One Community is implementing global change through open source and free-shared DIY sustainability components. Our goal is to demonstrate a sustainable way of living that is easy enough, affordable enough, and attractive enough to become self-replicating. We are including replicable components covering food, energy, housing, education, for-profit and non-profit economic design, social architecture, fulfilled living, global stewardship practices, and more.
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One Community’s physical location will forward this movement as the first of many self-replicating teacher/demonstration communities, villages, and cities to be built around the world. This is the March 28th, 2021 edition (#418) of our weekly progress update detailing our team’s development and accomplishments:
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One Community is implementing global change through Highest Good housing that is artistic and beautiful, more affordable, more space efficient, lasts longer, DIY buildable, and constructed with healthy and sustainable materials:
This week the core team continued with the development of the new “Earth-Dome Loft Structural Engineering and Calculations” page. We created new graphics explaining how to cut OSB sheets for the “Earth-Dome Loft Structural Engineering and Calculations” article, this reduced the count of needed panels from 7 to 5 per loft. While adding this and other images to the site, we also recorded a tutorial explaining how to edit and upload images, add metadata, etc. We also added another template to our Tables Template. Pictures of some of this work are below.
The core team also continued edits on the Earthbag Village Footer, Foundation and Flooring development Doc. This week we reviewed the new summary of the rockwool and perimeter installations for the winged insulation. We then began the deletion process of outdated narratives, photos, and resources in Sections 8 & 9. See pictures below for some screenshots related to this.
Dean Scholz (Architectural Designer) continued helping with the Earthbag Village (Pod 1) 4-dome cluster designs. This week was week #217 of Dean’s work and the focus was more creating and testing of the guest room furniture textures and working on fixing an export problem for the Murphy Bed furniture that created duplicates of every part. He also worked on removing all the part numbers from the Murphy Bed export. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Jose Luis Flores (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 35th week helping finish the Net-zero Bathroom component of the Earthbag Village. This week Jose Luis finished updating the water catchment area spreadsheet. He updated the bathroom fixtures along with their water consumption and updated the roof diameter to match the rendered value. The percent increase in roof size formula was updated to include the ratio between the difference in needed roof size and selected roof size over the selected roof size.
He then began to calculate the heat loss of the structure at various temperatures to accurately recommend the quantity of heating elements in the rainwater storage that can keep the water from freezing. First he measured and listed the dimensions of the outer and inner wall, the interior roof, and the connection between the roof hole and barrel. This data was used to calculate the surface area of the respective sections in the structure. Jose Luis also researched and recorded the R-values of the materials used in the sections. Everything was added and organized in the Net-Zero Bathroom Calculations spreadsheet.
Heat loss of every section was calculated at various ambient temperatures. The total heat loss to the ambient air was calculated and plotted at different ambient temperatures. The number of heating elements can be determined once their generated heat is calculated and compared with the net heat loss. The pictures below show some of this work.
Stacey Maillet (Graphic Designer) completed her 33rd week working on the final edits and revisions to the Murphy bed instructions. This week Stacey worked on the components page and getting quantities for the different materials. Also she was doing a general review of all pages again and thinking of ways to indicate cutting direction for wood, trying to accommodate some of the new comments into the instructions, and keeping everything consistent. Screenshots below are related to this latest progress.
Hannah Copeman (Structural Engineer) completed her 30th week helping complete all the Earthbag Village tutorials. This week Hannah continued the development of the Earthbag Village dome construction by continuing work on the Footer, Foundation and Flooring tutorial. She updated specific formulas for more clarity, researched using other materials for the floor envelope and exterior insulation, organized the references, updated the table of contents and moved information to other One Community documents that were not relevant to the FFF doc. You can see some pictures of this work below.
Mark Wambua (Civil Engineer) completed his 11th week working on the Parking Lot and Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping guides. This week Mark worked on drafting erosion blocks, THE erosion control plan, and also converted the driveway into a staircase. He also helped with turning bullet points for the roadway and walkway tutorials into paragraph form to make it easier to follow. Pictures below show some of this work-in-progress.
Zhiheng “Samson” Su (Civil Engineer) also completed his 11th week on the team and woking on the Parking Lot and Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping guides. This week, Samson had his weekly meeting with David discussing the roof drainage plan, the change about the stair of the basement floor plan, erosion control plan, and pump design. He finished the roof drainage plan AutoCAD drawing with David’s requirements. See pictures below showing some of this work.
Vicente J Subiela (Project Management Adviser) completed his 10th week working on the solar microgrid design, sizing, and cost analysis specifics. This week Vicente reviewed the Duplicable City Center energy demand to update and find a more real annual profile. He is preparing graphical balances per month to identify the different supply situations: 100% of grid supply; 100% of PV supply (excedents to the grid); hybrid supply PV-grid.
Vicente created a first version of a schedule by a gantt diagram for the time follow-up of the whole process; this tool will be regularly updated to illustrate the real process. He also explored the EIA web to find references on the energy demand in our state. Pictures below are related to this work.
Aidan Geissler (Sustainability Researcher) completed his 7th week helping with 2nd-to-final review, feedback, and content editing. He spent the week creating content for the Plastic Recycling webpage. This work consisted of researching and writing sections about the process of plastic recycling via shredding, extrusion, 3D printing, and molding. For each of these strategies, Aidan provided information, considerations, and resources for both purchasing and building various machines. The pictures below relate to this work.
