ANSWERS 2014 Robert Steele with Pierre Cloutier on Smart Nations and the Future of Quebec

Advanced Cyber/IO, Answers, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Design, Ethics, Governance, Politics
Pierre Cloutier
Pierre Cloutier

Robert, you are the originator of the concept of a Smart Nation, with your article in 1996 published in the Government Information Quarterly, entitled “Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information.” Quebec is a nation, recognized by Canada, with a distinct culture, a distinct geography, and perhaps a distinct future.

Continue reading “ANSWERS 2014 Robert Steele with Pierre Cloutier on Smart Nations and the Future of Quebec”

Worth a Look: #OpenSource ALL Power Labs Carbon-Negative Bio-Mass Gasifier

05 Energy, Design
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

ALL Power Labs offers biomass gasifiers and power generation systems at multiple levels of assembly and system integration.  From “We deliver it turnkey complete“ to”You build it from scratch,” you decide the relative amount of effort vs cost you want to invest towards your finished system.

All Power Pallets and GEKs are covered by a 100% money back guarantee.

ALL Power Labs

Tip of the Hat to Mark Perrodin for this pointer — note open souce and reasonable pricing.

Guardian Sustainable Business: 8 Recycling Success Stories

03 Environmental Degradation, Design, Materials

guardian sustainable business8 ways to rethink resources: nappies to benches and food waste to biogas

LIST ONLY

1. Nappies to roof tiles and railway sleepers   .   2. Paper to reduce food waste   .   3. Sustainable construction materials   .   4. Clothes from old water bottles   .   5. Agri-waste into plastic bottles   .   6. Worms as fertiliser   .   7. Food waste to biogas   .   8. Recycling polyester

Phi Beta Iota: Brilliant examples of remediation in context of continuing to do the wrong things righter (Russell Ackoff 2004). Bio-design and the tri-fecta of holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering would make such measures moot.

Sepp Hasslberger: Rebuilding the Internet as a Commons — Local Mesh First

Access, Autonomous Internet, BTS (Base Transciever Station), Cloud, Design, Hardware, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Software, Spectrum
Sepp Hasslberger
Sepp Hasslberger

The internet needs to be re-built from the bottom up. Network locally first and only then connect to the world “out there”.  A local wireless network might be coming to your neighbourhood soon. 

The Rise of the Network Commons, Chapter 1 (draft)

Armin Medosch

Continue reading “Sepp Hasslberger: Rebuilding the Internet as a Commons — Local Mesh First”

Robert Horn: Visualizing World’s Biggest Problems

Access, Data, Design, Innovation, Knowledge, Transparency
Robert Horn
Robert Horn

Robert Horn is a political scientist with a special interest in public policy, organizational strategy, and knowledge management. These days, he deals mostly with social messes. Social messes are more than complicated problems. I define them as tightly interconnected clusters of wicked problems and other messes. They are very complex; ambiguous; highly constrained; seen differently from different ideologies and worldviews; and contain many value conflicts. They usually contain major entanglements of economic, social, and political, cultural, and psychological factors.  Bob is a pioneer in dealing with messes through interactive visual analysis with task groups.

Below the Fold Are Links and Some Astonishing Visuals

Continue reading “Robert Horn: Visualizing World's Biggest Problems”

Jean Lievens: fab labs, open innovation and smart cities

Design, Hardware, Innovation, Manufacturing, Materials
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

4/4 Fabbing & cities: Barcelona Fab City

This post is the fourth of 4 posts about Digital manufacturing (fabbing) environments that we have been publishing weekly on Fridays. In these posts I have shared my research on fab labs, open innovation and smart cities, mainly in Europe and in Spain.

The fourth post is the result of a research on fab labs and their relationship with smartcities. In the last two articles I have written about two recent nodes of the global fab lab network. Although there are other fablabs in Spain, I decided to give visibility to these two initiatives in León and in Sevilla. Among all fab labs in Spain those two are giving a real opportunity to make personal production and digital manufacturing accessible and comprehensible for a wide range of people. However, the most popular manufacturing laboratory in Spain is Fab Lab Barcelona (2008). It is settled in the IAAC – Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and it is part of the Fab Lab Network. I would like to share my interest in their research on how the digital production ecosystem could make our cities smarter.

Read full article.

Sepp Hasslberger: Beautiful Woven Refugee Tents Get Their Power from the Sun Read more: Beautiful Woven Refugee Tents Get Their Power from the Sun

01 Poverty, 06 Family, Design, Materials, Resilience, United Nations & NGOs
Sepp Hasslberger
Sepp Hasslberger

Beautiful Woven Refugee Tents Get Their Power from the Sun

Designer Abeer Seikaly has developed a practical yet elegant solution to the need for lightweight, mobile, and structurally sound shelters for disaster zones.

The Canadian-Jordanian's Weaving a Home project not only provides flexible, transportable shelter, but also incorporates water collection, solar power generation and solar water heating into the design.

Each tent has its own water collection system, utilizing the natural channels formed by the skin to direct water to the storage point. By using a fabric with strong thermal properties, the tents can alsoconvert solar radiation into power and heat collected water for showering.

Read full article.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge