Open Source Low Tech
opensourcelowtech.org115 points by grep_it 4 days ago
115 points by grep_it 4 days ago
I like the idea behind this. I feel like far too often, the solutions we build for poor communities involve specific materials that can't be manufactured locally, so it just creates more dependence rather than self-sufficiency.
It's one thing to build and ship 1000 bicycles to a poor village, but it's another to teach a village how to make bicycles with random spare pipes and materials they can find anywhere. That way if something breaks, they have the skillset to fix it.
If you go to villages in developing nations, you'll see these kinds of innovative solutions all over - things that don't seem like they should work but they just do after lots of trial and error.
I strongly agree that it's incomparably more important to teach a man/village how to fish/build a bike than to give them one. Unfortunately most people who focus on "helping" are grossly incompetent and have largely misaligned incentives (and oversight).
As for local innovation, it think it very much depends on where. I've visited and lived in many communities in developing nations in Latin America and there's a distinct dearth of not just innovative solutions, but even just basic and seemingly obvious ones. Upon seeing and feeling this 7 years ago, I decided to dedicate my life to it. I'm hopeful that in the coming year I'll finally be ready to share what I've been working on to facilitate it in a more scalable way...
I had never really considered the _competence_ of help before. It makes a huge amount of sense and is a strong argument for intelligent younger folk looking for a meaningful career. Instead of engineering for the pocket lining of your chosen billionaire, why not use those incredible skills to use in frugal or humanitarian engineering
In my fairly extensive experience, non-profit organizations are not just full of and run by grossly incompetent people, but deeply arrogant and/or deluded ones as well. I have NEVER found an organization that has a genuine desire to seek truth, efficacy etc. They often go with whatever their first (inevitably insufficient) idea was, and not only reject all criticism but respond with indignity, etc...
There's no meaningful/competent oversight. It's all just about feels and optics. And thus no real progress has or will be made.
Anyway, yes, I agree that competent and genuine people (who are extremely rare) ought to try to make a meaningful impact in the world. But there's generally more money in something else.
(one rare exception that comes to mind, though i haven't visited them, is The Ocean Cleanup project. They seem to be experimenting and succeeding towards the worthwhile goal of making effective engineering interventions for cleaning up waterways and oceans)
Because i would rather solve the problems close to home, the problems involving those billionaires.
Im not going to put effort into turning those other people in another country into a new cash crop for billionaires.
Who's taking care of me when I'm old and my body and mind are failing? Billionaires aren't gonna, but the money they pay me can be used to trade for goods and services, so hopefully when it's my time, it's less shitty.
Strong disagree. It's much better to get the village a cost-efficient, mass-produced good and then get it on the production program (setup factories/businesses/etc..).
These tools might be useful in war, weird remote situations or maybe when no capital/investors are willing to inject capital in some remote poor african village. But I can't see why any government that can borrow money should do that.
What would be nice is setting up as much manufacturing as possible in Africa for making bikes designed for Africa.
Bike maintenance isn't a skill issue. It's an issue of specialised tools and hard to get spares. Talk to your own Grand parents. If they weren't rich they'd have had to fix their own bike, and they wouldn't have had Google helping them.
What would be different about a bike designed for Africa than one designed for anywhere else? What parts that require specialized tools should be redesigned to use standard tools?
This is of course all wonderful and the ideas presented here might also be useful for Western nations if the war machine starts gaining momentum in, say, a decade or two and things will turn uncomfortable.
That said, I'm also disgusted by the fact this is necessary at all. We designed and/or let an inherently unfair game go on unimpeded and give the losers some scraps so they may survive and continue to play along with can only be called the naturally occurring and less entertaining variant of The Hunger Games.
Any changes to the status quo will have to contend with powerful questions because why build bonds with people you distrust? Why bother including insignificant nations in your decision process? Why not be top dog and trample everyone under your righteous boots? Why not exploit and generally harvest the shit out of everything in sight and retrieve resources for the absolute minimum you can get away with? These sound annoying and they are, but they are really tough questions and they demand a good answer. Just "be a good person" is not cutting it. We need systemic solutions.
In case you're wondering I have the answer: sadly I do not, but I am convinced a couple of you do so please enlighten me.
