Appropedia Blog

The Open Knowledge Foundation has launched a new mailing list for open knowledge in development. Jonathan Gray writes:

We encourage you to join - whether you’re interested in:

• visually representing development related open data (a la OKF Advisory Board member Hans Rosling)
• sharing development information or making it easier to find and re-use (a la Aidinfo or PublishWhatYouFund)
• sharing practical information for development, e.g. on sanitation or construction (a la Appropedia or Akvo)
• open textbooks and open resources for education in developing countries
• or in any other open knowledge thats related to development!

The full post is on their blog: New mailing list for open knowledge in development

Edit: Note the new Appropedia wiki page, Open aid and development.

If you make technology appropriate and you make the how-tos accessible, you can get people to solve the problems themselves. They don't need aid agencies any more. That's the dichotomy, that's the problem that the aid sector's got to face, with this knowledge. It's got to try and release it, to achieve their mission, but it also means that a lot of their revenue streams, a lot of their purpose will become redundant. And this is generated by people themselves." Andrew Lamb, CEO, EWB-UK and director of the Appropedia Foundation.

That's from this presentation by Vinay Gupta and Andrew Lamb at the recent Open Knowledge Conference in London:

A fellow Appropedian asked if I'd written any articles on water treatment, as he wants to learn about it. Yes and no - most articles I've worked on have been collaborative efforts that remain open to improvement. That can work well,  as described in a recent post.

Putting that aside, where are the open resources that a learner should know about in water treatment?

• Appropedia's Water portal is a good place to start - it gives a map of Appropedia's water content and some highlights, as well as links to other key open resources.
• Akvo's Akvopedia (similar name, different site - but they're good friends of Appropedia). This has great, structured information about specific tech, with a development and appropriate technology focus.
• Wikipedia's Water Portal and Water_treatment pages, and the many others in the Water treatment category. There's also the water section of the appropriate technology article. It's topical info only, without the how-tos and designs you can find on Appropedia and Akvopedia, but the breadth and organization make this a great resource.
• Waterwiki.net is a United Nations project, which is less open in a number of ways. Much of the content is posted as PDFs attached to pages (are they covered by the open license too?); you need to jump through some hurdles to join and contribute; and although it's a polished looking site, it's not clear at first glance that it also welcomes non-UN contributors. It's good that the UN is taking steps towards openness - the best thing they could do, though, is make a policy of open licensing all their publications, past present and future.

OpenCourseWare resources are course materials such as podcasts and written materials, often from top universities, that are freely accessible online. The OpenCourseWare Finder yields results such as these:

• Watermanagement from Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. (English language.) (CC-BY-NC-SA)
• Water Sanitation Needs in Complex Humanitarian Emergencies from the Johns Hopkins OpenCourseWare (OCW) project. Lectures by Leslie Roberts, in MP3 (audio) format. (CC-BY-NC-SA)
• Other courses from the Johns Hopkins OpenCourseWare (OCW) project deal with water and public health, e.g. Tropical Environmental Health. (CC-BY-NC-SA)
• Water and Wastewater Treatment Engineering from MIT, (CC-BY-NC-SA)

Then there are great resources which are copyrighted, which we hope will soon be open:

• CAWST - Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology - Akvo used some of their content in Akvopedia, which is how I found this great knowledge resource, but as there is no copyright or license statement on the site, it's technically copyright. (I assume Akvo got permission for the pages they used.)
• BioSandFilter.org - another great resource on a more specific area of technology and design for water treatment. From our conversations, we know they support knowledge sharing - we just hope they go the extra step and choose an open license.

Photo credit: Gaetan Lee, CC-BY. Chosen because: The glass is half full.