Day: 22 July 2008

Growing up in Calcutta during the Sixties and Seventies, I was brought up acutely aware of the role played by energy in my daily life. Load-shedding was a daily occurrence; this, given Calcutta’s average temperatures (27C) and relative humidity (over 90%), ensured that I have a disproportionately high liking for air conditioning and for ice in drinks.

It also meant that a sense of stewardship was instilled in me from an early age, particularly to do with the consumption of any sort of fuel. Even today, when I pass a building festooned with a large number of air-conditioner barnacles, I am overcome with a odd sense of waste.

Over the years, that sense of stewardship has permeated other parts of my life. Take food for example. As a boy I grew up believing the apocryphal tale that the USA throws away enough food to feed Canada. Never bothered to check it out, but had this sense that it may be true.

And then today, catching up on my reading, I came across this:

You can read the whole report here. The figure that most surprised me was this one:

Food waste represents emissions worth 20% of cars on the road? Wow. When you consider that there are some schools of thought that suggest the climate crisis is itself greatly exacerbated by industrialised agriculture, it does make you wonder.

By the time you consider the biofuels argument, it makes you wonder even more.

Rubbish has always been big business. There’s always been “brass” where there’s been “muck”. We need to look at all the ways we can reduce our wastage. Food’s a good place to start.

Gapingvoid tweeted this earlier this morning.

Coming from Hugh, that’s saying something. Even if he has “retired” to Alpine.

So I went and took a look at the story: The Techcrunch Web Tablet project. Which seems to look like this:

Now neither Michael Arrington nor Hugh Macleod needs any link love from me. So why am I writing this?

Because I think it’s the right way to go. We have to keep experimenting with affordable low-power simple-spec sensible-form-factor open portable computing devices, we have to find the ten thousand ways that do not work in order to find the one that does.

A project like this, when centred around a participative architecture and community, reduces the cost of failure, reduces the cost of the ten thousand ways that do not work.

Ubiquitous and affordable and usable connectivity is an imperative for everyone, even more so for the five-sixths of the world that have none of it as yet. On the basis of “a dollar of trade is worth a hundred times a dollar of aid” principle, we should not underestimate the value of providing such power to people, power that will translate itself into affordable food, clothing and shelter, power that will translate itself into health, education and welfare.

Human beings are incredibly creative, incredibly adaptive and are cram-full of potential. Initiatives like this may well help release that potential.

In order to release that potential, we have to change how we think. We have to think of these tablets as mobile phones with the right form factor and functionality, not as computers with the right price and operating systems. For some strange reason, most people are comfortable with the idea that someone in darkest Africa or rural India or China needs a phone; yet the same people look puzzled when you suggest they could do with compute power and connectivity. Whatever. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck….

The headline, by the way, is taken from one of the four hundred odd comments that have been made on the post so far. The commenter was “a bit sceptical” about the chances of TCIT “actually pulling this off” and listed a series of issues, like “no opensource hardware project has really taken off” and “crowdsourcing doesn’t work that well”. And then he ended with “You’re a blog”.

With a little bit of luck and a following wind, we will see a decent open multisided platform approach here, as a result of which we will see what we have failed to see so far: a global opensource project, hardware and software, with local extensions and frills made by a dispersed long-tail community around a common and reusable core. Language and script support based on people everywhere rather than profitable conurbations; applications that have the ability to make that little difference to people’s lives; no sign of lock-in anywhere.

Let’s find that one way that works.