Seems somewhat related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appropriate_technology
I recall predecessors to this idea from the 1970s, which probably implies I heard about them from Futurist Magazine and/or the book Small is Beautiful. It has always been suggested that engineers could do something worthwhile by inventing very simple yet useful things that could realistically be made in poor/underresourced countries or villages.
What do you figure happened, such that people largely haven't done this?
One aspect is perhaps that simple things aren't necessarily cheap. One Laptop per Child struggled to get costs down, whereas a mass market solar panel is not self-serviceable but at their current cost, who cares. Even in the developed world, you get noticeably more bang for your buck if you buy a cheap, basic car than if you buy a cargo bike that could replace it, because of the fierce competition and huge economies of scale for cars. Touch screens are cheaper than seven segment displays. And so on. (Not a snub on the Open Source Low Tech community, their designs look great!)
Yeah, I agree with this. Though, I think you could make bikes for much cheaper with some ingenuity. Certainly some bike-powered appliances.
Also I think OLPC was a misguided project, as most of these things are. Its out of stem with maslows hierarchy of needs. Folks who are subsistence farmers with drought, smoke filled homes and stomach parasites don't need a laptop and academic education. They need practical and actionable tools and techniques to better meet their basic needs, a state from which they could better pursue academics etc
As other comments have implied, but not explicitly said, they do their own engineering already with what they have.
Since materials can be scarce and inconsistent, much of it is improvised. That in no way diminishes their efforts, results, or knowledge. If anything, that's way more impressive. Lots of engineers in the first world will throw a tantrum if they can't have things exactly their way and probably still make something that doesn't work as well. Entire businesses have shit their pants and gone bankrupt the moment a part is discontinued.
Trying to do better than the people who live there is not only arrogant, but it's own variation of Chesterton's Fence.
EDIT: I can't help myself and have to post an engineerguy video. It's too important of a topic to not drive this point home crystal clear by someone who is far more respected than me.
"Building a Cathedral without Science or Mathematics: The Engineering Method Explained"
Over here in the UK I've seen some pretty original bicycle adaptation with electric motors and even a 2 stroke engine added to aid propulsion.
In India there is a word for this kind of thing Jugaad
As someone who has spent some time in sub-saharan Africa, I can tell you that there is lots that can be done if just seeing the possibilities.
Not everyone everywhere are "engineering oriented", and having people with the skills and eye for practical solutions based on available materials, can help tons, and also open up people's imagination for what can be done.
In fact, this goes for northern Europe too, just that more people can manage without home-built solutions and can "buy away the problem" here.
Also, people where immensely thankful e.g. when my quite clever and crafty father managed to repair a water tank tower that'd been broken for months and years, by sourcing some local material, coming up with a repair design, and having local welders create it, etc etc.
I've never been to sub-saharan Africa, but I did grow up broke enough to be on the receiving end of people with good intentions.
I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but the realities of a situation guided by those who more deeply understand it can very quickly prune the possibilities that an engineer sees. Many engineers would just get frustrated and give up. Many leaders would become impatient with those engineers.
I think to get people's heads out of the clouds and produce real results requires a very special kind of engineer. That is most likely going to be someone local, not an outsider. One can definitely help on the education side of things for the locals, but I'm not convinced that's where the real problems are. It's more likely political and economic. Not even the best engineers in the world are going to solve that.
I suspect you've never spent any meaningful amount of time in the local environments, or you wouldn't have made this comment.
As I elaborated on in another comment, it is commonplace to find that people who have little to no education and resources are missing countless opportunities to implement simple improvements to almost everything.
This mindset of "locals know best" is, frankly, toxic. (just think about the locals wherever you live to see how incompetent they are as well)
What is needed is genuine collaboration and communication between people living in whatever situation and others who are fortunate to have more access to information, resources, education on critical thinking etc...
> This mindset of "locals know best" is, frankly, toxic. (just think about the locals wherever you live to see how incompetent they are as well) [...] others who are fortunate to have more access to information, resources, education on critical thinking etc...
This is insane.
Care to elaborate? (and not cut out the most important context from my comment)
Reminds me of https://www.opensourceecology.org/, but way more low tech. One could actually try the Open Source Low Tech designs without having a small fortune to spare or gathering a considerable community to cooperate.
I've never really understood the point of open source ecology. As you noted, it seems egregiously complicated and expensive. I guess that's why it seems to languish in obscurity.