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.
A Back-of-the-Envelope Master at work (on how to get renewable drinking water for 2m people.)
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.
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
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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!
EU to ban incandescent lightbulbs.
Four years ago, I said
You know when I’ll say we’re taking environmentalism seriously as a people? When the government *BANS* incandescent lighting in general applications. Just flat out bans it, like they did with PCBs or lead-based paint or other hazardous substances.
That’s how real change is effected.
Great video on systems thinking from Paul Krafel
Really great video on systems thinking from Paul Krafel.
Via Evonne - great link, thank you so much!
The Gupta Option is Open for Business
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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 
Vandana Shiva in Iceland
Vandana Shiva is visiting in Iceland and I’d very, very, very much like to meet her to discuss things like the Global Swadeshi Network.
Can anybody who’s reading this make the connection to let that happen? hexayurt@gmail.com you know where to call…
Food security shopping in Iceland
I spent $100 (ISK 10,000) to buy a two month basic food supply. Today, in Iceland, the Krona stopped trading on the international markets. People are talking about an Argentinean-style financial collapse. I do not think that Iceland will experience food security issues, but it would be deeply ironic for a disaster preparedness advocate to be caught hungry in a financial collapse. So I went shopping. I thought I would take the opportunity to prepare a one page guide to emergency food shopping - what to buy when you want to have some buffer in a disaster.
This diet would be a lot of flatbread (chapatis - I am Indian) and a can of tuna every two days once the cheese had run out. Most of the calories are from carbohydrates and oils. At 2200 calories it is not a hunger diet, being both protein and calorie sufficient for an adult male. Iceland does not furnish cheap lentils, and I could not find powdered milk, but adding those items increases protein supply substantially, as well as allowing for tea. It does assume both refrigeration (it is winter) and energy to cook with, and you might want to add yeast to make western bread.
This is far from a perfect emergency food purchase. It lacks variety, and bags of flour do not store perfectly. However, in general, the lesson is simple: buy carbs, fats and protein in about these ratios to survive. Do not bother counting conveniences. The cost is sufficiently low at the moment that a relatively lavish basic diet for 90 days could be had easily for $500 per person. Scenarios in which this might be useful include financial collapse, pandemic flu and other unknowns. You can learn more online - look for “Mormon food storage” for example. I hope you found this interesting and useful.