The Mission Statement for the Open Source Circular Economy Days is online! It was written by me and Lars, but it is based on the ideas, discussions and perspectives of the whole team (Erica, Sharon, Tim, Alice & others coming on board…) What do we mean when we talk about an Open Source Circular Economy? We share the vision of a circular economy. An idea for a truly sustainable future that works without waste, in symbiosis with our environment and resources. A future where every product is designed for multiple cycles of use, and different material or manufacturing cycles are carefully aligned, so that the output of one process always feeds the input of another. Rather than seeing emissions, manufacturing byproducts, or damaged and unwanted goods as ‘waste’, in the circular economy they become raw material, nutrients for a new production cycle. Right now we have a linear system – we take resources out of the ground, and transform them into (often hazardous) waste. We consume and destroy our own planet faster than it can possibly recover. We’ve known about these problems for decades and despite increasing public awareness we are still nowhere near comprehensive solutions. Current ‘green’ approaches merely act as an ineffective brake on this destructive trajectory. A more radical shift is needed – in how we collaborate, and how we design, produce and distribute our products and the services around them. One way to illustrate the circular economy is to think of cycles in the natural world. A simple representation might be a seed, which grows in nutritious topsoil, becoming a strong adult tree –...
In April 2014 I travelled to Georgia and Armenia with Edgeryders and the UNDP, working together with Noemi Salantiu to run workshops with social innovators, while documenting the events and participants’ stories. This is a teaser video for the main event held in June – the story is told through text, as I also needed to produce Georgian, Armenian and Arabic versions of the video. We also visited and interviewed participants to get international conversations going around their stories, and to start building collaborations throughout the region and further afield. Reports from the Spot the Future project can be found here:...
From OpenDataDay.org: Open Data Day is a gathering of citizens in cities around the world to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world’s local, regional and national governments. This was the local Berlin Open Data Day event, organized by the wonderful people of the Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland and held at Wikimedia Deutschland‘s headquarters in Kreuzberg. Check out the projects in detail here: odd14.hackdash.org Video by Sam Muirhead CC-BY Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland Made with Free / Libre / Open Source software (kdenlive.org, gimp.org, audacity.sourceforge.net/, magiclantern.fm/, ubuntu.com) Music Duck Duck Goose CC-BY Jupiter Skydive (jamendo.com/en/track/1088272/duck-duck-goose) Only Instrumental CC-BY Broke For Free...
School of Data is an Open Knowledge Foundation project to teach activists, journalists, and citizens how to work with data – how and where to find good data, how to process, clean and analyse it, and how to present it effectively to tell a story clearly and...
Documentation for an Open Source Hardware project I developed as part of my ‘Year of Open Source‘ project (an attempt to live as open source as possible for a year, exploring different areas of open hardware, open education, free culture and free software). Inspired by the collaborative hacking of these old Brother machines, and seeing Fabienne’s amazing knitting projects (see the earlier interview I did with her) I wanted to make myself an open source hat, building on work in the commons. This video documents the process, and the writeup and ‘source code’ for the hat are all here: Snowflake...
