OSN closed? + my work

[TLoeber]

I look at what appears to be the pdf file that helped start the OSN,
http://nciia.org/conf08/assets/pub/pearce.pdf , and I look at the
supposed home page of the effort at http://www.appropedia.org/Open_Sustainability_Network
where that pdf seems to not be included though its title is there with
a couple paragraphs but quickly degrades into being an edit with no
contribution and most of the paper does not appear on that site at
all, not even a link to it.

I look at the posts in this email list and I see few entries and those
mainly being small talk.

Makes me wonder if the effort has been essentially closed. Whether
intentional or not, there are people who believe that sustainability
is impossible and who seek to mainly be the meanest SOBs in a world
they see as basically "dog eat dog" so efforts to squelch attempting
to understand and pursue sustainability are seriously compromised.

My main web site is at http://www.mindsing.org . I describe my social
theory there with an embedded Google presentation that attempts to sum
it up and present detailed information on what the software may entail
to test my social theory at http://www.mindsing.org/CIM2010.html .

I was recently invited to a San Jose, California, Tech Museum
sponsored quasi-wiki forum which has seemingly stopped getting any
serious contributions at http://www.socialtext.net/colaboration/ .
You can choose the "What's New" option to see the most recent posts
and my entry on my social theory is at
http://www.socialtext.net/colaboration/?potential_quick_scaled_organizational_tensegrity
.

Maybe there are some die-hard pursuers of sustainability on this email
list and maybe they would find my efforts of interest.

Am studying the software Clojure right now as that appears quite
appropriate for making a test of my idea.

Best,

Tom

[Michael Maranda]

I think OSN is (still)  a worthy concept.  For my part I have somewhat dropped off the edge of the world and draft writings for non-existent and uncultivated audiences.  :)

I agree however --- there are plenty out there who believe all of this to be impossible, and when we provide them convenient evidence, it makes all our work harder.

Be well!

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[Joshua Pearce]

Tom

Thank you for the kick in the pants -- we need to get moving on this again.

OSN is not closed -- although most of us have not been working on it exclusively - we have been building more of the foundations -- getting Appropedia and Ekopedia together..http://www.appropedia.org/Open_Sustainability_Network_-_HowYouCanHelp -- both of which are exploding on the content front.
..figuring out he we can be pushing OSAT content into multiple languages.....http://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia:Benefits_of_using_Appropedia_as_a_platform_for_language_courses
basic site and tech development etc.

On the academic side -- check out the latest paper at the NCIIA --Open Design-Based Strategies to Enhance Appropriate Technology Development, http://nciia.org/sites/default/files/pearce.pdf and see attached for the tech side of things for OSAT.

My group will look into your ideas and see if there are any good opportunities for collaboration on the dev. side.

Best regards,
Joshua

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[Thomas Loeber]

I have little to no trust in wikis as to what is ultimately needed.  My theory tells me we need dynamic continually shifting VPNs that are scaled and designed to provide comprehensive coverage of all humanity with least path and least time allocation.  In order to avoid Sir John Acton's observation that power corrupts we need to preserve the self-determination of those who share the best strategies otherwise power blocks of vested interests will preserve the adage that the good die young.  If my theory proves workable current information dissemination methods will continue to exist but dependence on them will lessen and they will alter to fit sustainability.  The core working strategy will stress least dependence on any one or finite collection of servers.

Our current predicament appears to have fomented a perversion of our personal and collective intelligence.  I find that epistemic relativism describes this phenomenon and I attempt to describe it in the 9th entry starting with "Sorry Dave" here: http://www.socialtext.net/colaboration/?potential_quick_scaled_organizational_tensegrity .  That wiki suffers the same weaknesses of wikis in general and the reference could disappear quickly.

My thoughts are very much in concert with what appears to be the founding treatise for the OSN that does not appear to be directly available via the so-called home page of the OSN.  Wikis seriously fail.  I too see that we are faced with a virtual do or die situation.  Time is running out.  No amount of ignorance will render the gravity of our situation nonexistent IMHO.

Our survival is at stake.  

