A Village To Heal The Planet: A Practical Whole-Systems Showcase Village
Take a patch of land in the developing world and create a technology testbed for open source appropriate technology systems. Install not just one pump, but half a dozen models side by side for comparison, cross-training and testing. Repeat for housing, agriculture and all other basic systems.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
London
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
United Kingdom
Your idea
Country your work focuses on:
villages globally
YouTube Upload
What stage is your project in?
Idea phase
What is the average monthly household income in your target community, in US Dollars?
<$50
Name Your Project
A Village To Heal The Planet: A Practical Whole-Systems Showcase Village
Describe Your Idea
Take a patch of land in the developing world and create a technology testbed for open source appropriate technology systems. Install not just one pump, but half a dozen models side by side for comparison, cross-training and testing. Repeat for housing, agriculture and all other basic systems.
Innovation
Describe your idea in fewer than 50 words.
Take a patch of land in the developing world and create a technology testbed for open source appropriate technology systems. Install not just one pump, but half a dozen models side by side for comparison, cross-training and testing. Repeat for housing, agriculture and all other basic systems.
What makes your idea unique?
All personnel involved in the project will live in the village we build using the technologies we are recommending for local people _OURSELVES_. We will use the system we recommend, as a part of "being the change we want to see in the world." This in itself is unique, but read on.
There is no internationally agreed standard testing method for most individual appropriate technologies. There is no "underwriters laboratories" for simple toilets. The critical need to study these systems not individually but as whole systems, in real field conditions, is unmet. To enable easy comparative study, cross-training and whole systems integration, the cheapest and most effective course of action is to put all the equipment in one place, with cooperation from the technology-specific charities which support each individual technology system or methodology, and actually do rugged, objective, public field testing of systems side by side. We can also act as a centralized cross-training institution.
This is what it is going to take to get appropriate technology to the next level, and nobody is doing it. That is what makes the idea unique.
What is your area of work? (Please check as many as apply.)
Infrastructure .
What impact have you had?
Personally, I'm one of the main innovators in the Open Source Appropriate Technology field.
http://hexayurt.com is the project I'm best known for, but see also
http://files.howtolivewiki.com/hope_for_the_world -- start with the PDF, stay for the presentation
http://files.howtolivewiki.com/six_ways_to_die -- very important infrastructure mapping tools, please check this out
and http://globalswadeshi.net which is the world's largest open source appropriate technology social network (200 members from about 60 organizations.)
I'm also involved in http://appropedia.org
I'm getting things done, but this is a new, innovative idea that I'm proposing this year.
Describe the primary problem(s) that your project is addressing.
Lack of objective testing of appropriate technology systems, and balkanization of the field into many individual groups which do not share information or field results.
Describe the steps that your organization is taking to make your project successful.
We have an incredibly deep commitment to objective truth and the scientific method as a way of ascertaining that truth. We will apply these standards to the systems to be examined, tested and documented.
Impact
What will it take for your project to be successful over the next three years? Success in Year 1:
Year one is largely about securing land, getting a skeleton crew on the ground, and getting the basic living systems in place while, in parallel, getting NGOs to send systems and personnel to set up those systems to the testing facility.
Success in Year 2:
Year two is mainly going to be about documentation: taking each system to pieces, documenting it, putting it back together, documenting the process, showing how it works. A lot of video shot on cheap, rugged cameras. Open licensing so this video can be dubbed and translated into many languages to enable technologies to spread and replicate.
Success in Year 3:
In the third year, it will be about replication: taking what works in the village we started in, and using that package as a seed to replicate on other continents and in other countries as a showcase of what can be done with open source appropriate technologies.
We teach by example.
Do you have a business plan or strategic plan? (yes/no)
What are the three most important actions needed to grow your initiative or organization? STEP 1:
You know this as well as we do: raise funding so the people we need can quit their day jobs and do the work. Picking the right location and initial technology set counts for a lot too.
What are the three most important actions needed to grow your initiative or organization? STEP 2:
Document effectively under open licenses, make strategic partnerships with the big OSAT (open source appropriate technology) organizations, make sure it stays in the public eye.
What are the three most important actions needed to grow your initiative or organization? STEP 3:
Replicate. Figure out the business model for the initial village: most likely, training courses as the initial team return to their lives after three years in the field. Teach and transfer.
Describe the expected results of these actions.
Underwriters Laboratories for the developing world. A place where things can be objectively tested - water quality, stove performance, solar cooker efficiency, well reliability.
