"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Copying the internet
New Note: I´m updating this blog based on the input of all Agents.
Copying the internet
How can we make food and water available for everyone in this planet?
This is how: Building a Global Network of Community Urban Farms using the internet as a model.
The internet is a Distributed Network. This means it´s a network with far more resilience than our
centralized networks.
You can see centralized networks in the way we currently distribute water, food, energy among other things.
This centralized networks are very vulnerable to any kind of disaster. For example:
This images simulates what would happen in case of a nuclear attack.
If in a centralized network the main node doesn´t work like let´s say a hydroelectric plant or a
water treatment facility then the entire network collapses.
We have seen this happen in the Evoke Missions. Food, energy, water and even banks
are all centralized systems, when the main node collapses, the entire network collapses.
More about it here http://www.urgentevoke.com/profiles/blogs/food-energy-water-patterns
Think different
The internet is different because it´s a Distributed Network ("Red Distribuida" in the diagram). If a section is not
working due to an emergency the rest of the network is still working and can help to reconstruct the damaged
node. A Community Urban Farms is a node inside a larger Global Network of Community Urban Farms
Now it´s time to build a Global Network of Community Urban Farms that will bring Water Food
and Energy FOR EVERYONE IN THIS PLANET.
We can start with the biggest cities in the World.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/08/urban.planet.megacities/inde...
This cities have a great cultural influence over their own countries, their regions and the World. With only 14 farms we can impact a little bit more than 9% of the World Population. Other culturally can be included too. In the long term the plan is to have a Community Urban Farm on every block in every City in the World. It may take decades, but we can do it all through incremental steps.
At the beginning this Global Network of Community Urban Farms will resemble more a decentralized network, but with more farms it will eventually will resemble a Distributed Network.
Health and Education
To a certain degree Health and Education can also be part of this Global Network of Community Urban Farms, especially in places where Health and Education infrastructure is not enough. The health can focus on preventive medicine and first aid. Education should also be part of the project. Teaching science with what is grown and built in this Global Network of Community Urban Farms is a unique opportunity to make science fun and real. The Arts and sports can become part of the community live. A place for old and young to learn from each other and create community a global community that feels local.
Empowering Woman
Watch this video: http://www.girleffect.org/ It´s clear to me that if Women are the Facilitators of this Community Urban Farms they will do a far better job than we men do. It´s not about reverse discrimination it´s science proving they are better Community Builders.
Questions
I have some questions for you:
Could we integrate other projects and combine it with this System of Distributed Networks? What about Human Rights? Money or any substitute of it? Any ideas? I´ve seen some great ideas in Evoke and I would love to incorporate them and mix them . . . share with us your ideas!!!
The name Global Network of Community Urban Farms is descriptive but too long maybe? I am thinking
GLOCAL FARMS or GLOCAL URBAN FARMS sounds better . . . Can you think of a cool name?
How can we integrate play into it? If we are gonna change the World it should be a Fun World.
Agent Patricio.
* "The pioneering research of Paul Baran in the 1960s, who envisioned a communications network that would survive a major enemy attacked. The sketch shows three different network topologies described in his RAND Memorandum, "On Distributed Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Communications Network"(August 1964). The distributed network structure offered the best survivability. "On Distributed Communications: 1. Introduction to Distributed Comm... " From:Ahttp://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/...ugust 1964). The distributed network structure offered the best survivability.
Views: 1220
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Comment by Julio Cesar Corona Ortega on April 13, 2010 at 8:59am
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Oh, also, since this could keep track of local urban farmers, it would be conceivably easy to organize local farmpunking conventions that would include games and events, like having speakers, talks from farming innovators to show new technologies, "produce tasting" competitions, outdoor picnics/barbecues, cooking contests where they are only allowed to use the things they produce and anything else you can think of to make it fun and increase the "play value".
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Comment by Patricio Buenrostro-Gilhuys on April 13, 2010 at 11:03pm
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@Julio I like ALL your ideas!!! ALL OF THEM!!! Brilliant!!! Brilliant!!! Brilliant!!! Cool!!! Wow!!! I´m excited!!!
Now what form of play can you and everyone think of for the first pilot urban farm?
