local food ecosystems

κοινωνία

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Ripples of Influence
κοινωνία
 
The Common Good is always there waiting for some attention. It seems that attention is at a premium these days with the bombardment of our psyches with the steady stream of nonsense coming from the commercially prostituted media that has driven sanity to the margins of daily life. Who are we to withhold ourselves from the task of restoring Common Sense to our lives?
 
OzoneFarm is here to assist in the process of realization of the ideal for our own slice of the “masses” which is fairly small according to our year-end stats. But our aim is more toward quality rather than quantity. The ideal that we look to is not of this current world. It comes from a future world that can only be imagined and scarcely even described. All we know for sure is that justice and love will be the dominant themes.
 
Building real community requires openness, honesty and oneness of both heart and mind. The confusing forces that plague civic life and the overall well-being planet-wide appear to have a common source – an inordinate desire for material gain on the part of an ever-thinner slice of Humanity. Our philosophy is based in the belief that Community is Capital. To us, wealth consists of physical well-being, spiritual liberation and collective cognition of Earth’s ecosystem. It has nothing to do with finance, commerce or even government.
 
The battle lines are drawn along physical boundaries using ideals that are functions of collective acceptance of a few principles that empower mainly those who have material advantage through the usurpation of civil authority. This condition creates wide-spread misery and despair and results in crime and misbehavior on every level. Every problem ranging from irreparable damage to the ecosystem to mass starvation of innocent children is solvable through a return of the uniquely Human faculty of critical thinking and problem-solving that has delivered us through two World Wars and into a third. This war, though, is one of mind and spirit..
 
In 2016, we hope to show what can be achieved through tightly-focused community development and cyber-active vocational rehabilitation of our systems and networks. We are ramping up our efforts to build brick-and-mortar instances of maker spaces, rebuild centers, B corporations, permaculture projects, local food networks and other down-to-earth efforts to change things at the local level. At the same time, we are working on forming a collectively-rendered prototype of a new system of accountability and communication based, not upon greed but upon the κοινωνία principle.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koinonia

Arduino for sensor-actuator networks

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Arduino may easily do the jobs I was talking of earlier this year. As rainfall begins, the network across the topography will sense it, open some channels and close others and the dance will begin. Capturing the excitement and energy of a any event from a summer shower to a thunderstorm …

Ecosystems Services, Agroecology and the WikiBus

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Dana Drugmand in the Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet blog writes about “An Ecosystems Services Approach to Water and Food Security” : UNEP and IWMI Advocate Agroecosystems to Improve Food, Water Security | Nourishing the Planet. I’m hoping to activate a portion of a “corridor” that follows the Mississippi and its major confluence points especially St Louis, Cairo, Memphis and New Orleans since those are the ones I have “boots-on-the-ground” experience with. I especially wish to link-up ecologically aware efforts in a most pervasive and inclusive way.

For example:

  • St Louis: Kelley Greene Bio-diesel stops at the Soulard Market and fuels up the Wiki Bus. The Wiki Bus goes by The Whole Wheat House and picks up a team consisting of some Seasoned Wheaties and some new summer recruits that have already been screened, trained and assembled. Next Stop:
  • Cape Girardeau: To Family Friendly Farm to help with a massive pasture sweep and eggmobile class. After a fun and productive two or three days working, playing and touring Cape with the Fosnocks it’s on to:
  • Carbondale Illinois: We’ll tour R. Buckminster Fuller’s old stomping grounds and learn about Earthships and see what’s up in and around C’dale. Several EcoFarms and Villages dot the Southern Illinois landscape from what I’ve seen. And so on up and down the line.
  • Your town here
  • Cairo, Illinois is our hub. Airship Parked Here

The WikiBus offers ecosystem services to a whole range of businesses that are tuned to a new set of standards (quite above those of the US Government and its Bedfellows). Running on 100% biofuels, the refurbished school bus (later – larger commercial buses) are scheduled and routed with the whole ecosystem in mind through a highly interactive real-time web interface (a laptop on board) that is aware of wireless access points along the way.

Commercial venders, food co-ops, CSAs, urban permaculture projects, rural ecofarms, ecovillages, universities, … this list can grow massively… can each tune into the OzoneFarm Network and fill in its own blanks.

The Buses also serve as poverty alleviators for severely disadvantaged urbanites who need a break from the concrete jungle and some solid capital for starting their own gigs. (Everybody’s gotta have a gig – 2 Thessalonians 3:10 – for the organizationally religious). So the Expected Question is never answered the same way twice.

