Arguably the most amazing film I’ve seen this year, “FLOW: For The Love Of Water” is playing at the Bijou Cinema in Eugene this Friday at 7:30 PM.
Granted, it isn’t the most uplifting film in the world, but it’s a must-see. Even if you’ve seen it before (hint, Shane), I would highly encourage you to come see it again. It is so many adjectives I’m lacking right now, and might just convince you to get involved with ODA.
Join Oregon Direct Action, and work with students at the University of Oregon to promote basic needs sustainably in Peru and elsewhere.
Currently, we’re looking for several bright, passionate students on campus interested in helping to provide safe and reliable water access to communities in San Pablo, Cajamarca, Peru. You’ll get to learn all about project research, design, implementation, and follow up (think needs assessments, appropriate water technology, and Participatory Rural Appraisal). Our team, at the moment just three people, has room for people to help with Operations, Finance, Communications/PR, and as many Associates as we can manage.
There’s a community kick-off meeting on Wednesday, the 22nd of October at 7 pm in the Knight Collaboration Center (room 122 of the Knight Library). If you are a student at the University of Oregon, please contact us or RSVP on Facebook to give us a heads up on the number of people showing up. We’ve got to make sure there are enough snacks for everyone.
Also, we’re looking for professors and professionals alike to serve on our Board of Advisers for the fall term. The advisers will meet with the ODA team once per month tentatively on the third Wednesday to discuss project developments, give feedback on project and funding ideas, and help improve organizational strategy. Additionally, we hope the advisers will become more intimately engaged with our projects, as everything we do is easy to follow along with on our website.
The applicants will be voted in by the team after the first joint meeting this month on the 29th of October. Positions will be term by term, although applicants are more than welcome to serve indefinitely. Please contact us if this sounds like an awesome fit for you.
As of Friday night at around 6 PM PST, our very first grant application has been submitted. ”An Open Source of Water for Peru” was the title Isaac at Squarepeg helped propose. Many thanks to him, Jason at Green Empowerment, and the rest of the ODA team for helping to pull this together so quickly. Without everyone’s creativity, critical thinking, and wiliness to GTD, the application wouldn’t have been written on such short notice. Here’s to the possibility of $10,000 coming our way!
Even if we don’t win the money, though, taking the time to answer the questions for both components of the Clinton Global Initiative commitment and grant process proved to be a valuable experience. The prompts forced us to think deeply about who we are and what we’re trying to do, as well as provide specifics on how we hope to accomplish it. The format in which we synthesized this, too, makes the grant application a valuable read for anyone that wants to come on board with the team and our projects.
If you’re a member of the Clinton Foundation’s MyCommitments website, please do vote our project up. I would imagine the voting system does indeed count for something.
If you’d like to subscribe to updates from Oregon Direct Action with either RSS or Email, there are now a few stellar ways to do so. We’ve broken down how the updates we write get sent out, in the hope that, when you subscribe, you only get information that is relevant to you. With this strategy, everyone that is interested in working with us can be engaged to the degree they want to.
According to Wikipedia, a “feed” is a “data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.” In layman’s terms, this means that when a piece of content is published, you receive it in whatever inbox you would like (instead of having to continually go back to the publisher’s website). We’re hoping this offers a hassle-free way for the ODA community to keep updated on what’s going on. Read what we write about when it’s delivered to you, and if you have something to contribute, leave a comment on that post.
Let me make this a bit more concrete. At the moment, we have four tiers of feeds, this metaphorical river channel of information:
As time goes on, the way that these feeds are structured, and the types of content they receive, will most likely evolve significantly. We’re making this strategy up as we go along and, as far as we can tell, no one has ever done something like this before. Conceptually, we’re solid on the idea on “crowdsourcing” as much of our projects as we can, but how we actually do this is bound to have a few rough edges. Any and all feedback is warmly welcomed.
One thing to note is that you should only need to subscribe to one feed. With how we’re planning on structuring this, everything that gets published in “Community Updates” will also be received by the team and our partners, but not by “everyone.” The feeds will also have tiers of frequency, with “Updates for our Team” having the highest traffic and “Updates for Everyone” having the lowest.
Cool. On with the show.
Update: I almost forgot. Thanks to DJ Strouse of EWB USC and all others with the open source organization quasi-working group for helping map out this and upcoming strategies.
This is a summary of what I’ve accomplished so far.
What was the goal?
We are currently looking for information, ideally from scholarly or published sources, about reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives as part of a large sustainable development project, and about public health assessments following rural water improvement projects in Latin America.
What did we find?
On the subject of sustainable development:
On the subject of public health assessments, the best papers I’ve found were the following:
How did we find it?
Google Scholar was my main source for finding information on public health assessments, probably because there are many papers on that subject. Still, props to Google for creating a resource that allows quality information to be so easily accessible.
For the papers on sustainable development, I had to be a bit more creative. The first thing I did was call the U of O Libraries and get my account working so I could use U of O’s research tools. There’s a lot of sources of information there, and U of O does a pretty good (though not the best) job of allowing you to use them easily. One thing that bothered me was that a lot of resources, such as ScienceDirect, are IP based, so you have to actually be in the library to use them.
Still, I would encourage anyone to look into your university research resources if you’re a student. Your tuition dollars are paying for some high quality tools.
