I’m about to do a new one. This is for the archives.

I am best known as the creator of the Hexayurt free/open refugee shelter. I also act in a wide range of advisory and consulting tasks for clients across all sectors. If you would like to do some thinking together, write to me here.

Read on to what I do.

The Open Toolbox is a consultancy focussing on bringing free/open appropriate technology solutions into widespread adoption in handling disaster relief, poverty and other distressed situations. It focusses on providing the supportive services that institutions and individuals need to make these open solutions work in their context.

The best current overview of my poverty relief work is my four entries for the Google 10^100 contest. The Hexayurt, the Hexayurt Infrastructure Package, Health Insurance for $10 per year, and A COSMOS for the 21st Century.

The best summary of my work on disaster relief is the Reykjavik Briefing on disaster relief, which describes how the hexayurt and infrastructure package could revolutionize disaster relief efforts all around the world.

Gupta Option is where the policy work lives. Check out:

* Winning the Long Peace on appropriate technology as foreign policy.

* State In A Box – Identity Services Architecture on failed states and making biometrics safe for general use, particularly in bringing banking services to the very poorest.

* Severe Pandemic Flu Strategies on dealing with the real worst case scenarios on pandemic flu.

Hexayurt.com is where the free/open housing and infrastructure work lives. I particularly recommend the “Ending Poverty with Open Hardware” video linked from that site. This project is fully live, is commercially funded, and is moving forwards into mass production quite soon.

* Disastr.org looks at using Hexayurts to rehouse hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of Americans following a catastrophe.

* Live Unplugged takes a look at what high-tech low-impact self-sufficiency might look like for small farmers later this century. It’s a deeply inspiring vision of a positive future, and many people find it very useful for focussing on what needs to get done to make it real.

* STAR-TIDES is a volunteer project I helped start which includes many people at National Defense University which is focussed on developing appropriate technology infrastructure options for disaster relief, poverty and humanitarian crisis.

Global Swadeshi is a social network I cofounded which is connecting all the people who are working on solutions for self-sufficiency for everybody, from small farmers up to villages, towns, and eventually maybe even cities. Extremely high quality debate and cooperation are emerging from here.

Finally, I’m working on two new, long-range projects.

* An Free/Open Source Appropriate Technology license and associated patent pool.

* Raising massive funding for a comprehensive science-based broadcast television educational curriculum for the poor

A little further back, I spent some time volunteering at the Rocky Mountain Institute where I co-edited Small Is Profitable which was The Economist’s Book of the Year in 2003, and the highly acclaimed work on energy independence for the USA, Winning the Oil Endgame.

I’ve generally kept this stuff split up on dozens of different domains without much linking between them because I wanted each work to stand on its own, but I think it’s time to bring them together and make it clear that there’s a whole systems perspective here. I think I have a decent plan to fix the world, and I’d like you to consider appropriating pieces of my plans into your plans, and maybe working together with me on *our* plans to fix the world.

My new business development site gives you a fair impression of who I am – cantankerous but, if you’re not convinced I’m worth working with by now, I’ll see you at DOW 20,000.

Hail, and welcome.

Vinay Gupta