In Australia, university students are undergraduate or postgraduate. So when Americans refer to “grad students” it’s as if they said “whelmed” - I’m not sure whether it’s “under,” “over”, or right at the transition point.

But I’ve figured out they mean undergrad* postgrad - I just have to think for a second when I hear the term.
Catching up with ( Read more... )

The Appropedia Blogs are now active - so most of my development, sustainability and appropriate technology related  blogging will be there from now on.

There's still some tweaking to do, though - putting in the open license notices, and making the layout of links more like the Appropedia wiki.  Then to make the Appropedia wiki's skin more like the ( Read more... )

In Denver - and i have a ticket to see Obama speak at the big event tomorrow!

I didn't realize I was going to be here for the Democratic National Convention until last week. This is a trip for connecting with people in sustainability and development, about Appropedia, and I've been meeting great people so far.

Blogged with the Flock ( Read more... )

Having been in the office of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) at 2 a.m., and now on a Sunday afternoon, I can confirm that these geeks work hard. I now understand the introductions to some of the people here when I first visited - "This is X, he doesn't sleep."

It's been an intense trip - finally meeting the really great people I've been working with for ( Read more... )

Appropedia made it to semi-finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. (Yay, recognition! Sob, no cash prize.) From our entry:

Difficulties in tracking down existing solutions to appropriate technology problems has led to engineers and fieldworkers wasting time, energy, and resources solving the same problems over and over again. A single shared ( Read more... )

Engineers Without Borders UK are interested in how to contribute to the Appropedia wiki, and the process of making content free‎. Which of course leads to questions about when someone's content is their bread and butter. A section of that page, "But I earn a living from my content!", addresses this question, but needs much more thought.

I'm at the ( Read more... )

Very pleased to learn that the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) in Boston, running this month, will be using Appropedia for documenting their projects.

This will be a great time to experiment with ways of using wiki pages for documenting designs. My leaning is towards relying on the unstructured format of the wiki, documenting the ( Read more... )

Being interviewed with Mark Charmer ( @charmermark) I learnt a lot about Akvo & that I didn't know until the interview started. He expressed very well the issue of organizations each having their own silos of knowledge, and the potential that arises from opening them up.

Akvo is a NGO focused on water, working in the Netherlands, and they are ( Read more... )

Received an email from the founder of a fairly prominent UK organization, devoted to practical action for sustainability. The query was whether Appropedia was a suitable place to work collaboratively  on a book, which would later be published.

While we'd love to have this content, there are some reasons it may not be an acceptable solution for them ( Read more... )

On Appropedia pages, I often create a separate "Interwiki links" section. I see these links as different to other external links, as you may be leaving this wiki, but you remain within the wiki ecosystem.

Recently I've been thinking how useful it would be to have a good search engine that covers the whole wikisphere. I know some attempts have been ( Read more... )