Tom

[Pamela McLean]

Ref -  Appropedia and Ekopedia are exploding on the content front.

May I offer some feedback ref "use-ability"?

I was originally excited by the idea of  Appropedia - I thought it might have useful info for people ad projects that I know in Africa. But I gave up looking. There was too much stuff there and no way I could work out what might be appropriate. I needed an Apporpdeia that was arranged in ways that would help me find what I (or my contacts) needed.

Maybe things have improved and my feedback is out of date - I don't know - I stopped looking.

I didn't want to know so many possible variations - I simply wanted to know which might be relevant, so I needed help with useful stuff to cut down the options. In a database like this I need help to answer the questions in my mind like:

• how useful is it really?
• what is relevant on a community level?
• what is relevant on a household level?
  
• what is useful locally that we could produce locally and sell locally?
• is this relevant where we are? (it's so disheartening to read of great stuff being made avaible "for Africa" only to find it is only for specific countries - and we are not included)
  
• what does it cost?
• if it's more that we've got is there any way to help pay for it? (loans, grants etc)
  
• how easy to instal?
• what local skills would we need?
• if we don't have those skills already is there any way around that?
• what's it made of?
• how easy/hard is it to get hold of the initial components?
  
• how easy/hard is it to maintain
  

I'm sure there is great stuff in there - but I gave up trying to find it.

Pamela

[Lonny]

Hi Pamela and all,

Thanks for the great feedback.  Currently Appropedia is working on a few ways to provide what you ask for.  The idea would be that Appropedia continues to be a large pool of solutions (especially since there are no panaceas and many situations call for very specialized solutions), but that we would have better ways to navigate the information.  Some possibilities include: 1: A practitioner could answer a few questions about their context and be directed to a solution.  2. Experts would pick their favorite solutions and a practitioner could look through just those.  3.  Other organizations/sites would remix our content and you would access it through those sites (we are working with a couple of organizations on this right now).  Ultimately I would also like to have the ability to see only those pages my friends or a group of experts have rated highly.

Thanks again for your feedback, I hope we can address it better soon.

-Lonny, http://appropedia.org/User:Lonny
(Sent from cell in transit... please excuse English errrrrors)

On Apr 3, 2010 7:36 AM, "Pamela McLean" <pamela...@dadamac.net> wrote:

Ref -  Appropedia and Ekopedia are exploding on the content front.

May I offer some feedback ref "use-ability"?

I was originally excited by the idea of  Appropedia - I thought it might have useful info for people ad projects that I know in Africa. But I gave up looking. There was too much stuff there and no way I could work out what might be appropriate. I needed an Apporpdeia that was arranged in ways that would help me find what I (or my contacts) needed.

Maybe things have improved and my feedback is out of date - I don't know - I stopped looking.

I didn't want to know so many possible variations - I simply wanted to know which might be relevant, so I needed help with useful stuff to cut down the options. In a database like this I need help to answer the questions in my mind like:

• how useful is it really?
• what is relevant on a community level?
• what is relevant on a household level?
  
• what is useful locally that we could produce locally and sell locally?
• is this relevant where we are? (it's so disheartening to read of great stuff being made avaible "for Africa" only to find it is only for specific countries - and we are not included)
  
• what does it cost?
• if it's more that we've got is there any way to help pay for it? (loans, grants etc)
  
• how easy to instal?
• what local skills would we need?
• if we don't have those skills already is there any way around that?
• what's it made of?
• how easy/hard is it to get hold of the initial components?
  
• how easy/hard is it to maintain
  

I'm sure there is great stuff in there - but I gave up trying to find it.

Pamela

On 3 April 2010 01:42, Joshua Pearce <pea...@me.queensu.ca> wrote:
>
> Tom
>

> Thank you for the k...

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[Mark Roest]

Hello Pamela and Lonny and all,

This situation has a silver lining. There are many networks of true sustainability experts who are serious about the work, and the topics of the discussion indicate to me that it is time to start collaborating on a platform (or platforms, which can be integrated later) in which work can be shared, vetted and improved, and targeted to specific ecosystems, cultures, and situations or problems. I have had ideas about such a platform for years, and I can say that we should be flexible about the evolution of the platform, because it can become extremely powerful. Who in this network believes such a collaboration is important? I think it meshes well with the ideas and goals I have seen in this forum.