It's going to cut through the nonsense in the field like a hot knife through butter.
A group of cross-trained hands-on "we lived in these systems for years, mate" hardened engineering students would not hurt either, and the culture of "never recommend a technology you haven't used every day for a year" would, in itself, be utterly revolutionary.
And that's before we discuss the value of the video footage, mass translated to help the technologies we find perform to spread.
What was the defining moment that led you to this innovation?
Trying to find accurate, objective examples of documented failure of development projects, the weak spots in technologies, and the reliability of installed systems.
Tell us about the social innovator behind this idea.
37, half-scottish, half-indian. polymath, bicultural, absolute commitment to truth, worked in a variety of fields including co-editing the Economist's book of the year in 2003, working on genocide prevention by redesigning international identification standards, and very well regarded work on abolishing the distinction between transitional and emergency sheltering options while dramatically simplifying NGO supply lines (the Hexayurt project.)
I could do anything, I choose to do this.
How did you first hear about Changemakers?
The internet. Last year, I think.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
What would prevent your project from being a success?
Three main risks exist.
1> nothing works. the cookers don't cook, the pumps break, everybody gets sick because the water purification methods just don't work in practice. But is this failure, or discovering the truth? In any case, this seems unlikely - there's enough sound stuff that I'm confident we would survive.
2> NGOs won't cooperate and have their equipment tested. We can get around some of this by commercial purchase of the systems, or building from their plans. But, again, a refusal to have the equipment objectively tested by an independent third part is also a conclusive result, is it not?
3> The objective test data doesn't produce change in what people do, the videos go unwatched, and in general the application of the scientific method and objective, independent side-by-side testing doesn't produce useful results.
That would be a first. But it is a risk.
Financing source
If yes, provide organization name.
I've collaborated with a few established organizations but this would be a de novo effort because of the need for independence and autonomy.
How long has this organization been operating? (i.e. less than a year; 1-5 years; more than 5 years)
na
Does your organization have a Board of Directors or an Advisory Board?
na
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with NGOs? (yes/no)
na
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with businesses? (yes/no)
na
The Story
Does your organization have any non-monetary partnerships with government? (yes/no)
yes
Please tell us more about how these partnerships are critical to the success of your innovation.
I am one of the founders of http://star-tides.net which is a bridge between govt. and NGOs in America.
How many people will your project serve annually?
Depends on the reach of the science and the media produced by the organization. Global impact is entirely plausible.
What is the total number of employees and total number of volunteers at your organization?
1. But as noted I operate http://globalswadeshi.ne
What is your organization's business classification?
Not registered
Have you received funding from any of the following groups? (Please check as many as apply.)
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Comments
This is a novel idea. It seems reasonable that a form of inter-ngo cooperation is useful, but aligning it towards the viability of service offerings in this United Laboratories type approach is very targeted and it must have been simpy over looked in the past!
It'll have systemic effects, helping many other projects.
Possibly, the most obvious is "resilience when facing economic disruption", which is when poverty jumps upon us, so we can learn from people who are already poor, while helping them help themselves.
Everybody talks about building resilient systems, community gardens and what not. But what works? And, more importantly, what works when put together?
Permaculturists, transition towners, and many others, want to create complex designs. But complex designs are made of simple pieces put together. Now, you're the one who will be putting them together, so the question becomes What will work for me?
appropedia.org and akvo.org provide the information. We could say that's the theory. We need the practice.
The question is not Why do this. The question is How long until it happens?
One aspect of the proposal struck me as especially important: building strategic partnerships with other open source appropriate technology projects. Mr. Gupta's project would be an excellent complement to what Open Source Ecology is doing at the Factor E Farm demo site. The two together would create synergies, providing each other with additional components for their respective village development packages.
In the past Mr. Gupta has made inestimable contributions in designing open-source packages of life support technology for refugees and dwellers in shantytowns and tent cities: the hexayurt, solar cooker, and solar water purifier, so I know an investment in his fertile mind will pay off many times over.
And this sort of thing is absolutely essential. John Robb of Global Guerrillas blog writes on the "resilient communities" that will weather the current "perfect storm" of terminal crises--Peak Oil, the Great Recession, and all the rest of it. Mr. Gupta's proposal and the existing OS Ecology projects are both engaged in prototyping such resilient communities and creating a virally replicable package that may play the same role in the current collapse of state capitalism that the villa did in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
It is, I repeat, absolutely essential to get as much of the technology as possible prototyped and in the process of replication. This work is, as the Wobbly slogan puts it, "Building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old."
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