Appropedia Blog

You've seen the animated film, Coalition of the Willing? Well, the movement is growing, evolving, and and taking on challenges. The next online gathering is MovementCamp2, tomorrow (Sunday 14 November 2010). Check the details - the theme is Connecting the Dots:

Coalition Movement Camp II: Connecting the Dots

November 14, 2010, 7-11pm GMT. See start time in cities around the world

The Coalition Movement Camp series brings new players and possibilities into view and allows us to connect the dots between them. Our goal is to consolidate our collective powers and prepare for a collaborative web development project unlike anything the world has seen.

The inaugural Coalition Movement Camp took place on October 10, 2010. Participants included representatives of Appropedia, OpenKollab, Metacurrency, 350, Dadamac, CoopAgora, JAK Bank, GreenTribe, and Gaia10. For eight hours, we brainstormed ideas towards a new generation of internet platforms and collaborative strategies for the climate crisis. Details of the 10/10/10 Coalition Movement Camp can be found on the Coalition blog (http://cotw.me/invite101010, http://cotw.me/camp101010).

On November 14, 2010, the conversation continues.

Why are we doing this?

• The world is warming. Satellite records show that in the past two decades, the process of warming has sped up. 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record.
• Without drastic action, we risk temperature rises of 6°C or more by the end of this century. This would be a catastrophe.
• Yet the international community is ill-prepared, if not unwilling, to reign in carbon emissions to prevent this outcome.

We have no choice but to try a new approach.

We propose using new internet tools and a renewed commitment to interoperability and collaboration to creatively impact this situation and turn it around.

The internet is rapidly evolving from a place for sharing information to a place for collaboration and co-creation. How easy it should be, given the money, talent, and need in the world, to build an online network that enables the best people from about the world to collaborate on climate action solutions.

This is our vision. It is neither radical nor extreme. It is necessary, plain and simple.

Join us on November 14, 2010, as we continue this world-changing adventure. The venue is an open collaboration staging area: http://movementcamp.org. There will be sessions devoted to BetterMeans/Open Enterprise Manifesto, the Global Innovation Commons, and more. You’ll be able to upload image and video files and contribute to real time chat. There will be live interviews and webcasts, with an audio stream component for participants in low-bandwidth zones. Our facilitators will work to summarize developments and keep you up to speed.

Coalition Movement Camp II: Connecting the Dots will run from 2.00pm to 6pm EDT. International start times: 7.00pm London, 11.00am Los Angeles, 2.00pm NYC, 6.00am Sydney (Nov 15). Enlist here: http://cotw.me/enlist (Local Start Times: http://cotw.me/cmc2starttime)

If you’d like to send a video shout out or presentation to Coalition Movement Camp participants, we welcome pre-recorded content. Please submit links to Vimeo or Youtube content by Friday November 12, 5.00pm Los Angeles time, and we’ll include suitable material on the Coalition Movement Camp blog. Submit these to: tropology at gmail dot com. Submitted content should include a summary paragraph, with links to more information.

If you are ready to roll up your sleeves and join in this work, see the Coalition Portal for an orientation: http://cotw.cc/

The above message is based on the linked post on the Coalition Blog, and thus licensed as CC-BY-NC-SA.

Correction: I had the wrong times here before - partly because of my own incompetence with timezones, and partly because of someone else saying EST instead of EDT (glad I'm not the only one that gets confused). Corrected and clarified now.

Only a few  hours to go until the Coalition Movement Camp 10/10/10 Work Party - it runs 10 am to 10 pm EDT (that's current NY time), i.e. 2pm to 2am GMT. GMT sometimes gets called UTC now.

This is for all of us who want a new information-action ecology, for tackling climate change, and enabling the environmental knowledge, innovation and climate action communities. (If you're wondering who the coalition is, then see the Coalition of the Willing film - and remember that it's evolving.)

