GovTrack.Us

GovTrack.Us has information on all bills going back to 1993 and follows the status of current pending legislation as it goes through the law-making processs.

My brother Coburn’s idea is that these drafts of legislation could lay a foundation for innovative improvements by citizens.  Here, all the current bills before the House and Senate are posted and could be the basis for pragmatic solutions, writing or rewriting, or just increased citizen awareness to inform other roadblocks or incentives for other innovations.

Change.org – Online petition tool

I grew up in NH, where town meetings happen every March to approve the town budget.  My hometown has 1600 people in, and people still say Aye and Nay to practically every line of the budget.

Change.org holds my heart steady – this online petition tool uses the power of the internet to communicate agreement of a body politic on an issue.

All in favor, say Aye!

Supply Chain Transparency

Sourcemap is a collaborative mapping tool, for individuals to map out where things come from and encourage Supply Chain Transparency.  It would be great if there were maps to illustrate where things go.

I’m going to target you sourcemap.  Supply chains are key to this aspiring think tank.

Brain Spores- the advantage of 7 billion people

So, the world turned 7 billion.  Anxiety for a finite planet? or a hot bed of brain spores.

I’m terribly fond of mushrooms for all kinds of reasons.  For example, a mushroom in Oregon may be the world’s largest single organism.  “This 2,400-acre (9.7 km²) site in eastern Oregon had a contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through it. Estimated at 2,200 years old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees.” —Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running

Mushrooms don’t have seeds; mushrooms drop spores.  The dispersed spores land like birdshot on a field of resources.  Then the spores look for each other and connect by hyphae.  Like any node (spore) and edge (hyphae) configuration, as the nodes connect edges, the ability to extract and allocate resources across the field increases as the network becomes more connected.

Today is Day of the Dead – and mushrooms know how to dance on the grave.  That is, mushrooms thrive by working the reciprocal relationship of exponential growth with exponential depletion.  Mushrooms understand and thrive on a steady state economy.  What is so exquisite about this mycelial mat, is that the mushroom mat can kill and eat a tree that is floundering in a shady area and move those resources to feed another tree in a brightly lit area.  That is, the system gleans and allocates from across a large landscape for the success of the overall system.

R Williams estimates the human brain has about 100 billion (10¹¹) neurons and 100 trillion (10¹⁴) synapses.  Multiply that by 7 billion brains; we have a force of nature.

While our collective population is a force of nature currently pushing toward the limits of our finite system in myriad ways (e.g. exponential increase in energy use causes exponential depletion of oil reserves which is directly related to exponential increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases thus exponentially increasing heat retained from the sun and disappearing ice pack reserves…), we are a reflective species.  In the same way we can learn how the exponential function is a way to access resources, it is also the means by which we can understand that growth is predicated on depletion in a closed system.  Geometrical cause and effect.  We can begin to change our focus of vitality based on the abstract monetary system of economic growth to one of steady-state ecological stewardship of our material home.  Economics and Ecology both come from the Greek oikos “house, dwelling place, habitation”.

What I’m trying to talk about here is how each and everyone of us is a witness of the state of our home.  Embodied within the global citizenry are perspectives, ideas, and solutions to global problems to redefine these status quo behaviors and inform sustainable solutions. This think tank project liberates, combines and sequentially layers ideas from people who might be geographically remote to each other to generate solutions that impact the global ecosystem.  By releasing these ideas, we will have a greater capacity to respond to our rapidly changing environments.  We can harness the power of the exponential to redefine civic action.

Let’s mat together.

Improv: To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

This blog tips its hat to Buckminster Fuller and his “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”.

Buckminster Fuller talks about the Great Pirates.  From wiki:  “The source of their power is that they are the only masters of global information in a time where people are focused locally. Specifically, the Great Pirates (G.P.’s) are aware that resources are not evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the G.P.’s exploit for their own advantage.”  So as the 99% speak around the world, and the current political climate of our leaders rings out “No and No”, I suggest we let the current paradigm huff and puff itself to exhaustion and focus our energies on charting a path to improvise on our current system and build a new one.

Improv works by saying “Yes, and…”

My favorite definition of Improvisation is : To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

I like this definition, bc it has a distinct sense of a finite set of conditions.  There is a base, a trumpet, and a piano. There is a comedian, an audience, a theme, and a moment in history.  There are acquired skills, honed intuition, resources, memories, experiences, feedback loops, desires, wants, needs.  Improv is definitely informed by past events, but it is very much motivated by current context. It is extemporaneous.  It is immediate.  What I love about improv, is that it is constantly pushing the edges of innovation.  It is the generative outcome of play.

I’ve been culling rules of improv from the web that I like.  I appropriated them from all kinds of authors in all kinds of fields to act as conceptual guidelines to define for ourselves Sustainable Systems by group play.

10 Rules for Innovation Improv:
1) Say Yes.

2) Say Yes, and..

3) Be Specific, Provide details. Offer up changes. Share. Contribute. Add one idea per line.

4) Don’t Ask Questions, Posit solutions.