The solar manufacturing company David and I work for (see below) intends to sell to poor communities in the US and abroad, as well as to more affluent customers. Solar can make many other sustainability tools and practices possible in rural communities that are off the grid, including information and communication technologies, and this can help rural economies recover from forces that have devastated them, creating the global mass migration to the cities. By aggregating demand, we can inexpensively sell to people who cannot buy otherwise. By creating solution sets that meet human and environmental needs, and marketing them with affordable financing, we can encourage these people to make huge economic gains. From scattered pilots, such practices can spread like wildfire around the globe.

The knowledge base the people listed below are collectively capable of developing, over time, can actually guide humanity through the maze of choices and threats to true sustainability, and healthy, efficient, peaceful prosperity for all, with full flexibility, respect and support for the spectrum of human and natural diversity.

They include:
Gunther Pauli (co-founder & funder of Gaviotas) and ZERI.org (integrated farming & waste management, closely related to permaculture; has thousands of designers)
Ben de Vries, permaculture designer and researcher of critical plants to solve intractable problems, with contacts in many fields
- soilfoodweb.com, run by a gifted teacher and pioneer researcher in soil micro-organisms (every village needs people trained in this)
- The other Permaculture designers and teachers of the world
- Wiser Earth <WiserEarth.org> (and especially some of their editorial staff), with a directory of over 100,000 NGOs working for social justice and the environment globally, organized in a huge taxonomy
- oneVillage Foundation, founded by Joy Tang, operating in Ghana (where Kafui Prebbie, the country leader, is also in the computer services department of the University of Education, Winneba, which trains most of the primary and secondary teachers for the nation of Ghana), and Taiwan, with global contacts
- Ed Cherlin and the network that is writing new digital curricula to empower children and maximize their potential, in Sugar, the graphic user interface for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO computer. Doug Engelbart and Alan Kaye are supporters (Alan Kaye's Smalltalk programming language that he wrote to teach programming to his children ships with every XO). Some states (among them Indiana, where Ed is now) are starting to get serious about getting out from under the textbook czars in Texas and California. A sustainability sub-curricula, and / or weaving sustainability knowledge and practice throughout the curriculum, can complement the effort with powerful results.
- Commonwealth of Learning <www.col.org>, the organization responsible for improving education in the nations of the British Commonwealth, emphasizing poor countries; has a million links in its bibliography of education and sustainability topics (now indexed by Google); teaches Open and Distance Learning (ODL) modules as the optimal delivery structure for education outside the formal school systems, both in person and through distance learning; people from non-Commonwealth countries can access the web and physical library (in Vancouver, BC, Canada) resources
- me, and my partner in Design Earth, David Alan Foster, who also has an organization called DesignFluence, to get lots of industrial designers working for the other 90% (his Give Bank is a plan to match designers and people with design challenges). David and I are also principals in a solar panel manufacturing start-up.
- Norm Goundry, who created a machine-assisted translation computer program
- Natural Building advocates (think or search Google for cob, straw bale, wattle & daub, etc.)
- Digital Earth Imaging experts (check out www.isde5.org, and WorldWind (from NOAA), as well as GoogleEarth) work with, and often are, ecologists and other scientists.
- National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) <www.nrel.gov> created great software such as HOMER and IMBY for designing renewable energy systems, and predicting their technical and financial performance, to get them financed.
Hunter Lovins and her network
Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute
- Some of the people in the Compendium (mind-mapping and discussion-tracking software) user network
- A few people in the WorldVistA.org network are naturalists or in sustainability in other ways; all of them are valuable for creating an effective public health information management system, and they work with an extremely valuable programming language for resource-poor environments, and far-and-away the single best hospital information management system on the planet. That is important for human sustainability.
- GreenForAll.org was started by Van Jones; it is focused on bringing Recovery Act money for education in green careers, and for weatherizing homes and businesses, to low-income communities in the United States.
- Green America was formerly Co-op America. It works with Global Exchange to produce the Green Festivals, a major dissemination vehicle, and does many other programs as well.

