What can we do together?
Well, welcome, everybody! Great to see you here.
[Christina Jordan] mentioned it would be interesting to try to get some interaction going between the Ci2i group and the community at large. While this project is super-interesting, I don’t really think we have much to offer in terms of either farming techniques or issues with relocation – we are, after all, a bunch of mostly white, mostly Europeans.
We do, however, understand appropriate technology. The idea here is that some of the best technologies around are a weird mixture of high and low-tech, yielding incredible efficiency. In your project, here are some things you might use:
- hexayurts. Invented by edgeryder Vinay Gupta (goes by [hexayurt] here), they represent a simple, efficient, sustainable, beautiful solution to the problem of providing cheap housing in many different sizes. In this video Vinay himself explains the logic.
- mesh networks. We tend to think that access to information – hence connectivity – is fundamental in the development of a local community. Mesh networks are local networks you can build from very little and use them to share Internet connectivity. [elf Pavlik] is currently involved in building one for the Italian city of Matera, as his project in the unMonastery (video).
- solar trackers. Are you going to use solar panels? [Marc] is prototyping a 100% open hardware and open software system to let panels rotate following the sun. This increases their yield by as much as 40%.
- biochar rocket stoves. The idea is to burn small pieces of wood, producing charcoal that can be used as a soil amendment. Do you guys think you might have some use for something like this? This is still a prototype – [Darren] will be able to tell you more.
- OpenStreetMap. It's great to be able to map the terrain. Once the map is there, you can create as many thematic layers as you want (for example, a map of cultivars, or a map of water sources). Google does typically not cover rural Africa well, but there is an open source alternative called OpenStreetMap. In this community there are several people who have a lot of experience with OSM and a lot of standing in its community, notably [napo] and [simonecortesi].
Would you be interested in any of these? If so, let me tell you what could conceivably happen: your center in Uganda could become a place where we (collectively) learn how to deal with community owned- and managed assets. This is now interesting for Europeans: as the state retreats from some areas of service provision, people need to come up with the skills to build and maintain common assets. The UK in particular is looking hard in this direction – [CommonFutures] is specially active in this are. So, the Ugandan experience could become a place from which we in Europe could learn more. Thoughts?