Holistic ICT for EcoLiving

Andrius Kulikauskas (Minciu Sodas) and I plan to visit Marcin Jakubowski at his “Open Source Factor E Farm” after Thanksgiving. Andrius is wanting to develop a business direction for his Minciu Sodas laboratory that advances the Global Villages concept developed by Franz Nahrada.

He has fleshed out an “ecosystem” for East Africa that include the use of appropriate tools and processes that make the most of marginal Internet access as we have in Africa. This includes a proposed effort to develop a USB Flash Drive Editor that he calls The Includer. He wants to organize another such “ecosystem” for our work on “global villages.” I told him that I was open to considering this and how it might benefit Marcin’s work also.

One of the focuses of my trip will consider what ways OVF efforts to promote sustainable development can be linked to Marcin’s work.

Understanding the Need for Open Source Sustainable Development Models and the Bottlenecks

Marcin says that “knowhow and technology, intended for decentralization and thus self-sufficiency, is the grand answer” to humanity’s challenge today. Marcin adds however that “outside of his OSE effort, he’s not seeing the essential hardware to support the development claims.” This he adds “warrants deeper discussion.”

What he sees I think is the need to develop an global network infrastructure to enable and facilitate the production of energy, cars/transport, machines to make our lives easier, food production and food security and housing – all that we need for a modern life – that is focused on the basic elements of human survival.

Scaling the Open Source Community Development Model
Seeing this Open Source effort starting modestly, as it is, it is important to consider that these endeavors indeed have the potential as disruptive technologies have the potential to develop into “multi-trillion dollar markets” as they displace the current ecologically and socially destructive systems of production. A key consideration is how to scale and replicate this model without the kinds of coercive centralized structures that create the massively unequal and unsustainable resource consumption patterns that power the world today.

Currently OVF is engaged in network discussions on several Open Source Initiatives:

1. OVF is now working to pull together people to assemble a OpenHardware Router.
2. Another example of the Open FM Radio developed By Adapted Consulting.

The key is to balance the above tech work with the kind of work and vision that Marcin has put forward in terms of creating open source sustainable technologies.

What is a Disruptive Technology?
How a technology is deployed is key. In the common use of the term Disruptive Technology, it is value neutral, in the sense that it does not connote whether it is used to empower the grassroots and take the power back or become another weapon in the meta-corporate/elite command and control apparatus that is the major factor in the decline of the ecology and for the mass in the massive and rising gulf between rich and poor globally.

Another issue is the technology human friendly is it design to be evolved, modified, adapted to local conditions?

Starting humbly his has a vision of his farm as a world class facility within three years, with the same products as part of our infrastructure.

Effective Communications and Network Development Plays a Vital to the Success of Social Movements
Marcin is now developing a wiki that explains all 18 items and how they relate to the basic human needs for a stable food, water, shelter and energy supplies to power a sustainable human habitat.

To complement this he is planning a campaign to promote a major resource development phase for the facility which includes the deployment of the main 18 tech items outlined here.

Global Emergency Systems for Grassroots Mobilization
While Andrius was in Mexico at a conference of tech innovators he was impressed with social entrepreneur (http://www.xigi.net) he spoke with Mark Beam about his vision of a global emergency “early warning system” & “response network.” This seems increasingly relevant in this age of great change and global warming that we are now living in.

At the meeting Mark Beam encouraged Andrius to design a plan that comes up with 5 basic questions that anybody in the world could answer and that might help us all understand what is going on as the first step in the development of this system. His thought is that we might even have an ongoing contest to come up with the best questions.)

The Online Platform
These SMS could be sent randomly, say, every two months, and people in the emergency network would respond. And people could send out an SMS to engage the question system at any time and contribute an answer to a question. This could be a global network with local control.

We could also consider the development of more integrated online interfacing tools to connect the networks and development of complementary on the ground networks that combine the aspects and strategies to maximize bandwidth in those regions which have marginal internet access with consideration to how to scale more sustainable approaches to addressing community needs in both affluent and marginalized regions of the world.

Possible Questions towards Developing a Global Villages Index

1. Are we eating junk food? or processed food? or cooking our own food? or growing our own food?
2. Where is our energy coming from?
3. How do we build our houses
4. How reliant are we on sources outside our community for our survival?
5. What are our sources of information?
6. Are we part of cohesive communities?

We would define a Global Village Index in this process.

A Vision for Sustainability Consultancy: Develop Meaningful Measures of Resiliency
Al Gore notes that we are in a state of Planetary Emergency with regards to Global Climate Change and other World Urgent Issues. Andrius notes that Resilience in the event of a catastrophe or in the face of outside pressures is vital to ensure human survival. This perspective might help us better understand what a Global Village is and what sustainability means. It might also help global villages flourish even in the face of a worst case scenario in terms of a unprecedented global economic and ecological collapse.

Developing a matrix such as something based on the OVI Mandala/Integrated Knowledge Wheel to design such a resiliency measure is a business opportunity for the MS network. Corporate strategists might be very interested to have a way to rate the resiliency of different communities in the face of adverse trendlines and events. We might consider in this how process in Andrius’ words how we might “foster, catalyze, organize leadership for emergency response as well as long term improvement.”