The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World
hexayurt.com
hexayurt.com
I'll be around if you have any questions.
But as the suburbs have taught us, sprawl is incredibly costly. Raising the standard of living for spread out peoples is harder because by definition its going to involve more transport energy cost and less economies of scale.
Also, at an almost philosophical sense, the single-family dwelling is itself a symptom of the problem. Castle doctrine and every-man-is-an-island and all that. Shared walls mean shared lives, or more importantly, acknowledge the fact that we have shared lives and need to make the best of it.
I don't think we solve this via 1-unit structures housing <10 people a pop. And history shows that hundreds-unit structures over did it. How do we create cheap, open-source 10 - 100 unit, 2 - 6 floor, structures. Something that could actually go in those slums you mention (which these yurts would get destroyed in).
Anyway hope this didn't come off too critical, I really appreciate that you're even working on this problem and presenting it so clearly.
I like this project a lot.
Careful. You're fighting millenia of human nature here. That typically doesn't end well.
From TFA:
> In disaster relief applications the hexayurt can cost less than a tent, and be constructed in far larger quantities than tent supplies allow.
How do you handle ventilation, heating/cooling, bathroom, fuel for cooking, etc.?
There's also this: http://files.howtolivewiki.com/somalia_or_sudan.mp4 I found the video on a search, and have not discovered who made it or what the story is, but it's clearly the kind of diffusion we've always hoped for!
As for suggestions: I think that you should recognize that the entities who are most likely to be able to deploy hexayurt broadly for humanitarian reasons (air drops, etc) are established businesses, well-funded startup companies, or individuals and groups who are in some way tightly coupled to the larger business community. Although these may groups vary on a diversity of issues, they all pretty much share one thing in common: they either
A. identify with what you would call a "statist" ideology or B. benefit financially from being perceived as not opposing the prevailing social norms of the local business community with regard to recognizing the state.
Therefor they are very likely weary of association with any project who's leader argues for a dramatic reform of those community standards (no matter how rational those underlying arguments may be).
My suggestion to you as someone who recognizes the enormous potential benefit of hexayurt technology is for you to perhaps adopt a softer approach towards corporate america and startup culture in general. Perhaps this approach could highlight the potential for corporate entities to rapidly catalyze positive externalities while generating strong network effects by leveraging a technology with an architecture that could make an impact globally via a relatively small pool of capital. To me it seems likely that the motivation for this kind of an outreach project might stem from the ability to rapidly surface a branding event by generating a humanitarian "PR wave" and then surfing it. This overall approach could serve as a mechanism for expanding global relationships, enhancing brand visibility in foreign markets, and even facilitating entre into new markets.
As it currently stands any corporation contemplating research into the deployment of a hexayurt grid as a humanitarian project faces several challenges. One challenge is that they must first somehow leverage a PR firm to figure out how to rebrand the underlying technology in order to separate the positive humanitarian PR from the negative PR stemming from the fact that the project was born out of a libertarian or anarchist social milieu, burning man, etc.
Another challenge is how to motivate other businesses to join in to see how far this can be developed and safeguarded all while fostering business relationships and strengthening brand identity in emerging markets.
TLDR: If you feel that corporatism is a problem, then perhaps instead of trying to attack that snake with a club, you could somehow tame it into consuming it's own tail like the mythological ouroboros.
I could have taken the politics out in one of 99 ways, but I did not, and I'm willing to sacrifice 5 or even 10 years of hexayurt growth to keep the politics in.
The reason is simple: I want to politically organize the people who grow up in hexayurt refugee camps, getting their education over wifi and dreaming of a better, fairer world. So if I sell out my core values now to reach the refugees faster, I'm going to have a vastly less powerful offer of aid when I finally arrive there.
It's a very dark calculus, but the years of active sabotage that I've faced from aid organizations like UNHCR and Red Cross blocking the hexayurt's participation in testing programmes and similar bureaucratic interference have convinced me that the only way out of this mess is to disintermediate UNHCR and the Red Cross - to route around them as dark legacy - and to have refugees directly raise funds themselves over (say) YouTube and Bitcoin (or, hey, Ethereum) rather than hope for political change in the big orgs.
The big orgs need to lie that the status of refugee is temporary, and not tied to deeper political problems. But the average refugee is in the field for 15 years, and lying about their status being temporary is great for fund raising and locating host governments who are willing to have them, but absolutely horrible for the refugees: endless years in boiling hot / freezing cold tents, no services for education and long term health care, and so on. It's just garbage: if it was you in one of those camps, you'd think you were in a prison camp.
So we stand in defiant opposition to those lies: refugee is a generation-long or longer condition in most cases, and we insist on cycle-of-life support for the people who will be spending an entire phase of life in these camps.
In the short run, this insistence on truth costs me the short term support of the (hugely corrupt) NGOs. In the long run, I hope it buys me recognition and credibility among the refugees and former refugees that I hope will be the backbone of hexayurt deployments in the fullness of time.
I have to speak the truth as I recognize it today, in order to be recognized as not having been full of nonsense by the refugees when they are assessing where to put their support later.
Hard calls all round. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV3fgqhat60&t=16m <-- Dave McClure does a great job of explaining that phenomena and what it could mean to the IT startup ecosystem in the US and abroad.
I bless all of 'em, without wanting to get too involved (for fear people will think I'm picking favorites - my political neutrality (ironically) is important!)
Would love to go to BM, but my VW would probably dance its exhaust system off 50 miles out of town because it's "too cool" for emissions standards, right before deciding it's also time to nom-nom-nom the (nonadjustible) clutch. :'(