Tom Loeber mentioned The Tech Museum; there is more interest there in sustainability.
- Rob Stephenson is part of the team that produces The Virtual Tech program at The Tech Museum in San Jose. He has a long history in education; I met him at the Educational Object Economy meetings in 2002 and 2003. Rob also works with Doug Engelbart, who pioneered ideas and many tools for empowering humanity to solve tough problems (Doug says they culminate in the knowledgebase). Here is one page I found for Rob.

Engelbart Prize and Semi-Finalists of the Program for the Future Challenge

by Rob Stephenson — last modified Mar 08, 2010 06:21 PM

Filed Under:

• Program for the Future Challenge

Winners were announced at the CoLABoration 2010 conference for the best new collective intelligence tools. These five winners are semi-finalists in the Program for the Future Global Design Challenge and one of these, HealthMap, was named the winner of the Engelbart Prize.

The winners shown below, chosen by a distinguished panel of judges, are outstanding examples of tools to help people work together better, make better decisions together or solve tougher problems together to create a better world.  The final winner(s) of the Program for the Future Challenge will be chosen in a few weeks by staff from The Tech Museum and other participating museums, after the entrants have time to develop "demos" or museum exhibits for their entries. The project that won the Engelbart Award, HealthMap, is a web platform that combines official and informal (e.g. Google News) sources for an up-to-the-minute global map of human and animal diseases.  The platform has been recognized as a leading indicator of disease outbreaks such as the H1N1 flu. The Engelbart Prize carries an award of $1000 USD. In addition to the five semi-finalists, other projects deemed worthy of honorable mention by the judges and/or the conference organizers are Charity Connect, The Synergy Engine,  Transit Everywhere, Bloomer--Collective Intelligence,  Intelligent Web,  Fair-Share Spending and Hugging Media.

I am busy with a day job and the solar start-up; I would still like to pursue all of this with those who are interested.

Regards,

Mark Roest

[Thomas Loeber]

In my first post to this email list I made an error in one of the sentences that presented a discontinuity of logic.  I try to clean that up with the following:

Whether intentional or not, there are people who believe that sustainability is impossible and who seek to mainly be the meanest SOBs in a world they see as basically "dog eat dog." Efforts to squelch attempting to understand and pursue sustainability happen.

I recognize that people who basically believe in anarchy as an insurmountable fact of life (and plenty of death) are not opposed to being misleading.  I suspect that pursuit of some claims are often excuse to defeat those claims.  It happens.  There's evidence that seriously immoral people are in positions of supposed authority over nothing less than morality, people in positions of authority of maybe every major task who are opposed to its success.  People are the most powerful information handling entities in our environment.  We have undergone abuse in many weird and strange ways, been in situations where we have delivered myriad kinds of abuse and many have adopted it as a way of life, as an inescapable and acceptable fact of existence.  

I'm trying to formulate a theory of how we interact that is in concert with general systems theory.  I agreed with Buckminster Fuller's assessment that sociology or what he called "livingry" was/is the least developed science.  I want to see it become a science.  We've had more than enough focus on weaponry.

Been trying to figure out the difference between knowledge and information.  Seems knowledge is information that is given more consideration as having proved useful in past situations, useful to the self.  What is the best knowledge for one person is different from that for another.  I think science tells us that things are relative.  What we see is dependent on what we are.  What we can come to know is an emergent potential of the information that makes up our existence.  In trying to grasp some understanding of Douglas Engelbart's concept of a Dynamic Knowledge Repository, a DKR, I have come to see evidence that he himself may find that rather perplexing and that essentially what we need is a Dynamic Information Distributory.  One person who heard me speak of the concept referred to the idea early on as a DID.

