Appropedia Blog

I love the Post Growth Institute's latest project: The (En)Rich List, with the byline "A Wealth of Inspiration!"

This is a brilliant insight - paying attention to people who have helped show the way to sustainable paths is so much more important and urgent than talking about "Rich Lists" that measure individual success.

That's not to say I'm equally enthusiastic about all the choices on the list, but that's okay - the (En)Rich List is a conversation starter rather than an authorititative list. The listmakers state: "it makes no claims of objectivity". In the same spirit, I'll make some nominations below, for next time.

The commons is rightly recognized in the (En)Rich list, notably through Elinor Ostrom (commons researcher and Nobel laureate) and Michel Bauwens (the P2P Foundation). But what of those who have made the commons possible, in software, spreading knowledge, and in cultural works?

Being a wikiholic, I'll start by nominating Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) and Ward Cunningham (inventor of wiki software, to radically open up the development of knowledge and ideas on a website). Their revolution is a social one - by enabling learning and connections of knowledge on an unprecedented scale, they've expanded the opportunities for potential future leaders, and future pioneers and innovators in sustainable paths. And of course the wiki provides the model and platform used by Appropedia, enabling sustainable paths in our own way: as a sustainability wiki, an open database of solutions.

Before wikis came Richard Stallman, who stands out for his work in the software commons pioneering "Free Software" (that's free as in freedom... also called "open source," though Stallman hates that term). Crucially, he also wrote the first open license, that said in effect: I'll share this with you, if you agree to share what you do with it. Linus Torvalds added a missing piece to the coding work of Stallman's GNU project, and kicked off Linux, an important, very secure operating system; he also licensed it under Stallman's "copyleft" license.

And finally, Lawrence Lessig applied these principles to all kinds of creative works, through Creative Commons licenses. These are easier to understand and use than Stallman's original license, and are used on this blog, on the Appropedia wiki, on Wikipedia, on many published works by the Australian and other governments, on vast numbers of photos and other creative works on Flickr and elsewhere across the web.

I have more thoughts on the list which I'll share soon, on the contrast between the pessimists on the list (including Paul Ehrlich and Ted Trainer) and the optimists (notably E.F. Schumacher and Jean Russell).

Again, thanks and kudos to the Post Growth Institute - a great and provocative idea, well executed.

There's just over a day remaining for the Open Source Permaculture project, at time of writing, and around $3000 more needed to reach the target. Please consider donating if you haven't already - this will be a real boost for permaculture. See the fundraising status box to the right.

And if you're reading this after the deadline, there are plenty of ways you can get involved - just leave a comment here and we'll direct you.

Now for a brief "roundup" - as in the latest news and blogs, not Roundup the chemical herbicide. We use mulch to keep weeds down . Open Source Permaculture has been getting attention, appearing on Treehugger, Ecopreneurist, Inhabitat and many other sites. I want to highlight three particularly interesting links.

• Open Source Permaculture: Interview with Sophia Novak, Upcycled Love.
• Crowdfunding Open Source Permaculture, Shareable.
• Open Source Permaculture - a robust discussion on Permies.com. There was some confusion about the fact that "Open Source" is a computing term - I don't consider it incorrect to use for an open knowledge project, but "Open Content" is more precise. Both open source software and open content involve collaboration and open licenses, giving freedom to adapt and reuse.

We've been speaking with Sophie Novack and Evan Schoepke from the Open Source Permaculture project, and we're glad to announce that we'll be working together building the permaculture wiki on Appropedia, and that we're supporting their fundraising effort.

They state:

We believe that sustainability is for everyone. That's why we're creating Open Source Permaculture, a free online resource for anyone who wants to create a more sustainable world.

This resonates with us. We've been talking about open source permaculture for some time, and putting the idea out there in the permaculture community. Our "Permaculture wiki" page describes the state of things, noting various attempts which have sadly fallen over and others which have a more limited scope, and inviting others to join us. An open source permaculture wiki page (hosted by our friends the Open Source Ecology wiki0 looks at what we need in a website to really serve this vision.

We've made progress. We're now using an important tool for structured data, Semantic MediaWiki, which we can apply to a permaculture ecology to help map the relationships between inputs, outputs, plants, animals, principles and resources. We've cultivated the wiki platform, to enable open source permaculture to grow

But a key part of the ecosystem has been missing, until now: Passionate individuals who know permaculture, who are prepared to study and work on developing materials to explain and teach permaculture. That's what the Open Source Permaculture project is about and we're happy to point you to their fundraising effort. This is a vision that deserves funding, and deserves a vote of support. Please check it out, and ask yourself how much this kind of abundant future means to you.

