Yesterday was a day to celebrate. We have just published our 5000th book.
In 2012 I create a small organization with a group of people whose interests intersected. Cultural preservation, education, literacy, social innovation, anthropology, information science, arts, sociology, hackerculture, we came from a variety of backgrounds and professions. Tired of the walls that kept us confined in narrow interests, we wanted to do transdisciplinary work and take action for positive change.
We went into areas that had just experienced conflict, natural disaster or economic upheaval, issues that were becoming more common thanks to environmental change, with three goals: assist in the coordination of information for NGOs, preserve local culture, support education.
Our first task was usually to create some form of library, drawing on the local population for staff, thereby ensuring the work could continue when we left. They organized the “lessons learned” sent to us by NGO’s and provided them much needed feedback and criticism from a local prospective while learning useful technical skills.
Our next task was to ensure local knowledge was not lost. Local teams tracked down areas and institutions than contained important cultural heritage and ensured that it was safeguarded and preserved. Digitization of information was key, bringing local culture and knowledge to a worldwide audience via the web and narrowing the gap in understanding as they brought attention to their needs in rebuilding their country.
Our role in education was probably the most important, working with local literacy projects. If the country lacked books in their local language, we compiled a list of subjects from local people and then had local experts, if available, write short books on those topics. We published these using a
print on demand machine. Once expensive, we had these machines made in our libraries by the populace who had been trained by staff from our
hackerspaces. Soon we would have POD machines popping up around the country. Via the web, we crowdsourced the translation of books from around the world into local languages if locals asked for them, then had them printed. Why are we still focusing on books in 2020? Books don’t need power to function, can survive a lot of mistreatment and are easily passed from hand to hand. And yesterday, April 24th, 2020, the 5000th item popped out of one our POD machines.
Yesterday was also the day we got the call from Alchemy.
(Inspired by the work of
Nancy Hatch Dupree)
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