Common Tools for Common Socio-Environmental Problems

A hybride event with skill-sharing to solve socio-economic and environmental problems.

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 2024/09/21
7:00 pm - 10:00 pm

Categories

An event for skill-sharing and knowledge exchange

How can we help each other make sense and respond to pressing socio-technical-and-environmental problems? Looking in our past and present we can find collaborative tools, approaches, and sociocultural practices to answer this question.

Join us for an evening of presentations, skill-sharing workshops, and artistic performances at Sudoroom, your friendly neighborhood hackerspace!

!!! Donations will be requested to help support the community space and the artists !!!

Format:

Hybrid with in-person and online presentations

When:

September, 21st, 7:00pm

Who:

– Valerie (trust framework for science-community collaborations), Oregon State University

(TBD)

– Jose (air quality / open hardware), Purdue University

– Vince (community digital territories / Baobáxia), Casa Tainã / Rede Mocambos

– Erin (community data / open data), Metadata Game Changers REMOTE

– Liz Henry (diy wheelchair stuff), Grassroots Open Assistive Tech

– Criptastic Hacker (Build a spot welder from an old wheelchair battery) REMOTE

– Masi (Cybersecurity for the Environment / How we moved from the Fidonet Era, Mascanc.net) REMOTE

– Eseibio Halliday (environmentally conscious rap artist)

– LF (host)

Organization:

SEEKCommons project

Sudoroom community members

ABSTRACTS SO FAR

Paths to assistive technology Repair & DIY, Right to Repair, and reverse engineering

by Liz Henry (GOAT)

There is a lot of home-grown wisdom in disabled communities about adapting or making “assistive tech” – things like wheelchair modifications, small devices that make life easier. And there are inventors – often disabled inventors – creating super complicated devices as well. There are also books, papers, and research with plans for DIY assistive tech.

Grassroots Open Assistive Tech aims to collect, preserve, and propagate that info and encourage the use of open licensing to make ecosystems for building & sharing so that more people can get the adaptive equipment they need!

Community Digital Territories: Baobáxia

by Vince – Casa de Cultura Tainã / Rede Mocambos

“The idea comes from the Baobab, an African tree that lives for thousands of years and symbolically represents the collective memory of the territory. Baobáxia is the union of baobabs with galaxies. Galaxies of memories of community territories, on the Baobab Route, on the Path of the Stars..”

Baobab is a network of mucuas, computers with free software, GNU\Linux, operating on the community network, through the local Wi-Fi, even without internet. The mucuas host different galaxies of knowledge and digital applications such as collections, maps, blogs. All mocambolas can share their knowledge in the form of audio, videos, articles, documents, images, maps and soon much more.

The knowledge of each mucua can be synchronized with the others, over the internet or on the local network through mobile mucuas. A mucua can be a very robust computer, like Madiba, which is located at the Community Data Center of the Tainã Cultural Center, or even a simple USB stick.

This way, knowledge is maintained in our territories and shared on our networks. Baobáxia is created by , a collaboration between quilombolas, indigenous peoples, Nartisans, and artists from all over Brazil and beyond.

The WBSW (Wheelchair Battery Spot Welder)

by Criptastic Hacker

An eco-soluton to reporposing batteries for useful projects! Every year, many thousands of large lead-acid batteries from wheelchairs are discarded to landfill because they don’t offer enough torque for the motors to push a human across city blocks, or even around the house. However, these batteries still have a lot of instantaneous JUICE to create— sparks!

This project repurposes my old wheelchair batteries into a fully functional portable spot welder. With spot welding, you can repurpose EVEN MOAR by taking recycled laptop and car Li-ion and LifePo cells and creating new packs from them — for your DIY projects like robots, outdoor sound systems, and so much moar! It’s reporposing batteries to repurpose batteries. And since the materials used in batteries are some of the most toxic to our planet and have major health and worker rights issues around the materials mining for them, getting the most life out of them possible – and de-investing from that industry – is very good for both people and the planet.