Announcing GlueSniffers
by Vinay Gupta • January 22, 2009 • Hexayurt • 7 Comments
GlueSniffers is today, February 9th 2009 in Bermondsey, London.
A Tuttleish get-together for people interested in the intersection between ICT and appropriate technology, so named by the Mad Genius of Akvo – a hotly contested title – Mark Charmer being the current holder. Dougald Hine of the School of Everything – another mad genius, you may see a theme running though this event – is also co-convening.
What are GlueSniffers? What we’re looking for is the fertile delta where the ICT game intersects with the sea of appropriate technology – things like Akvo itself, the new new School of Everything appropriate technology focus, Appropedia, Dadamac or even STAR-TIDES. The glue refers to joining pieces (glue code, ahem!) to form a bigger whole than the component parts.
Topics for the first meeting: geospacial and taxonomy sharing between organizations. What would it take to get datasets like maps of all the wells in Tanzania passed around all the organizations who could use them? What about tools that are location-aware like Twitter as a backbone for some kinds of aid or disaster relief collaborations?
We’ll have meetup or similar links up this week, but the basic information is:
Movement Design Bureau at 5:30PM on Monday, February 2nd, 2008.
The address is 25 Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey, London. It is about a five minute walk from the Bermondsey stop on the Jubilee line, one stop from London Bridge.
(picture from Mark Charmer’s visit to Nimdivandh village, Kutch Province. Gujurat)
Any hope for video from your presentations from the Temporary School?
I don’t know when the video will be up, Al. The audio is up now and the quality is pretty good, you could start there 😉
All right. Thanks for all the hard work, Vinay. I was happy to see a Hexayurt on the playa this last Summer.
Looks good Vinay. I hope to be there.
Pam
Dadamac
Vinay Gupta wrote:
You might think that the problems of the world are insurmountable – that there is not enough to eat, enough water to grow food, that the sky is on fire and falling fast.
It is not like that at all. There are really good solutions for the vast majority of the development problems of the poor. Most of these problems are in the general fields of infrastructure or agriculture.
It is not at all clear that there are good solutions to these problems. Renewable energy technologies do not rely upon energy from the sun stored over long periods of time. Rather, the sun is harvested in real time; and, since, only a fraction of the energy striking the earth can be harvested, the amounts of land required to support even a soft lifestyle are very large. Probably, without extreme political change it will be impossible to solve the problems mentioned by Vinay even long enough to permit the population to be stabilized and, then, reduced, by half or more. By the way, I don’t know how vinay intends to deal with over-population, if at all.
I have done the arithmetic for the US, but others should make similar energy accounting efforts or other countries. The papers are linked to my website principally under Energy. Begin with “The Demise of Business as Usual” and “On the Conservation-within-capitalism Scenario” at http://dematerialism.net/demise.htm and http://dematerialism.net/CwC.html .
An additional problem is that almost the full investment must be made before the first joule of energy is recovered; and, concomitantly, most of the greenhouse gases emitted will have to be emitted all at once at the beginning of the project to produce renewable energy.
Overall, however, I favor the soft development concept for the nations that require development and the soft technology concept for those that must shrink or simply sustain themselves.
Tom Wayburn, Houston, Texas
http://dematerialism.net/
Tom: It is not at all clear that there are good solutions to these problems.
You’re being really dumb here. You need to actually go and look at Perfecto’s numbers for food production, and the situation with low cost water technologies, stoves, plastic solar panels and so on.
Really, you’re just missing the point because you haven’t looked at the technologies in sufficient detail.
Vinay
Mr. Gupta shoots from the hip alright. He is quick to resort to school yard trash talk; but, I very much doubt that in the 68 minutes between our two comments he has been able to read, assimilate, and analyze the papers referred to above. I looked at Ivette Perfecto’s University of MIchigan website, but I didn’t see anything like global resource accounting. I get the alumni bulletins for Michigan and Michigan engineering and I am appalled at the irrelevance of most of the research underway. Well, what can we expect from corporate and corporate-controlled government sponsorship! Nevertheless, at this late date, I emailed her with these three comments (expurgated of course) to ask for her results and, presumably, computations from which they were obtained. I am pretty much in the loop for carrying-capacity computations; so, I despair of being very much surprised.