Here in Jakarta it's 10 pm to 10 am, so I'll be taking a nap in the middle, and I have my caffeine sources on standby. For many of you the hours will be better than that, so sign up at movementcamp.org and stay informed, and there'll be more info on that page when the day arrives, with chatrooms and video links.

There are a growing number of sessions, all about collaborating on tackling climate change. There's one on green knowledge trusts (focused on green wikis) co-facilitated by Appropedia, and there are plenty more, including:
Opening session:  Coalition Brainstorm. Be ready to think big picture!

1. What existing sites/services perform the kinds of functions described in the film? What additional functions are required?
2. What might be achieved by linking these sites/services (i.e. interoperability)? What are the challenges?
3. What social/ethical protocols are required to sustain creative collaboration between different online audiences (e.g., activists, innovators, green wiki enthusiasts, and so on)?

2 hours into the meeting (4pm GMT, 12pm NY time), it's How Cooperatives Can Save the Planet, facilitated by CoopAgora (online advocates of cooperative culture) and the JAK bank (a cooperative, interest-free, institution). Can the cooperative ideals of these sorts of organizations be used to impact the climate crisis?

3 hours in (5pm GMT, 1pm NY time): The Future of Online Activism. Joe Solomon, social media coordinator for 350.org, leads this one.

4 hours in (6pm GMT, 2pm NY time): Metacurrency - the attempt to broaden out the concept of currency beyond money, to totally refigure standing ecologies of production and exchange.

5 hours in (7pm GMT, 3pm NY time): Green Wikis Are Go! We look forward to sharing our experience and vision on building and sharing green knowledge, and hearing yours. Later in the session (probably around 8pm GMT, 4 pm NY time) we'll also be hearing from GreenTribe, a new green directory coming online in October. Join the discussion on the future of online sustainability!

It is not too late to register a session of your own. If you'd like to do this, please email Michael Maranda (tropology at gmail) ASAP.

Can you help us build the Movement Camp?

If you'd like to help -- spread the word around! Please forward this email to anyone you know who might be interested, and ask them to pass it on too! If you can think of suitable mailing lists or discussion groups, post a short summary and link to the Movement Camp sign up form. The busier and more diverse we can make this event, the more productive and exciting it will be for all of us and for our planet.

The Future We Deserve is "a curated collaborative collection of 100 essays about the future." The contributions are being coordinated on Appropedia - see The future we deserve.

From the homepage :

The Future We Deserve is a new book project about collaboratively creating the future we deserve. We will be working together at internet scale on internet time to brainstorm and barnstorm our way towards an image of a world we all believe in, a world of fairness, collaboration and living within a harmonious balance with nature. The book is open to all contributions — essays about technology, politics, working examples of better ways and fantastic ideas which just need to get done.

The print edition will be created together, as we collaborate to select and coordinate what goes into the final book. We'll use open licenses and crowdfunding to lower the barriers to collaboration, and do our level best to make the book the start of a ongoing journey together into the future we are shaping with our lives.

This is creating The Future We Deserve.

Last Wednesday, I had the honor of presenting on the future of Humboldt (Northern California) Sustainability for the Humboldt Bay Center for Sustainable Living and the Redwood Coast Energy Authority. The presentation was part of a growing movement of community wide sustainability and hopes to catalyze a series of large-scale open space technology style meetings.

This clip starts a few minutes into the presentation, just after I describe that the presentation was made with the help of many local and over-the-internet colleagues. Click the info button to access the introduction (part 1).

Thanks to StreamGuys for providing excellent streaming services.

David Stairs of the Design Altruism Project argues that many collaborations aren't actually collaborative. In a sobering post, he notes that people want to set up a project to be the hub for collaboration in their field... often without checking who's doing the same thing, or even using the same name. We've observed similar behavior.

