Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

Why Smart Cities still aren’t working for us after 20 years. And how we can fix them.

(I was recently asked to give evidence to the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development during the development of their report on Smart Cities and Infrastructure. This article is based on my presentation, which you can find here).

The goal of a Smart City is to invest in technology in order to create economic, social and environmental improvements. That is an economic and political challenge, not a technology trend; and it is an imperative challenge because of the nature and extent of the risks we face as a society today. Whilst the demands created by urbanisation and growth in the global population threaten to outstrip the resources available to us, those resources are under threat from man-made climate change; and we live in a world in which many think that access to resources is becoming dangerously unfair.

Continue reading “Rick Robinson: Why Smart Cities Are Not Smart”

Telecoms Look Past Cisco and HP to Open Source Hardware

Now, a new wave of companies aims to push this movement even further. This morning, four big-name telecoms— AT&T, Verizon, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, and South Korea’s SK Telecom—agreed to join the Open Compute Project. Through a sub-project dedicated to the needs of telecoms, they too will explore open source servers and networking equipment that can boost efficiency and reduce costs. “Everyone is looking for that same synergy and agility,” Gagan Puranik, a director of architecture planning at Verizon, says of his company and others who have joined Facebook’s experiment in open source hardware. “The learning and the sharing will go both ways.”

Continue reading “Yoda: Telcos Discover Open Source — By-Passing CISCO Et Al”

Getting dirty with open source databases

“We have been forced to look elsewhere because it’s not economical. If I want to do some serious number-crunching, I’m not going to spend £60,000 for a box when I can get something like MySQL with zero licensing costs and which pretty much does the same thing. It might not be as polished, but the tooling has progressed immeasurably.“

Continue reading “Koko: Getting dirty with open source databases”

100+ Makers eco-hack the future with open-source prototypes for a fossil-free, zero waste society

From a group of about 200 applicants, POC21 selected “the 12 most-promising open source products” in the fields of food, energy, housing, mobility, and communications, and the five-week innovation camp that was held from August 15th to September 20th brought together some 100 participants “create a proof of concept for a sustainable tomorrow.”

The final 12 projects/products can be seen on the POC21 website, some of which we've covered before, such as the $30 DIY wind turbine and the Aker urban ag kits, but there are also compelling projects for DIY solar (both PV and solar thermal), cargo bikes, 3D-printed water filters, home food production, and a pedal-powered tractor.