Current location:	Sydney
Current music:	humming Midnight Oil for some reason
Entry tags:	collaboration, distributedaction, internationaldevelopment, povertyalleviation, wikis

Distributed Action
Here's an ambitious project being formed: Distributed Action. Primary goal: Save the world.

It will start by touring the third world countries to identify places where westerners can help.  These places might be schools in need of teachers, clinics in need of doctors, farmers in need of training or appropriate technologies, water projects in need of engineers, or any number of other projects...

Each volunteer opportunity will get a page on this wiki with photographs of the project, the location, descriptions, and contact information for the people who posted the project and those in the community who would host the volunteers and be responsible for the project after the volunteers left.

Collaboration like this is what we dreamed of when setting up Appropedia. Distributed Action is the  work of David Reber, a Civil Engineering Student at San Francisco State University,


On a tangent: Discussiing this with other Appropedians got me thinking about how important the "soft" issues are when we're saving the world - culture, gender, the socio-economic context. What exactly makes a technology "appropriate" depends entirely on the context, and no design sheet can fully address that.

There's plenty of good ideas out there - Kamal Kar (Community-led total sanitation), Paul Polak (Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail) and  Akhtar Hameed Khan (Orangi Pilot Project) are just three with a lot of wisdom. But the softer issues could do with a lot of expansion on Appropedia. For example, we need guides laying out principles for aid workers to keep in mind - both general principles, and advice for specific locations and cultures.

Also of interest: I've been in touch with Engineers Without Borders Australia and they're working on a related project: developing country guides for their volunteers. I'll post again when I've learnt more.