An academic paper in the Journal of Education for Sustainable Development reports on service learning with Appropedia as a platform.
It notes that contributing to sustainable development can be a way of improving students' academic skills - but this is expensive when it involves international travel, and as a result, few students have this experience.
The article describes two learning experiments with service learning programs based at and around the university, These experiments provided...
...solutions to sustainable development problems using Appropedia.org, the site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development. The course successfully used Appropedia (1) as a forum for students who were geographically dispersed, (2) for a whole-class writing collaboration, (3) to coordinate a sustainability-focused outreach campaign to retrofit stop lights in communities throughout Pennsylvania and (4) to review class material with application to technologies for sustainable development.*
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.
People around the world are working on appropriate technology. Most of them don't know each other - aren't aware of others with knowledge that might inform their own work. Connecting these people and this knowledge is what we had in mind when we started this Appropriate Technology Wiki almost 3 years ago.
"Appropriate Technology Wiki" is one way of describing Appropedia - it could also be called a sustainability wiki, an international development wiki, public health wiki, a wiki for thrivability, for abundance, or many other things. But appropriate technology sums up so much: the right solution for the context, relying on ingenuity, efficiency and awareness of the environment, rather than throwing resources at a problem.
By this definition, are you working on appropriate technology? Do you want to see a comprehensive resource, a guide to solutions? Join us: Use Appropedia, contribute to it, and make sure appropriate technologists around the world know about it. And leave a comment to let us know how it's helping you.
It's very striking when we meet people that really get what Appropedia is doing - why knowledge sharing matters, and why we practice radical openness and collaboration. Examples are when I heard Akvo's Mark Charmer talk passionately about the importance of breaking down the barriers between our silos of information; another was in 2007, on my first call with Andrew Lamb, head of Engineers Without Borders UK, hearing his lament over the many, many development organizations, each with knowledge that is not actively shared.
The most recent example is Jean-Luc Henry, founder of Ekopedia, a mostly French language sustainability wiki. Like others, he didn't need to be converted - Ekopedia has been sharing sustainability knowledge since 2002 (well before Appropedia, which began in 2006), and branching out into multiple languages.
In the last few weeks we've begun talking seriously about our shared vision, and how we can work together. As a first step, we're moving all French language content on Appropedia to Ekopedia, and all English language content on Ekopedia to Appropedia. Less duplication, more synergy - and an expression of our trust and shared vision.
With our own translation projects, starting with Clarion University's program and expanding from there, and with like-minded people working on translation for related projects (such as OLPC), there is the potential for massively ramping up the work of effective multi-lingual knowledge sharing. If we can get funding to develop new translation tools, it could be better still.
We'll keep you informed. If you want to join the team, please get in touch!
This is the blog to accompany Appropedia, the wiki for solutions in the challenge of building rich, sustainable lives.
Follow our blog to understand how things work, and how we're dealing with the challenges of a growing wiki expanding into new areas. Your contributions are very welcome - you can start contributing, let us know your questions (commenting here is one way). You can also keep watching here as we talk about how things work in this wiki world, and figure out where you fit in. (But we'd still love it if you dropped us a line.)
This was posted when we were still playing with the Drupal blog, before we switched to WordPress. So we'll need to make another welcome, soon. - Chriswaterguy 23 Sep 2008
Green home designs that cost less than traditional housing - simple changes make such a difference. Especially passive solar design, which also makes for a much more pleasant and comfortable place to live in.That's real sustainability.
Originally posted, by the same author, at Pablo Garuda.
A bunch of different folk are doing BarCamps* on a Green theme. This GreenCamps page lists the ones I could find, though I haven't had time to organize the page.
Coming soon: OSNCamp, aka The Open Sustainability Network Conference, October 18-19 in San Francisco, at which the Open Sustainability Network will be launched.
*A Barcamp is also known as an unconference - a very ad hoc conference. usually they are mostly on tech subjects. Think how the conferences you've been to have often been more notable for the conversations that have happened spontaneously, rather than the main talks. A BarCamp has a lot more of the informal stuff, and short talks can be given by anyone, at short notice. You can choose which talks to go to, or just do your own thing.
Received an email from the founder of a fairly prominent UK organization, devoted to real-world action for sustainability. The query was whether Appropedia was a suitable place to work collaboratively on a book, which would later be published.
While we'd love to have this content, there are some reasons it may not be an acceptable solution for them. At the very least, contributors need to know what they are committing to when pasting on a wiki, and using a free license.
Rather than just explain this in an email, I thought it was a good question to answer on the wiki: See Original content FAQ.
Note that I'm starting to wonder if our old policy of using the "Original:" namespace is a good idea after all, as it requires a set of gatekeepers for what content is worthy to be placed in this namespace. And yet... an original document by a respected appropriate technology organization, for example, may deserve to be readily available. Or perhaps a link to a "diff," showing the text of the original, with all the changes that have been made since the original document was first placed on the wiki - that will confuse the eye of the average non-wikiholic however.
Tricky issues. Feedback welcome!
Originally posted, by the same author, at Pablo Garuda.
The Netherlands is a country for people who go by foot, bike, train and tram, not built around car drivers the way Australia and many other countries are. No great revelation there, but I can confirm, it's makes for a really pleasant city. Of course it's greener, and more practical as well, when done properly. Zurich seems pretty good that way, too.
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