Those tools found me some decent articles, however, I felt like I really began to tap into a gold mine when I began searching for sustainable development blogs. These are sites from people like us (after all, this is a sustainable development blog), many of whom have implemented projects and have valuable lessons to share.
What’s next?
The plan now is to find more sustainable development blogs, to post them, and then to comb through the best of them for detailed reports of actual projects. I also want to find analysis of projects, in terms of lessons learned, problems encountered, and ways they plan to address these problems the next time they go into the field. Also, as we find blogs, we are finding potential partners who we can contact and work together with.
For the community:
So, to all of you reading this, I have some questions/requests:
I have been officially delegated to be head of research for ODA by Daniel, the man who long ago officially delegated unto himself the officially delegate powers…
Anyway, in this position, I’ll be the go-to guy when we need to find out about something. However, there’s a lot more to my job than that. I also try to figure out what we should be researching, I work with others so we can help each other out when researching, I record the fruits of our research, and I blog about this whole process so that members of the ODA community can see what we’re up to, learn from us, and maybe chip in and help us with our research.
With that in mind, I’ll be blogging regular research posts that you can track if you want. In this first post, I’ll talk about progress we’ve made in helping our partners, GE (Green Empowerment, not General Electric), find the following:
I began to search first for papers that paired health assessments with water projects, utilizing Google Scholar. An immediate problem I ran into was that most publishers want you to pay for their articles, offering only abstracts for free. I kept track of promising abstracts, figuring that GE could look them over and see if any were worth paying for. I was able to overcome this problem, however, because most articles gave links to similar articles, and so I was able to quickly look into a large number of good articles and find a few that were free. I’m going to keep track of the pages that offer free articles and eventually create a page of good sources for research that all can look at and add to.
In addition to these articles, I also remembered that a friend of mine, DJ Strouse, is working on a similar water project in India and one of the things they’ll be doing is installing a software system that improves patient health by giving clinicians the ability to keep patient records electronically. However, this system also collects data on health trends in areas where it’s installed. Global Medical Brigades, one of DJ’s partners in this project, is the organization that provides this software, called the “GWB Data Informatics System.”
I then began to search, again using Google Scholar, for papers on reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives, hoping to find some that also mentioned water needs, or rural areas in developing countries. I wasn’t able to find anything promising that was free, and little at all, money or no. I plan to continue searching tomorrow.
Before I end, I have a few requests for all of you:
On the UO Sustainability list serv this week, Emmalyn Garrett of the Center for the Advancement of Sustainable Living forwarded an email from Steve Mital, Sustainability Director at the University of Oregon. His email outlines a Sustainability Conference, tentatively scheduled for October 23rd and 24th, 2008, and requests ideas for its components:
We need your help designing a one-day leadership development conference for college students in the Oregon University System who are interested in making their campuses more sustainable. What are your needs? What should the day’s agenda be? What kinds of workshops should we develop? Who should we ask to come and speak?
In the spirit of opening discussion on the event, I thought I might blog my ideas.
To start off, I think it could be quite powerful to put all the documents related to planning online and editable by the community in a wiki-like format. I know there are numbers of students passionate about sustainability on campus; connecting digitally would be a manageable way of allowing everyone to get involved. This PBWiki for the 2008 Netsquared Conference is one example we could follow.
Secondly, with Oregon Direct Action in mind, it would be useful to us to have an international component to the conference. I’m not exactly sure what this would be at the moment, but one thing we’re seriously trying to consider is connecting the international development we would like to do with initiatives at home. For instance, if our project for this year were decentralised wind energy, it might be useful to build and maintain a wind turbine in Eugene as a part of the beta testing. We’ll have a better idea of what exactly we will be doing internationally in the next month, after we’ve decided on which project(s) we’re going forward with.
Having sustainability non-profits from the community at the conference, in terms of networking, would be an added bonus.
The last idea I have is one that’s been floating around in my head for a while. Last fall, in working with the WDA team, I thought there might be potential benefits in developing a sustainability policy for the organization. Sure, WDA is an organization all about promoting “economically and environmentally sustainable community development,” but what does that mean if the organization itself isn’t sustainable? Unfortunately, I don’t have many definitive answers on what this means at the moment. In specific terms, a sustainable organization or student club could be one that minimizes its use of paper by advertising online, instead of using flyers, and either buys renewable energy or offsets transportation by carbon credits. This type of discussion, and the possible drawing up of a charter, might be relevant at the conference.
What do you think?
Oregon Direct Action (ODA or, spoken aloud, Yoda) will a non-profit, open-source, and student-run organization from the University of Oregon dedicated to helping marginalized people by promoting economically, environmentally, and culturally sustainable community development. Lofty mission statement for a student organization, eh? We like to think big.
Currently, we’re looking into project ideas involving microfinance, decentralised power, education, and/or water and sanitation possibly in the countries of Peru, Haiti, India, or Mongolia. The feasibility assessments we do in the next few weeks will largely determine the scope and direction of this year’s project.
Shout out to the peeps at Whitman Direct Action for the super model for a student organization.
I thought it only fitting that we use the default Wordpress post to launch the online presence of Oregon Direct Action. It is a super easy way to run a website.