The details of our collaboration are being worked out - it will be based on using Appropedia as the permaculture wiki, and I'm sure we'll be working together in other ways in this work to create an abundant and sustainable world.

By the way, for those unclear about what permaculture is exactly, here's a video from a community in San Francisco:
Read the rest of this entry »

Light a candle to reduce fossil fuel consumption! Wait a minute, what are those candles made from...?

In late 2011, Todd Sampson, CEO of the advertising agency behind Earth Hour, presented at a conference I attended, and he was engaging and inspiring. I'd always been skeptical of Earth Hour (wouldn't a better action be to sign up for green energy with your power company?) But his presentation helped me be much more sympathetic: lights being turned off around the world is a grand symbolic action, and the sense that we connect with others around the world by taking part in this action is an inspiring, goose bump inducing feeling - at least while a gifted orator shared his described it from the stage accompanied by a beautiful slideshow.

It was a challenging audience, though, not your average sustainability conference, nor a marketing or managing conference - this was an audience of engineers. While younger engineers I spoke with were mostly positive about the presentation, and Earth Hour, but I found that older engineers in attendance were skeptical or ambivalent. One head of an engineering relief agency, not out of his 20's but already skeptical enough, confessed privately: "I thoroughly enjoyed his presentation, and I resented him for it, because I knew it was marketing."

For all our skepticism, though, I felt the emotional power of the symbolism, and I was struck that an advertising agency had done what it knew how to do, done it well, and inspired a grand gesture.

So I'm inspired... not to be less skeptical, as skepticism keeps us from folly. Not to be less practical, as symbolism is nothing without action. Rather, I'm inspired to be appreciative of the roles of others in our "ecosystem" of sustainable action.

And when I see someone doing X rather than Y (when Y is something far more important in my view), it's a reminder for me to ask if Y is my role. I can't do what an advertising agency can do, and I can't expect an ad agency to do what I can do as an engineer (or a teacher, or business manager, or community member, or communicator, or gardener, or scientist... insert your role here). But we can look for ways to work together, to do what we must in facing our challenges.

Earth Hour’s challenge is no longer to connect people; the challenge is to offer a reason to connect. Any movement of change begins with symbolism - it’s a needed step to prove enough people care about an issue. - Earth Hour co-founder Andy Ridley

Public domain (or PD for us open content geeks) is the absence of any copyright restrictions and licensing requirements - public domain content gives you absolute freedom in how you use it. This is important in, say, a wiki, where public domain content can be used as the basis of an article - as was done for many articles in Wikipedia, using old, out-of-copyright encyclopedia articles.

The Public Domain Review has published a Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online, a great guide to finding public domain cultural works, in particular. But they've missed my favorites - the scattered works of the US federal government.

Appropedia is about science and technology - not necessarily the newest technology, but the most appropriate technologies and methods in construction, energy, water, sanitation, agriculture and other areas related to sustainable living. Guides and manuals, best practice, reports, impact studies, analysis - this kind of content is often found in governmental and intergovernmental publications, and while most governments' works are copyrighted, in a few cases it is open content.

In particular, work created by officers of the U.S. federal government is generally public domain, by law. However, it's not enough to searching in the*.gov domain, as that includes vast amounts of state and local government material which is not public domain, or even open-licensed. These pages also don't use anything like the Creative Commons "mark" which helps search engines identify pages by license.

For that reason I've put together a custom search engine for the public domain - mainly searching the .gov domain while excluding a long list of non-PD .gov sites (more than 400 so far, most of them identified manually). It needs more work, possibly by an IP intern, identifying and excluding non-PD sites, and the onus is on the user to check the status of the material, but if you're after public domain material of a serious nature, try it out.

Appropedia's Public Domain Search:

An experimental site called cross-innovation is exploring innovation in appropriate technology. Founder Jon Minchin asks "How can we improve / augment collaborative innovation online?" I like the question, and these are my thoughts:

To socialize hardware, think about social structure. Communities doing things on the ground are key to the physical activities that people participate in. That's partly helped by networking - finding out (A) who else is near you who likes the same things as you, and (B) what building and tinkering is going on near you (in case it catches your interest). Uniiverse sounds interesting for that.
It's also helped by information flow. This is my own focus - the socialized information. I'm hoping we'll make the most of th possibilities of socialized information, by building a comprehensive library of how-tos, guides, designs and topical info (which is what Appropedia, a wiki for appropriate technology, is about).

