October 2008
Four notes on the last few days.
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.
New Hardware: Acer Aspire One
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.
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!
On sudden poverty
Tips for new paupers from The Exiled.
Really kind of heartbreaking. Sad.
Shaking out the big ideas
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.
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.
It’s just as well I’m going more private sector…
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?)
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.