Addicted to oil
I’ve said it before: the United States is addicted to our cars.
Check out my friend Megan Miller’s collage she’s working on (which expresses this, among many other themes):
aaron :: Jul.18.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »
Graphically facilitated critical analysis
My friend Brandon Hemenway has proposed a really big project to change the political debate in the United States. Instead of our shallow “Hard Ball”/”Crossfire”/”Ann Coulter” political debates, which are often not evidence-based, he has conceived of a way of using online tools to facilitate more logical debate — users on the internet will be able to participate in creating these graphs.
As an exercise, we decided to map out a current debate here in Humboldt County, the rail/trail debate. Here’s what we produced. I think it’s a pretty useful way of visuallizing information.
Download the entire rail banking debate PDF file (with two conclusions mapped out)
If you want to participate in this project — in brainstorming, developing the technical tools, art, visuals, marketing and promotion, or just watching it take shape, go to the “Our Country” Google group.
aaron :: Jul.18.2007 :: Information tech, U.S. Politics :: No Comments »
Browse at Amazon, request from the Library
Check this out:
I made two “bookmarklets” that let you browse through books at Amazon.com, and then with one click, search for it at the HSU Library and in the Humboldt County Library.
To use ‘em, just drag these links to your toolbar.
Then, when you’re at a book’s page on Amazon.com, just click one of the links to search for the book at the library. I wish I could have made bookmarklets for the CSU System and the Northern State Co-op Library system (you can have book’s inter-library loaned to you). I like this because it allows you to utilize Amazon.com, which, in most ways, is more powerful for browsing titles than the library catalogs, but also makes getting books FREE! And plus, it just strikes me that libraries are wonderful, underutilized, and resource-efficient (paper should never be used for things that are read only once).
Here’s where you can go to generate bookmarklets for other libraries.
I discovered this at 43folders.com, an inspiring resource for cultivating zen-like efficient organization and work habits I’ve read in the past and just added to my Google Reader.
aaron :: Jul.14.2007 :: Humboldt County, Information tech :: No Comments »
Appropedia celebrates its first MILLION!
Way back in 2006, I helped start Appropedia, a wiki site for appropriate technology. I’ve gone from doing the initial research to choose MediaWiki to being less and less involved with the project, but I still love seeing its success. On July 7th, Appropedia hit 1,000,000 pageviews!
Oh, and just for good measure, I’m including a pic of the solar hot water system worked on a team to design and build last summer in Parras. Relevance? The project is on Appropedia.
aaron :: Jul.11.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »
How Drupal Will Save The World, and other things that seem like they’re only for nerds, but that shouldn’t be
The Green Wheels website is moving to a new home at www.green-wheels.org, and as part of that move, we’re transitioning the site from our old content management system (CMS), to a new one, Drupal. A content management system makes it easy for Green Wheels people to log in with a password to change and add stuff. It’s exciting to get everyone involved in content publishing, but unfortunately CMS implementation is easier said than done.
With nerd and non-nerds alike, I just wanted to share some articles and resources I was inspired by:
- How Drupal will save the world (by Jeff Robins) - Good article describes how powerful and useful web-publishing through a CMS can be for the civic sector, but also makes the case Drupal needs to be made much easier for newbies (I hear ya, Jeff!)
- NetSquared, remixing the web for social change - they’ve sponsored a lot of good and inspiring projects here.
- TechSoup, the technology place for nonprofits - This one’s on my feed list in Google Reader now! We need something like this for Humboldt Count — a supporting organization to help our great nonprofits utilize insanely great tools, many of which are practically free. I’ve been calling for this for some time. If anyone wants to set up a group to help make this happen, email me.
aaron :: Jul.10.2007 :: Information tech :: 1 Comment »