I might be that person who only has a hammer and find that everything looks like a nail - but my feeling is that access to quality information, inspiring stories and great designs is actually central to making things happen.

Vinay with the latest incarnation of the Hexayurt (the H13) at the Cloughjordan Ecovillage in Ireland.

In the Appropedia community we often talk about thriving - but Vinay Gupta is a philosopher of surving. From the Hexayurt shelter to the Six ways to die‎ framework, to the upcoming book of essays The Future We Deserve, his focus is on dealing with the critical questions that vast numbers of people in the world face, and which we all might face if and when things go belly-up for us.

Like us, Vinay is a proponent of the value of open knowledge, one of the reasons he uses  Appropedia as a collaboration tool for his projects.

Vinay's just been interviewed for Boing Boing, where he talks about his influences: Mahatma Gandhi, Buckminster Fuller and Richard Stallman.


Image credit: Vinay's blog.

Two stories from recent years got me thinking. (If you know the stories, you're allowed to skip to the last paragraph.)

1. A British father helped his wife give birth at home. He's not the first, and won't be the last, but there's a lot that can go wrong. You really want to get it right, and if you don't have a midwife or doctor handy, and you (and the woman giving birth) never happened to learn how to deliver a baby, what do you do? Leroy Smith turned to the web, via his mobile phone. He found a wikiHow article, and by following the 10 steps, he did his part well.

2. Surgeon David Nott had a more complex challenge. A hippo had bitten off a boy's arm, and faced death within days from infection. An amputation of his shoulder blade and collar bone would save him - but the doctor didn't have any experience of this unusual and complex procedure, and no one he knew in the Democratic Republic of Congo could help. But a colleague in the UK could help - and did so via SMS. In two very long text messages he explained the procedure, and wished Dr Nott luck. The operation - carried out in a basic operating theater, without the equipment and support the doctor would have expected back home in the UK - was a success, and the boy's life was saved.

In the appropriate technology for solving a problem, the key component is often information. Whether we're talking about health services or development, the right information can be the difference between a good outcome and a failure.

I'm inspired to see wikiHow used in this way - as I am with the stories I hear of Appropedia being used in the field. It's also true that making the best use of expert knowledge, as Dr Nott was able to do, supports good outcomes. Combining these ideas - enhancing ways of accessing knowledge, and making available the best knowledge - continue to guide our mission.

What brought you to Appropedia? What did you find, and what difference did it make for you?

We'd love to hear your stories, short or long, about how you used Appropedia. Please take a moment to add a comment at the end of this post, to tell us about your experience. Whether you learned something, or were inspired, or found what you needed for your project, or contribute your knowledge about making the world better in one particular way - let us know what Appropedia means to you. Even a single line is valuable feedback, and appreciated.

You can share your story as a comment below, or add it to our Appropedia:Stories page on Appropedia itself - and you can read other stories there, as well . You can also share on this Appropedia Facebook post.

We hope to re-share these stories to inspire others, so comments left here are accepted under the same Attribution ShareAlike license used by Appropedia. Many thanks - and we look forward to hearing your story!

There is an ecosystem of wiki websites on sustainability, design and development issues.

Appropedia is a large and broad site; others include small but active communities and NGOs doing good, focused work (e.g. Greenlivingpedia and Akvopedia), wikis run by multilateral organizations (e.g. the UNDP's WaterWiki and the OECD's Wikiprogress and Wikigender), and (sadly) wikis where nothing has happened for years, and the community appears to have scattered.The ecosystem isn't exactly thriving - even when we're friendly (and we usually are) we don't talk and we don't share as much as we'd like.

As communities we want to collaborate and encourage each other, but as individuals we're busy - and I'm as guilty as anyone. What can help is just being aware of what is on other wiki sites - knowing of good wiki pages out there in the green wikisphere, to learn from, borrow from and link from our own pages. That can even lead to the odd bit of drive-by editing on another wiki - all the better.

To that end, here's a tool I've made - a search engine for green and development wikis.

It's a Google custom search of over 40 wiki sites - apologies to the good wikis I haven't named in this blog post, but I hope you'll check that your site shows up in the search results.

If you want to who's writing about something on which wiki, this can help. The results are a little quirky, so allow a few seconds to scan the list to find what you want, and maybe try different search terms. Give it a try, and let me know.

May it add a little more unity to our wiki ecosystem.