I just blogged on the Appropedia blog, about a notable sustainability site run by Peter Campbell from Melbourne - Green wiki #3: Greenlivingpedia.

One interesting thing about Greenlivingpedia is that a wiki is a collaborative platform, but here it's almost all the work of one person. And this one person has created the 5th most active green wiki on the web that I could find - more active than Wikia's green wiki, for example. One person can use a wiki very effectively to create a useful resource, if they're knowledgeable and committed.

Now, Peter could have used some other platform that doesn't allow editing, but a wiki gives some key advantages:

• It's easy to edit, and all changes are recorded.
• Contributions are possible - okay, they haven't come in a flood, but others (including me) have contributed here and there.
• Conversations are tied to the topics. Forum sites may attract more activity, but I like the fact that the permanent resource page is the focus, rather than ever changing discussion topics.
• The next passionate contributor may turn up tomorrow - and start contributing immediately.

See this wiki at Greenlivingpedia.org.

I swam in Lake Ontario today. Good time of year for it - while the water is in liquid form.

Beautiful spot here in Kingston. It's good meeting Joshua Pearce (who teaches at Queens University) face-to-face at last, and talking about sustainability, appropriate technology and all that, and ways to get collaboration happening in a much bigger way. And tinkering with his clever piece of solar water disinfection equipment - but I'm not allowed to share details of his specific design, just yet.

I mentioned to an Indonesian friend by email that I was going to Ontario - she said watch out, maybe there's lots of onta (camels) there :-).

Engineers Without Borders UK are interested in how to contribute to the Appropedia wiki, and the process of making content free‎. Which of course leads to questions about when someone's content is their bread and butter. A section of that page, "But I earn a living from my content!", addresses this question, but needs much more thought.

I'm at the Humanitarian Centre at Cambridge University - a "hub organisation that 'thinks local and acts global', sharing complementary resources and skills to achieve more than the sum of its parts." This basically means that these world-changing organizations share office and meeting space, and get to do lots of incidental meeting with like-minded people. Great idea - every city should have at least one. Every small NGO (and big NGO for that matter) should be part of one.

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.