First video from my new collaboration with Akvo, an open source water charity, working on getting ultra low cost videos made which explain their operations and make Akvo more transparent. This is 30 minutes from Mark on Akvopedia which is an open water technology resource. For commentary and making of, see The Akvo Blog. We’re going to be doing a lot more of these in the next few weeks. Enjoy!
Rapid move to take a gig with AKVO (everybody’s favorite water appropriate tech outfit!) helping out with a number of things, including video.
So… game on. Who do I need to be meeting?! 
Really, really good and interesting song.
Just a little cheesy, but really nails a sense of the re-opening of the future.
I’m packing for London. I have a feeling that I’m going to be doing a lot more traveling in the next couple of years than in the last few, so I’m sort of assembling “standard kit” as I go, figuring out what I need from the rats next of cables and odd converters. Things which don’t charge off USB pain me, and these days the cables are bigger than the electronics.
It’s strange packing against 40 Kg. I wish I had a scale (I may well pick one up) but it’s more the sense of fitting through the eye of a needle. Fortunately or unfortunately I no longer travel with tent and water filter and walkie talkies. It’s the suit and the extra batteries, the mobile studio basically. There’s a few hundred bucks of expensive audio gear that’s probably just too big and heavy to make the cut, I suppose I’ll post it.
The hard part was that brief period where I travelled with both sets of gear. It’s been a few years now.
Two laptops, a terabyte of storage, two cameras, two microphones, cabling, chargers, batteries… a few years from now it’s going to be vastly different, smaller, more integrated devices, terabytes everywhere, probably things like phased array microphones… in the future, every device will be a video output device. Editing will be more and more the critical point: how little time can you make delivering your message take.
There’s probably a rule there: every time you half the length, you multiply the potential audience by 10. I suspect that’s about right.
So right now I’m trying to figure out how to simplify my message by another factor of two or four. I’ve spent a couple of years getting the depth in place - there’s now four or six hours of video and a dozen or so papers and long articles which flesh out the deep theoretical models - enough for a book, enough for people who care to dig through and understand my chain of thought about the world much as I understand it.
Now what I have to do is simplify it for people who just want to do it.
That’s a shift from a basically academic and reflective model to a model of active propagation: not teasing out what is right, but trying to inspire people to change their behavior in helpful ways.
Active persuasion.
The fundamental vision of the movement is shared to at least the same degree as the vision of the original free software movers and shakers. Shared enough to get the job done. Enough is held common to enable mass collaboration.
That wasn’t obvious to me until I spent some time talking to people at Global Swadeshi and it became apparent that we all spoke the same language and had come to broadly similar conclusions. And now, implementation.
Estimated time of stay: two months minimum.
Will likely be back in Iceland after that.
1> The laptop is the new desktop
- moving essential communications functions on to the Acer Aspire One (AA1)
- leaves the MacBook as the workstation frees up a ton of ram, but more importantly, frees up focus.
- it seems to be psychologically significant that the subnote is *small* - can’t say why - but I think this will be a dominant hardware form factor in the developing world. If it took a SIM card and worked as a phone, it’d be everywhere.
2> Engaged in what amounts to a long range planning conference
- couple of visitors from the US and Canada - long series of strategy meetings mainly oriented around setting priorities and putting things into context - super high level abstract stuff
- haven’t been on top of email etc. catching up tomorrow.
- expect great things
3> Iceland has not collapsed
- things continue much as they did, I’m not sure how or why but things are just running along unchanged
- how long can it go on like that? Possibly indefinitely depending on things like a Euro bailout. We will see.
4> The Open Toolbox continues to gather steam. Am meeting with folks about it next week. Expect really great things.
Gift from a dear friend who knows that my mac needs some time in the shop and that I could use a traveling machine. Wikipedia page on the AA1.
Four thoughts.
1> Keyboard is very good for the size.
2> Machine is fast - subjectively faster than my Macbook for some operations.
3> Bundled software is more than adequate. Has python on it. Putting on skype takes a few minutes, getting it to run from the cutesy start menu requires one config file edit. SSH is about the same amount of work, ditto gpg. Python included. IRC client would not hurt either.
4> Minor quirks. Power adapter is small, but the cable from the adapter to the wall socket is huge - half the size of the machine even tightly wrapped. Odd. Also one of the two SD card slots is fully recessed, but used by the software automagically as an expansion of onboard storage. The other is not fully recessed, and is treated as a normal drive. Both should be fully recessed.
Overall, I think that going with the SSD (8 gig) rather than the HD (160 gig) makes sense for three reasons: battery life, general system robustness (with an SSD these are tougher than most ruggedized machines are), clarity about what the machine is for. Right now it’s configured as the IM box and I may move my RSS feeds on to it, so there’s a simple kinesthetic cue for main work activities on the mac, and gossip with my homies on the AA1.
Still some question about “working set” management. There’s no substitute for Omnigraffle and I find Pages a pleasure to use. Ecto’s hard to beat. There is no substitute for a mac.
So this is one of those time periods during which I go through and cull things - what ideas are workable, which ideas are fail-laden monstrosities. There are a bunch of critical mass phenomena all heading in roughly the same direction at roughly the same speed, and now its a case of figuring out what the critical places I can apply leverage are to get some results.
At a deep theoretical level, I’m largely done with with disaster relief and the hexayurt. I first started thinking about this stuff in 2002, and it’s now nearly 2009. I’ve got one or two more rounds of diagrams to draw - “six ways to die” for organizations and nation states, and maybe some software to produce - but, fundamentally, I haven’t had a really radical new idea on this stuff in about three years. I had a fallow year in 2006, 2007 was CheapID and getting STAR-TIDES off the ground. 2008, to date, was the first attempt at hexayurt commercialization, and the Global Swadeshi Network. The six ways to die video really convinced me (when I watched it again) that Six Ways To Die (needs renamed) is formally correct and technically accurate, so that nails down some of the namespace management problems (”what problem does this technology solve?”) that we’ve had since about mid 2003…
This stuff is all pretty much done. It’s not fully matured and out in the world, but barring some loose ends, I am out of profound intellectual challenges here. There’s code to write, there’s details to arrange, there’s work to finish, but to a fairly high degree of certainty, I’m now convinced that this is all entirely practical, reasonable and doable.
Next steps? Learn enough medicine to make a meaningful contribution to the $10 per year health insurance plan or, god help me, make enough money doing something to self-fund actual implementations of some of these ideas.
The other option is to admit that, at root, these are all governance problems. At that point the questions are “why are our national priorities - in whatever nation - so utterly broken?” I know four dozen people who could just fix countries if people would listen to them - smart, practical engineers who believe in things like strong education and preventative medical care. So that’s the other option: move towards converting some of this base into the kind of political clout it would take to get implementation.
I mean, c’mon, this is the best game in town, guys. With a couple of million dollars of development money I could deliver a new civilization. I’ve gotta think about that.
Because these new mac laptops are gorgeous.
(searching for the new equilibrium… what’s the sweet spot for maximum effectiveness? It’s between the gutter and the five star hotel, but where between?)
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.
I just love this post. This is exactly the kind of magic that I hoped that Global Swadeshi would produce. Now let’s build it!
I’ll note that the same logic applies to the dry coastlines of Africa too. And I bet there are ways, at scale, of cutting corners we can’t even imagine now.