Ongoing Global Brainstorm by gmoke

How much did it cost to start Linux? Or wikipedia? The kind of index of practical local solutions I am suggesting is already out there but widely scattered. If we can link it together into an understandable vision, and many different entities are already doing that, then we can start replicating the best practices around the world. That's what's gonna take money (but not as much as initiative and imagination and not as much as most people think. The process should be FUN. It's a puzzle to find out how to live lightest on this planet while still enjoying ourselves. One laboratory is Burning Man. Another is any refugee camp or hike in the wilderness. Start from bare minimum, survival, refugee camp standards and move from there. Adapt to local conditions and partner with the people in terms of design. Open source maker culture techno-nomad emergency assistance swat teams morphing into basic survival kit for any circumstances anywhere on the surface of this planet. Backpack space suit for Spaceship Earth. Wrote one recent dkos diary on CoLab at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/25/1010648/-Climate-CoLab:-Brainstorming-Global-Climate-Change? Just suggested that Beach Babe in Fl who has posted about quick climate fixes like reducing black carbon, methane, and low altitude ozone do a proposal here. Her latest diary is at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/03/1013175/-Climate-Change-Fast-Solutions-Are-All-We-Have-Left-Updated-Obama-Ozone-decision?detail=hide

While poorly structured, this proposal posits an interesting idea. The concept of diverse and wide ranging open experimentation as a method of identifying and proliferating best practices isn’t a new one, and it certainly has its merits as a method for solving highly complex problems. Perhaps the biggest difficulty with such an open sourced, experimentation-based approach is the disparity in time scale between candidate solutions that are enacted, the response of the climate system, and the period over which solutions need to be carried out to avoid further irreversible changes. Climate change, by definition, occurs over vast time scales. The effects of potential solutions to climate change (though sometimes able to be quickly enacted) will, similarly, only be visible across very large time scales. The window of time to avoid irreversible damage, however, is comparatively small. Essentially, do we really have time to experiment, wait a long time to ascertain the effects, and then re-iterate? This proposal could be strengthened by constructing a more detailed, comprehensive plan, rather than simply listing a series of analogous examples.

Thank you for the comparison you have done, and the comment you have written on this proposal: http://tinyurl.com/platform-mutual-development The re-iteration and the resulting time scale issue, named experimenting by kevinhuang (comment #4) is maybe not necessary, since success stories and the description of encountered problems by some users, and the ways of resolution shown by others, can mostly solve this issue. Hence no re-iteration in the strict sense would be necessary. What about integrating these problems as examples into the proposed "platform for mutual development" (http://tinyurl.com/platform-mutual-development) ? It would be awesome, if you could help on this. The platform could be seen as the "comprehensive plan", as mentioned above (#5). Feel free to add and change to the platform proposal, whatever you feel necessary. =) Cheers!