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Comment by Michele Baron on April 13, 2010 at 11:28pm
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thank you patricio, for this good post
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Thank you very much, Patricio. :)
Well, if you start with a localized pilot based on a single community (like oh, I don't know, Guadalajara?) you could organize contests between the participants. For a pilot of course, we are talking about your resources and funding being limited, so maybe it could be something more modest, like a certificate that would officially set whoever completes their farm before the rest as the "First World Farmer", promising a lifetime honor spot on the database website you would implement later. Maybe this could increase both excitement and a sense of importance about the project between your "players"
You could also have weekly "productivity session" to discuss how each farm is doing and what each person is trying and what is working for them. To make it more fun for them, you could make it into a party, offering pizza, garbanzada, grilled meat, tacos or whatever you want. At the end of the session and after everyone exchanged their stories and ideas, you could organize some sort of game. For instance, if you have a bow and a cardboard box, you could make an archery competition. Or if you want to go more traditional, maybe a poker game, Uno, dominoes, or whatever else you think will be the most fun for them, and whoever wins, gets free seeds, fertilizer or other supplies.
You can also have a "farmer of the season" contest, where whoever has the best growing crops in the trimester gets to pick a place for the entire group to go to, like a water park, a restaurant, an arcade, a gotcha (paintball) field or whatever they choose.
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Comment by Turil Cronburg on April 14, 2010 at 12:34am
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This definitely goes well with my idea for the Evolved Nature Sanctuary (also known as the Evolutionary Garden), where the goal is to offer as many of the basic needs for health as possible for anyone in the community to use. An evolved garden is a distributed network in and of itself. And a distributed network of a evolved gardens is absolutely awesome!
So I'd love to offer my basic ideals for creating an evolved garden for your global garden network:
1. physical needs: food, water, air, warmth, and light
2. emotional needs: a feeling of personal connection with others
3. intellectual needs: information about how things work
4. spiritual needs: a sense of contributing something to the evolution of life itself
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Comment by Chris Ke Sihai on April 14, 2010 at 1:42am
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Keep it simple: resourcenet, worldnet, the basic share system (share as a noun, not a verb), healthweb, econoweb, production grid, etc.
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Comment by Ursula Kochanowsky on April 14, 2010 at 2:55am
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Just let me know how I can help.
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Comment by Nicholas Nagao on April 14, 2010 at 3:01am
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Patricio, I love this idea and the ideas thrown out here by others, but I had some questions about practicality. Please keep in mind my favorite project on here so far is Growcology and I am helping in a community garden, so I believe in the idea of localized food sources, but I want to ask these questions anyway because I think they are worth exploring...
1. In a distributed network, part of the reason the network can work the way it does is because the "cost of transportation" is extremely low. I think there is a reason that Walmart does their logistics the way they do, which is through more of a decentralized model (they have large Warehouses in strategic areas of the US) and distribute to their stores from these points.
2. Aside from cost of transportation, you run into other logistical problems such as availability of products at each node. In a way I suppose it's related to #1, but rather than cost of transportation, this deals with "speed of transportation". With electrons, the time it takes to get between nodes is tiny which allows for this type of architecture to work well. However, if you have to "order" a product from another node in real life, the time it takes that apple or orange to get to the other node seems unrealistic. This is the reason stores exist...in order to ensure that there is enough supply of everything for a wide variety of people.
Ok, like I said I really believe in these projects and think they are important to do locally, but I'm not sure how this could work on a large scale...
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Nicholas, you're missing the point. The goods produced are not meant to be shipped. They're meant to be eaten, right where they are.
This is to ensure that we are awash in cheap, plentiful, nutritious and local food by walking down the street.
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Ursula, I love the idea, but I'm trying to understand the practicality and/or advantages/disadvantages. I understand that it would be nice to look at things in a distributed network architecture, but as a System architect, I study this type of thing all the time, and can say that a distributed network is not always the best solution. There are tradeoffs to each type of system. While things like redundancy have been noted in the example as to good thing about a distributed network, I feel it should be pointed out that there are many disadvantages to this architecture as well
For instance, quality control is very difficult on a distributed network. When you have choke points in a system, it's easier to apply global rules, filters, or other quality control features. In a grid or distributed network, each node would have to have these filters.
Storage is also another problem with Distributed networks, as I was trying to discuss with my last comment, but perhaps didn't make very clear. Distributed networks work great for continually moving traffic, but once you have to store large quantities of "data" or whatever else you're moving, you run into logistical problems as I was describing.
Anyways, I'm not trying to derail the conversation, but wanted to inject some objectivity and further thinking into how we can overcome some of these problems, and to give an honest look as to whether this is indeed better than a decentralized system...
There are obviously benefits to these ideas aside from "efficiency", however, I feel that if you're going to compare something that was built for certain reasons, you should at least understand the reasons and decide whether they apply to what you're trying to implement it in.
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