!Adopting a Village (22-01-2005)

It seems not a bad thought at all. Thanks to Martin Kircher for relaying this! /AdoptAVillage

!Despaming our Wiki (10-01-2005)

...is now easier with the effort of Main/SpamControl

::At the Sola Roof Wiki we have implemented a log in for members that would like to contribute and edit and this is easily implemented here if you would like. The Sola Roof Yahoo Forum is also restricted in this same way - but the archives of the forum and the wiki pages are all open for viewing by all. This proceedure has not limited the growth of the forum - in fact the lack of spam and off topic messages has probably promoted our growth and a greater feeling of community. - Solaroofguy

!Tsunami Catastrophy Thoughts (09-01-2005)

In our German-Language Dorfwiki, we have alerted the architects and planners in our readership to collect thoughts and ideas on improvement of habitat facing the Tsunami Disaster. I repeat this also here and hope to move thoughts back and forward.

We have three sections:

TsunamiDisasterAndBuiltEnvironment: what could be done that is both practically applicable and sustainable to use the current funding to improve the long term structural resilience facing natural disasters?

• Please see our Tsunami Reconstruction page at the Sola Roof Wiki

TsunamiDisasterAndSoftTourism: how can tourism become a force to reduce dependance instead of increasing it? How can tourism help to build up sustainable structures instead of destroying them?

Similar efforts are maintained by Eric Britton here

More thoughts on this on 12-01-2005:

The almost non-existing response to the questions above gave me a lot to think. Could it be that our groups have nothing to say in the face of this disaster from the point of view of their core subjects? Could it be there is much dreaming about Global Villages, Global and Open Learning, alternative ways to organize communities, community currencies and you name it - and we are not able to relate it to the reality of the rebuilding after the Tsunami Disaster? Even the arcology group which favors a completely different style of building - which would have saved tens of thousands of human lives if existing in South East Asia - did not have the slightest tendency to even react to this suggestion, that I made some weeks earlier there.

So there is a pattern - a very problematic one. Do we really accept the fact that several billions of Euros and Dollars are spent on rebuilding in these countries, just to rebuild the non-sustainable structure that was there before? Are we so comfortable to live with our negative opinion about the powers to be that we do not even care any more to make our ideas known when the world seems to be watching and listening a little bit more?

But maybe I was not specific enough, maybe I was not concrete enough. So lets face the facts again: with a lot of public support from all side, for example Austria is building up a complete village in the South of Sri Lanka with three hundred houses, schools, streets. When if not now are we going to show the potential impact of our ideas on the sustainability and resilience of these settlements? When if not now are we able to outline an alternative, even an alternative to mass tourism which is said to be beneficial but in fact is one of the elements of the dimension of catastrophy in its current form?

All I wanted was that a collective body of intelligence shows up and responds to that challenge. There are some slight signs of that elsewhere, but I do not feel the idea to create a venue and facilitate such a process in our online community was redundant. There were critical voices like Helmut Leitner and Thomas Diener who showed up in the German language Wiki commenting on the poor response.

http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?TsunamiKatastrophe

But I feel that could really become the case for a virtual flash mob. Lets face the challenge: Many millions are invested for rebuilding and reconstruction of villages. We have friends here on the lists who have close links to Sri Lanka. I think it would be a good exercise for our network to try to think relevantly about what is needed.

Please respond to this here:

TsunamiAndRelevantThoughtsDiscussion

"Doing homework is inescapable for those assuming responsibility during this "one-time-ever-in-a-whole-planet's-history" critical events. We are entering the bottleneck. Not all alive now will survive the transition events. Many can be saved whom are otherwise destined for much suffering and early demise -- but that requires everybody on the team to do their homework.

You not only need to know in general, you need to know in specifics, and that might require you apprenticing yourself to [an] expert[s] for a term. And if there is homework, nobody can make you do it, but you can find yourself not picked for the team.

Only once in a planet does this kind of a crisis arise. Those in the future will have a better future precisely because we did what we had to do in this time. Every bit of it is important, but not all of it is glamourous. Doing homework is not glamourous but it is essential, vital. It's nothing to sneer about or disdain, and certainly nothing to shirk. Your future, which is very probably longer than mine, is highly dependent on you doing high quality homework with nobody standing over you to make you do it." Lion Kuntz