5) Don’t Block or Deny. That’s a Know-No.

6) Pay Attention, Read, Listen, Watch

7) Build. Bring anything from anywhere. You look good if you set the frame for another good idea. Don’t feel self-conscious, your idea is an inspired stepping stone to an improved or divergent pathway.

Strategizing Solar Sheds

In 2004 I organized a workshop named “Mapping NY Resources” funded by a small grant I procured from the Crop and Soil Sciences Department at Cornell.  The idea of the workshop was to get some of the most interesting minds in NY who thought about different natural resources to convene a kind of collaborative mapping sensibility.  Expanding on the idea of watershed protection for water use, the goal was to begin to layer different resource maps (cropland, forestland, sunlight, wind, water) to begin integrating what I called “Energy Sheds” to meet the energy demands (heat, electricity, food, transportation) of the distributed population.  One of the speakers was Richard Perez from the University of Albany.  He talked about solar maps – maps that indicate historical sunlight patterns across regions to estimate solar capture potential.

But then what Richard pointed out, was a relationship of solar potential to peak energy loads.  Notably, that peak energy load in upstate NY occurs in the winter when there are less daylight hours, lower intensity, and snow covering panels.  In contrast, the peak energy load in New York City occurs in the summer, when the light is longest and strongest.  Therefore, it would behoove State policy makers to advocate for solar panel installation in NYC.  Solar panels in NYC provide the best simple return-on-investment and also support the complex infrastructure required to meet our very expensive peak load.

Everyone talks about how expensive solar is.  And yet, people may choose a more expensive car for aesthetic reasons.  Solar may not be the most cost-effective way to get your energy but that is because there is no discussion about the ethics of energy. Solar has so many aesthetic and ethical benefits.  Namely, it is capturing today’s sunlight, Today!  Fossil fuels are a trust fund of solar energy that took millions of years of biological photosynthesis to accumulate.  Unless we change our pattern of behavior, we will blow that massive trust fund in 300 years.  Yes, in history, we are the Energy Generation with little regard for future generations, say nothing of the environmental impact our fossil-blow-out-party is causing.  No matter how ‘inefficient’ one might label a solar panel, it has a lot of intrinsic benefits.  Maybe the best panels only capture 20% of the solar energy that hits them, but that is 20% more than we had before, which is also that same quantity of reduction of non-renewable fossil energy demand.

Solar panels distributed across our neighborhoods shore up the electric grid in a number of ways.  First, they provide energy during the day when most energy is consumed.  Second, given that most electricity production occurs in remote locations at large scale, we lose 7-15% of that electricity through friction on the powerlines.  Solar electricity connected to the grid is going to be used in the vicinity of production and not subject to grid loss.  Except for production pollution, they don’t give off CO2 everytime you plug in.  They don’t require cooperation with other countries, and once you’ve purchased them, no embargo will stop them from running.  Solar panels provide a beginning for a more distributed electrical grid system that makes our social system more resilient and less susceptible to natural disaster or terrorist attack on the few large plants (NYS has 62 electric generating plants).  Solar panels are a kind of independence.

Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK)

Random Hacks of Kindness is a community of innovation focused on developing practical open source solutions to disaster risk management and climate change adaptation challenges. Random Hacks of Kindness was founded in 2009 in partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank.

RHoK works by bringing together experts in development and volunteers with a broad set of skills in software development and design. The goal is to produce practical open source solutions to development problems. Events give the community an opportunity to sprint on projects, but the community continues to collaborate around the year.

I’m going to target you RHoK!

Goal: Crowd Source Think Tank

The goal of this website is to form a Crowd Sourced Think Tank.  The Think Tank provides a platform where we collaborate by identifying problems (technical, financial, social and policy) and respond with inspired solutions.  But notably, the objective is to create integrated solutions that shave off inefficiencies by layering improvements of incremental efficiency gains across the larger system. The idea is not that we present one-off solutions, but that we weave our various ideas together to come up was a sequential series of improvements along the chain of production for an overall improved system.  So for example.

Say NY decides to implement an incentive policy to increase private solar panel use to diversify the State energy profile.

Someone suggests it be linked to the grid to shore up the grid and reduce battery needs.

Someone suggests that it be prioritized for NYC in the beginning because it would provide most benefit to the State by getting the most light capture at peak load to benefit the State electric system as a whole.

Someone suggests that isn’t fair, bc upstate NY’ers don’t get a chance to experience solar.  Someone makes an amendment and suggests all upstate schools have solar panels and monitoring systems and when the NYC system is maxed out, other NYS areas are targeted in a methodical way.  Someone else notes that by addressing NYC solar opportunities first, NY State reduces the State per capita GHG emissions fastest.

Someone suggests that whoever gets the solar panel incentives, must also be required to paint their roof white or silver to increase the albedo (reflected light) that reduces warming in the city, thus also reducing demand for A/C in the city.

…

The Goal of the Think Tank is to redefine civic entrepreneurship, by LAYERING ideas, LAYERING complex systems, and LAYERING efficiencies in the larger system to get the most return on investment, financially, socially, and environmentally.