I came across another possible use of DID to stand for "Distribute Information Dammit" in my thoughts on the post here by "Lonny" and my displeasure with Apropedia for not posting the full text of the article that apparently served greatly in launching the OSN.  Next to Lonny's signature I find a link to discover he's the founder of Apropedia.  It would be better to disclose this prominently in your email if you would like to instill trust.  Please realize believing there are no panaceas is an opinion.  Myself, I don't know, but if there are such things I wouldn't want to suppress them to sustain an opinion of there being no such animals.  For any one at any time, there just might be panaceas out there somewhere.  If so, we should make efforts to bring them into focus for each of us.  What is valuable to others may not be valuable to ourselves or maybe even any experts anywhere.  Lonny, I don't mean anything untoward by this suggestion, but you may want to drop the nickname (if it is) or go by your last name or something because, with no slander or anything intended, "Lonny is one letter away from "loony."

Second-order cybernetic abstractions I see as the nature of the internal conflict that reflects and feeds-back with external conflict to be a chief antagonist curtailing options.  I guess it was the guy who is considered the founder of general semantics, Korzybski (sp?), who said "The name is not the thing."  I think he may have also stated "The map is not the territory" but, if I remember correctly, that has also been attributed to A. N. Whitehead.  I think one could also phrase this as the idea that words are not ideas.  When we overtly depend on words to represent things in our heads, we become less here and now.  Names are even less informative.  When we capitalize a word in the midst of a sentence I claim we are abstracting it further from credible communicative comprehension.  We are not our names nor members of all the various institutions we have proclaimed as existent.  We need to serve ourselves, all of us humans.  We need to acknowledge that each of us is human and our success and sustainability is dependent on our facilitating the success and sustainability of our species.  The self is not what we call the self, our ego, that which we associate with our name.  The self is human and it holds no end to common needs and dangers with all other selves in our proximity.  Seek no human enemy or die stupidly might be our task.  I'm afraid we have learned stupidity as inescapable.  I hope that is not the ultimate case.  Though stupidity is sometimes amusing, sometimes the violence wrought is not fun at all.  With the toys and potentials we have developed and are developing, I suggest we don't embrace stupidity.

Tom

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Lonny <lo...@appropedia.org> wrote:

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[Mark Roest]

Hello Thomas,

You are addressing a large problem. I think that by empowering the people with knowledge of sustainability, and also with radical history (see A People's History of the United States, and histories of the process of weakening and then outlawing most medical professions in favor of allopaths who use drugs from drug companies which were, at least at first, tied to petroleum companies), we can basically drive the bad guys out of business, and support humanity and nature in all its traditional diversity (and the replenishment of the  acceptance of diversity that is brought by the young with each new generation). You will find more on this subject in the reply I posted earlier this evening.

To both you and Appropedia, David Alan Foster and I, <DesignEarth.net>, propose that the way sustainability expertise can be best organized (for accessibility and for focus on what people actually need), is to code or tag all useful information (knowledge, wisdom, and data) with the ecosystems, cultures and situations and / or problems for which it is useful. This radically reduces the responses to a search, focusing on what actually applies to a particular group of human beings and the environment of which they [should be, and were historically, before colonialism and multinational corporations engaged in unbridled competition with all who are not of them] stewards. The World Wildlife Fund and National Geographic funded a major study of ecosystems, with over a thousand scientists providing boundary data, that led to production of a map with 667 ecosystems. In many cases this narrows a domain down to a common soil type; that gets very useful in creating a viable, sustainable economy.

It is also very easy to identify where your work applies, and it can be used as the ultimate marketing engine for real solutions to real problems. Because this is true, it makes it possible to make our collective work economically viable. That is one of the goals of the proposal I floated tonight.

Let's not fight or aggravate each other (sustainability experts and helpers) any more, because united we stand, and divided, our whole planet full of ecosystems, and the human cultures who evolved through the process of learning to steward them, will fall.

Does this make sense to any of you? Please let me know either way, with some specifics about the answer and where you stand as "part of the solution." With effective display tools, we will clearly see that myriad solutions fit myriad problems, specific because they are ultimately place-based, as is life in Gaia. Every one of us is important, valuable, and worthy of support.

Regards,

Mark Roest

[Thomas Loeber]

Thank you for cleaning up the OSN home page and including a direct link to the full paper pearce.pdf .