Amos Meeks's Blog – March 2010 Archive (13)

Continue

Husk Power Systems is a for-profit (which I read as economically sustainable) company using rice husks, a form of agricultural waste, to power rural India.



You can see their company website Here, and their PopTech presentation Here.



There are several reasons I really like this project:

1. It's economically sustainable. They make a profit by powering rural… Continue

It's March 10th, 2020. After my latest Hackerspace in Africa achieved independence last week, I decided to go home and visit my family for a little while.



Right now we're sitting down to dinner, some of my mother's delicious pasta. My mother got into gardening back when there were the worldwide food shortages, and she's kept it up since so some of the vegetables in the sauce are fresh from the garden. Most of the food, however, we got from the supermarket nearby, much like we did 10… Continue

In the upper-middle class town of Winchester in the second most food secure state in the United States, food security right now is not much of an issue.



However, in the future if we continue as we are concerning food, feeding yourself, even as an affluent citizen of… Continue

I began juggling a little over four years ago. I began with Contact Juggling, a type of juggling that involves taking one or more balls and rolling them around your body. A great example, and my personal favorite video, is Elements. Another great video is JCJC.



Now that you've been wowed by contact juggling, I hope you want to learn. By the best resource, and the way I… Continue

This is the official unveiling of the Maker's Guild Wiki!

If you are interested in being a part of the Guild, to the the wiki and follow the application guidelines. I look forward to this network of Makers contributing significantly to the EVOKE Network!



However, this would never have been made were it not for Raymond M. Kristiansen's blog post, "… Continue

This is another idea for the "Challenge the Network" discussion.

This would be a Maker's challenge. The challenge is to make something.

First, you would try to identify some need to want that you are someone else has.

Then you would find something you could make using the resources around you that would address this need or want.

Then you would make it, and blog about it (preferably with pictures!)

It is important to…

Continue

There has been some talk lately about EVOKE "Guilds". I like this idea.



The purpose of a guild to me, at least on a site like EVOKE, would be to give people with similar interests or goals a place to communicate, collaborate, and work… Continue

I recently submitted an idea for a player Challenge:

"I like the idea of a collaborative challenge.



I've noticed some people already posting to try to gather groups of people together to work on an Evokation (Here and Here). I think it may be interesting to turn collaboration on an Evokation, or any sort of positive…

Continue

Of the Evoke powers, Resourcefulness is the most meaningful and significant to me. With resourcefulness you can use what you have to create solutions that work, both in function and feasibility. You can turn bicycles, cellphones, and scrap metal into windmills, pumps, pipes, bellows, infrastructure, lights, and so much more.

I blogged about my two favorite examples of this in my ACT1 post, both the…

Continue

In 2020 I will turn 28. I will be in a small town in rural Africa, working in a metal shop I made with the help of the community. I will be teaching the community to use the tools and the resources at hand to solve the problems they have. The shop will be open to anyone to use in return for whatever they can give, money, food, labor, etc. The community will use this to create things like windmills to create electricity, tools to help plant and harvest crops, better stoves, pumps, and…

Continue

My hero is George Odhiambo, a metalworker in Gikomba, Nairobi (blogged about on Afrigadget: http://www.afrigadget.com/2008/06/17/re-use-in-the-unofficial-kenyan-ironworks-industry/)

He is significant not for making a company or an invention that will save the world and help millions of people, but rather for using some ingenuity, engineering, and the resources available…

Continue

"Innovate on existing platforms (We’ve got bicycles and mobile phones in Africa, plus lots of metal to weld. Innovate using that stuff, rather than bringing in completely new tech.)"

This aspect of social innovation is I think of the greatest importance. If you create something to solve some problem or some need, but it is something that needs to be manufactured elsewhere, your solution will probably not be very successful or sustainable.…

Continue