Partly it's about wanting to be at the center of things - and that's natural. And partly it's about not realizing just how much work is involved in making an online community. I'm not sure what the solution is. One possibility is the Wikipedia experience: perhaps what happened with Wikipedia is that it was a single project which gained a good reputation, gave a good experience to many contributors, was a clear concept to grasp (a free encyclopedia), and a broad enough scope to be of interest to many, many people.

This hasn't happened to the same degree in architecture, design or sustainability, though we've made good progress on Appropedia - especially as we've come from a number of different projects and chosen to collaborate rather than compete.

Another key element in collaboration is a recognition of our limits. As Wes Janz noted (quoted in the same blog post)

"…And, you know, it’s all good, an orphanage in Sri Lanka, house inspections in Mississippi post-Katrina, a community center in Kenya… But I just got sick of it and had this idea that you should change the name of DWB to Designers With Borders. As in, maybe there should be some boundaries, some active awarenesses that we are unqualified, or unfit, or unable to work borderlessly."

Not that we need to be changing names - just recognizing our limits. I can't recall who said it, but it is our weaknesses that make us great, not our strengths, for our weaknesses lead us to work with others and create something greater than ourselves.

Pardon this meditation on failure. There are many encouraging successes to dwell on, support, and learn from, and we'll continue to do that. A cautious recognition of where things go badly pear-shaped is one side of the coin of success, and we do well to keep both in mind.

Blogger on global health issues, Christine Gorman, was researching patent issues around "Plumpy’nut," an easy-to-make peanut-based food used to effectively treat malnutrition. (In brief, there are concerns about whether the patent is preventing some who need it from getting it, and even questions about whether the patent is valid.)

Gorman decided to try a collaborative approach - but as many others have found, getting concrete contributions is a challenge:

Online collaboration may be the wave of the future but it’s not so easy to convince people to do it...

This was not the instantaneous burst of community magic that I had hoped for. But a kind of long-amplitude wave eventually did materialize. My old Plumpy’Nut posts kept getting traffic. Maybe I had brought a fast-food mentality to a slow-cooking world.

And indeed, a year after the blog went up (and many months after I stopped posting anything new), I received an e-mail from Martin Enserink at Science, who was working on a story about Plumpy’Nut and wanted to include a sidebar on the patent controversy.

via Global Health Report: What Plumpy’Nut Taught Me.

The biggest part of online collaboration is making a start, putting it out there, and making it open for people to use. It's hard to say when results will come - but sharing and practicing openness creates the possibility.

The birthplace of civilization (at least based on the clearest evidence we have) was in population centers based in abundant agricultural lands, at the crossroads of moving groups of varying ethnicities:  the Fertile Crescent, i.e. the eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia.

This was an exciting development in human development. Cities are culturally dynamic and innovative places. At a critical time in our history, seeking to change the direction of civilization and commit to a zero-carbon or negative carbon economy, we do well to remember this.

Most observers agree that the way forward for Canada lies in achieving a more effective innovation economy, but there is considerably less understanding of the role that cities play in an innovation economy. The reality is that cities are ever more important as sites of production, distribution and innovation around the globe.

via Conference Board Speeches and Op-eds > Innovative economy vital to take cities into the future.

On the other hand, people outside the cities are more connected than ever. So while a city's face-to-face interactions are great for innovation,  we can still keep track of a project like the Factor-E Farm, where innovative appropriate technologies are being developed in an off-the-grid context that's forcing them to hard work and creativity to achieve their aims.

There's no need for a a fiery debate about whether off-the-grid or cities are better. Each have their advantages, and there are different choices for different people - and a thrivable future means having choices. But off-the-grid technologies and the social, creative energy of cities can work together. Social technologies that enable collaboration - of which Appropedia is one example - can bring together the creative forces of cities and physically isolated people.

Not sure if that was coherent or a ramble. But share your thoughts in the comments.

Eating fresh local food (and super fresh food tastes so much better) is appealing, but for some of us, we're just never going to make our own gardens. Behold, a solution:

What is ‘yardsharing’?

