regulated which means it doesn’t get dimmer as the batteries run out. This is an incredibly pleasant feature for a heavy use light because you just turn it on, and it’s always the same brightness, right up until the last 10 hours when it’s still pretty usable. Some people prefer unregulated - but you saw how that worked for finance.

Honorable mentions: a great LED headlamp you should consider and the venerable, beautiful, 4AA 2W Underwater Kinetics flashlight which will never, ever let you down in the rain, mud or zombie attacks, but is fifty bucks. Lovely item, though. All their gear is.

Utterly superior wood-burning camp stove. Takes AA for the blower. Can heat an entire house, or just burn your chilli in 15 seconds. Lovely, lovely device, cannot be overpriased. Buy one just to wonder at its magnificence.

Item Four: Water

Bleach and vitamin C tablets or Emergen-C. Purify the water with the bleach, then after it’s safe to drink, add the vitamin C (just a pinch) to remove the chlorine taste.

Why is water fourth? It’s fifteen seconds to acquire, and you probably have it in your house already. If water goes out for a few days, you’re going to need a sawdust toilet. But that’s a bucket and a lot of newspaper (instead of sawdust.) You’ll live.

Item Five: Comprehensive First Aid Kit
One of these depending on budget.

Item Six: Other Crap I Like
World’s best space blanket. World’s best emergency whistle. World’s warmest, best designed, uglyest outdoor clothes. Wiggy’s secret is that he silicon-coats insulating fibers so they stay dry and don’t compress so the gear lasts forever and doesn’t trap moisture at all, even when you sweat. Unfortunately the clothes are boxy, like a Saab. But unbeatable. And never forget the Lovely, tasty, mainstay food bars.

Finally, don’t forget the hand sanitizer because the developing world is a filthy, filthy dirty nasty place, and pandemic flu, bad sanitation and many other potentially fatal risks can be reduced by a simple rule: every time you or somebody else comes into your home, people squirt this stuff on their hands and wash them. At the door, right after people take off their shoes.

Right now, we’ve all got it easy: the tap water is pure, the lights come on, the food is cheap and plentiful. I believe we’ll be back there again in 10 years, but cushion your transition if you can. Learning how to deal with nature again, with the unpredictability of a life that you cannot fully control, is the heart of the experience of poverty, and of social and financial collapse, disaster and so on.

Wash your damn hands. It can save your life.

If you want to learn more about this kind of thinking, take a look at the Fragile Plenty diagram (PDF, and zoom in!) and consider watching the Six Ways To Die section (5 minutes) of the Reykjavik Briefing. Draw your own Six Ways To Die map, and work on moving your essential services to your own house and your own administrative control.

Good luck!