Alberto Cottica's Blog – March 2010 Archive (8)

Here's my favourite water visionaries this week: the fine folks at Bricolab, who have launched the Open Source Washing Machine Project. Here's the rationale in their own words:



Continue

April 8th 2020: celebrating ten years of a happy marriage between me and my wife. I am Italian, she is Swedish-Ethiopian-Sudanese, we live in Costa Rica, part of my family is in Austria, so loved ones are all over the place.



We throw a party, and people convene. But we appreciate that traveling is tiresome and energy-hungry, so we want to give people ways to participate while not making the planet's energy bill any worse. We've thought up of two schemes.



One is an energy… Continue

So I did my homework and blogged. So why does my IMAGINE4 not show up in the evidence panel? Why does the mission not log as complete? Do I have to complete LEARN4 and ACT4 before? This did not seem to be the case when I accepted the objective. Can anybody help me? Alchemy?

2020. People all around the planet have joined forces two years ago, starting to weave a network of citizens, schools, universities, NGOs, local public administrations. The goal is to check all freshwater bodies on the planet for main pollutants, feed the data to a server and make them available for reuse and remix.

• Volunteers have been trained in basic chemical and biological analysis; a network of teachers and scientists worldwide, led by MIT, has developed a low-cost, low-tech,…

Continue

My device for saving energy is the Kublai presentation kit.



I am the director of project named Kublai. It is a community of creatives targeted especially at the lagging areas of Italy, where social trust is way down. My job entails travelling a lot to creative events and meetups to pitch Kublai to participants: every person and every shared idea counts. Last year I spent more than 120 days on the… Continue

When you get on a train or on a motorway, chances are most vehicles you'll see are transporting information, not things. Commuting to the office? Going to a conference, or to school? Information. You are going there to talk and listen. That's information exchanges. And, in this day and age, information comes in bits



So, look: I don't think that the alternative to the car is the electric car. That's just shifting the problem. The alternative to… Continue

My hero is Augusto Pirovano, CEO of CriticalCity. At 27 (he is now 30) he began to wonder what would happen if we could a play so big that it could encompass our wh*** lives. He lives in Milano, Italy, a business capital plagued by pollution, social tensions, and more than its fair share of corruption. He thought that, if people could perceive their cities as playgrounds, they might live out their cities in a more lighthearted way, and think of things… Continue

I want to do something along the lines of Providing skills, not just finished technologies.



I live in a developed country, Italy, with a vast lagging area called Mezzogiorno. While by no means destitute (about 50 billion euro are funneled yearly towards it from the more developed northern Italy to) Mezzogiorno has an autonomy problem. Maintaining private expenditure levels in the area depends on transfers coming from outside, steered by public decision… Continue