Yardsharing is an arrangement between people to share skills and gardening resources; space, time, strength, tools or skills, in order to grow food as locally as possible, to make neighborhoods resilient, kids healthy and food much cheaper!

via What is yardsharing? « Hyperlocavore.

Turn that wasted space (that you have to maintain) into a resource.

Turn a chore into a social activity. While I grew up around plants, and love lazy gardening (better eating by doing a little pleasant activity), I know that many people are daunted, uninterested, or feel that they don't have time. With some local teamwork, you can have a garden anyway!

Find a local group/website if there is one (e.g. Portland Yardsharing) and start from there. Or visit the Hyperlocavore social network and ask there.

Enjoy!

Paul Currion at humanitarian.info got my attention with this:

I think there’s a lot of potential in... FrontlineSMS - mainly because it’s a platform. Like any good platform, it’s up to the end user (in this case, grassroots NGOs) to work out how they want to use it, and how they want to incorporate it into their organisation and activities.

Not being a software expert, I looked up Wikipedia:

A platform might be simply defined as 'a place to launch software'. It is an agreement that the platform provider gave to the software developer that logic code will interpret consistently...

This sounds a lot like the strengths of a wiki - it's a blank slate in many ways. People use Appropedia and other wikis in many ways. They create structures to use on certain types of pages, and are free to adapt or ignore those structures, as they innovate. And in a growing wiki with a very broad scope, there is a lot of room for innovation.

A topic that has come up repeatedly in conversations is whether a wiki is a good way to share designs and ideas for development, sustainability, open manufacturing etc, or whether a more structured approach is needed. I'll look at some of those approaches in coming posts (filed under platforms for collaboration).

I'll leave it to others to decide whether a wiki is a platform in the software sense (and ask Is a Wiki a platform if you don’t program it?)

The wiki pages that make the news are Wikipedia articles where things go wrong - libel, conflict of interest and the like. It's worth taking a look at an article where things work differently - for example in the following case of an article about an environmental technology.

In September 2005, an anonymous editor added a piece of information to Wikipedia about wastewater treatment equipment:

UASB - Upflow Anaerobic Sludge Blanket technology normally referred to as UASB Reactor is used in the treatment of wastewater.

That was the entire UASB article - no categories, no images, no links, no formatting. Not even a comma.

Four and a half months later came the second and third edits - a cleanup tag and a suggested merge. Thanks to these tags, I found the article a few days later, and thought: Merge? A UASB is a really cool piece of technology - it deserves its own article! So I helped turn it into a short but respectable article. After a quick consensus on the talk page, the merge tag was removed.

At this stage this stub article (an article with just a few sentences of useful information) painted a broad picture, describing a valuable piece of technology that turns waste into energy, at the same time as it cleans wastewater. It would be a good place to learn the very basic facts, and had some valuable links to more in-depth information.

I went back to working on the appropriate technology articles (this was shortly before Appropedia started) and left the UASB article for someone else to develop further. Another editor improved the article a little, and then, less than 2 months after I did my basic work the article, came a new Wikipedia editor with a passion for water technologies.

Vortexrealm's userpage says he works in the field of waste management - but more importantly, his edits showed a consistently good understanding of water and wastewater treatment. 11 weeks and many edits after he started on the article, a solid, informative article had been created, including a photo he took himself of a wastewater treatment plant with UASB. The article had become a great starting point for anyone - student, worker, curious citizen - who might want to know about a valuable piece of sustainable technology technology.

Today the article, renamed as Upflow anaerobic sludge blanket digestion, is even better, after still more work by a number of editors, both regular editors of the article, and new editors.

The history of some articles on Wikipedia is smoother than others. This is what it can look like on the many, many occasions when it works well.

(Note: All of these changes can be seen via the articles history page, linked from a tab at the top of the page.)

Photo: A "Mechanical Biological Treatment facility" in Tel-Aviv. Credit: Vortexrealm (Alex Marshall).