Maslow and the OSI Model

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float
OSI Model
Data unit Layer Function
Host
layers		 Data 7. Application Network process to application
6. Presentation Data representation and encryption
5. Session Interhost communication
Segment 4. Transport End-to-end connections and reliability
Media
layers		 Packet 3. Network Path determination and logical addressing
Frame 2. Data Link Physical addressing
Bit 1. Physical Media, signal and binary transmission

This is from a conversation at Wikiversity:

Good to see you back on the scene here, John. I read the Empathy paper. Nice. Especially the part about the congruency of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the OSI model. Nice! —CQ 02:01, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

The idea of layers, or levels

This text is from writing about my learning from working in theraputic environments[2]

Tying together ideas so apparently different was helped by my information engineering background; I adapted the abstract concept of “network layering” that links different abstract approaches to Internet communications. The different layers describe all the various aspects of network communication abstractly ranging from the user’s applications, through addressing and routing protocols to a physical layer that describes the wires and electrons. For every interaction on the Internet, each layer is utilized and they all work towards the same purpose but each layer describes, abstractly, a different aspect of the communication linking process. Empathy, as emotional communication, can likewise be described in layers as every empathic action has many facets, perhaps even more than Internet communications protocols. Immediately apparent is an idea of scale that follows each aspect of an emotional communication from birth of ideas and emotions within individuals at the neural level that are communicated through expressions, to the wider reaching effects that these communications have on social relationships, and even society.

This adaption of network layering helps me conceive of how every emotional communication event “hits” on every level. In the education of children, for instance, happy emotions “hit” their surrounding world through positively constructive activities because they spring forth from healthy neurons. It is entirely misleading to think of any empathic event in isolation. Empathy is what the world needs more of, and on a worldly scale, empathy is the most profoundly human concept.

Act Locally

Applying the OSI Model, or at least incorporating its framework within priority schema or decision-making frameworks, may help people visually place various physical (or metaphysical) needs in perspective on actual computing networks. For example, imagine “tuning” the data link layer that connects your small farm to the needs of a supporting CSA group in town. Traversing up and down the needs pyramid and the OSI layers offers some interesting solutions.

Example: Local food systems

Sensor-actuator networks

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Remote sensing and actuation are by no means new. The USGS has installed thousands of sensing units that yield terabytes of data for those who study and manage our watershed systems. Many a city uses remote control for everything from simple valve and pump mechanisms in treatment plants to sophisticated robotic cameras and listening stations for ghod knows what. Scaling these technologies down for use at the local level makes sense given the emergence of commons-based infrastructure and recent models for consensus-driven urban, rural and suburban planning.

Case in point: riparian zoning model – http://www.eightmileriver.org/zone/

Riparian zones can be fairly easily outfitted with sensors and actuators that can assist in long-term data modeling for ecosystem health and watershed management. Beyond “ownership and control” paradigms, new governance models are taking forms that allow groups of land users to bring a collective approach to committing to the extended maintenance of a local ecosystem. Of course nothing can take the place of human eyes and ears atop boots on the ground to enforce (substantiate) our claims to a better built environment, but web-enabled sensing and actuation can fill some specific needs.

I hope to attract some involvement toward building some testbeds in an around the Americas as has been done in Europe, Australia and other parts. I believe that commons based peer production is better than patents and trade secrets, by the way.

attention: tibi – Sensorica.com

KeyLineAmerica.org

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Mississippi River Watershed

The application of Keyline design principles for North American agrarian ecosystem services.

Continued from Keyline design principles

The problems we create by placing dotted lines on maps are sometimes greater when we back up and look at them from a different perspective. Drawing lines based upon the notions of ownership, governance, dominion, infrastructure and other abstract constructs can lead to ecosystem damage, poor performance, pollution, and other ugly manifestations of the lack of thoughtfulness. The pure genius of the land itself should inspire humanity to create a built environment that is worthy of the natural environment that provides a substrate upon which and from which we earn our livings.

KeyLineAmerica.org proposes to become a think-tank (for lack of a better term) that looks at the emerging open data structures and open geographic information systems as they apply to advanced techniques for designing permaculture-based systems and infrastructures for local food ecosystems. The idea is to work with topographical and hydrological properties of landscapes before building anything of lasting impact. Everything we do on the land has lasting impact, but we are responsible to the next generation to assure that the products, processes and provisions we bring forth have lasting value. Keyline and permaculture studies help to take us closer to what nature itself has in mind for our use of the land.

…

Bibliography:

  1. http://www.keyline.com.au/
  2. http://www.yeomansconcepts.com.au/basis-of-keyline.htm

local projects: https://sites.google.com/site/occupyndg/home/projects/new-economy-initiatives/local-food-systems