Jeson Hu (Mechanical Engineer Assistant) completed his 4th week helping with research related to the solar microgrid design, sizing, and cost analysis specifics. This week Jeson researched the new type of solar harvesting technology offered by some companies. The concentrated solar thermal tech involves heating a working fluid using concentrated sunlight.
The heated fluid can then be used with conventional power generation equipment (i.e., turbines, generators, etc.) to produce electricity. However, there are many variations of this tech, again a quote and specs from the requested companies are needed to make a comparison. The pictures below share some of this developing work.
Indiana Mann (Atmospheric Scientist) also completed her 3rd week researching new additions to the Most Sustainable Insulation tutorial. This week Indiana focused on updating all necessary finishes to her research in order for it to be appropriate and legible for the website. Research for sustainable toilet options was also begun. Pictures below show some of this new content.
Dan Alleck (Designer and Illustrator) continued helping with 3D render work, completing his 2nd week helping with the Earthbag Village 4-dome cluster renders. This week he focused on adding people, plants, and objects to the two renders shown here.
Gabrielle Williams (Sustainability Researcher) completed her 2nd week helping research natural greywater processing pond design for the Earthbag Village and Duplicable City Center. This week Gabrielle began research on the composition of household water that will be part of the greywater system. The pictures below relate to this work.
One Community is implementing global change through a Duplicable and Sustainable City Center that is LEED Platinum certified/Sustainable, can feed 200 people at a time, provide laundry for over 300 people, is beautiful, spacious, and saves resources, money, and space:
This week the core team finished adding all the temporary parking lot research and instructions to the Sustainable Parking Lots Page.
Qiuheng Xu (Landscape Designer) completed her 25th week helping with the Duplicable City Center landscaping design. This week Qiuheng was concentrating on the outside walkthrough rendering. She fixed green still covering some of the grates, updated the texture around the sliding glass doors to match the dormer window white, scaled down some bushes so they weren’t covering half the path, and changed the video path not to cross through trees. Pictures below show some of these changes.
Ksenia Akimov (Plumbing Engineer) completed her 25th week working on the Duplicable City Center plumbing designs. This week, Ksenia answered question from Evan, and changed the architectural plan for the Living Dome toilets. She also made PDF files for Evan’s further review and updated all the files in the common folder. Pictures below are related to this work.
Ian Oliver Malinay (Energy Modeler/Analyst) completed his 13th week helping run the energy analysis calculations to help us achieve LEED Platinum status for the Duplicable City Center. This week, Ian processed the occupancy data of the Duplicable City Center that is pursuing LEED Platinum certification. The occupancy is based on actual, as per designed, or from the client. This occupancy has data of the schedule of operation which he also provided.
The schedule of operation should be the same with the proposed and baseline design. Ian also provided details of activity of spaces per zone, and created the summary or tabulated details of receptacle power density and lighting power density. Additionally, he revised the previous lighting power density according to the details from the electrical engineering team. Please see below progress photos for reference.
David Na (Project Management Adviser/Engineer) completed his 7th week helping with input and management of the Parking Lot and Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping tutorial development, as well as the City Center Water Catchment Designs. David began the week with a team meeting to set action items for the week. He completed sketches for the erosion control and basement to stairwell conversion so that his team can begin making the changes into the design.
To access the teams progress and productivity, David used a gannt chart template from another team and has modified it to show action items that are needed to complete the civil drainage plans. David has also been looking into ADA handrail design standards, walkway/bicycle design, and roadway drainage design. He is currently working the technical writing portions of the report/tutorial. Lastly, David is working on a design to incorporate a fire lane truck access and turnaround hammerhead into the Earthbag Village’s design to meet the Fire Apparatus Access Roads requirement. Pictures below are related to this work.
Saffet Kilçer (Structural Engineer) completed his 5th week working on the Duplicable City Center beam and column designs using SAP2000. This week he began writing the final report. The introductory part of the report is now complete, the loads part has been started, and the dead load part continues to be written. Picture below shows this work-in-progress. Â
Sunitha Paraselli (Mechanical Design Engineer) completed her 4th week working on the Duplicable City Center connectors we’ll use to build the domes. This week Sunitha used the Aluminium 2024-T3 plate as an angle bracket with length of 4 inches on each side and with 6 holes. She did static analysis simulation and the results were better than the small bracket. The pictures below relate to this work.
Luis Manuel Dominguez (Research Engineer) also completed his 4th week helping with research related to the solar microgrid design, sizing, and cost analysis specifics. This week Luis focused on another state of heat transfer that the hot tub experiences: the idle stage. When covered and not in use, it is crucial that the hot tub maintains its heat level for use at any time. The hot tub experiences a significant reduction in heat loss by convection and evaporation due to the cover.
His efforts this week focused on calculating the evaporative heat loss and sourcing a cover to understand the conductive heat loss through the cover. Each variable is crucial to the description of the system and understanding where optimizations can be made. His goal is to wrap up the analysis of the idle stage in the coming week and begin assessing the heat start-up energy requirements of the system. The pictures below share some of this developing work.
One Community is implementing global change through Highest Good food that is more diverse, more nutritious, locally grown and sustainable, and part of our open source botanical garden model to support and share bio-diversity:
This week the core team continued working on the Herbal Garden design for behind the Duplicable City Center. We placed four picnic tables outside of the East fence line of the Herbal Garden, and designed a greenhouse with two entrances on opposite ends and placed it on the side that is closest to the Dining Dome. The fence on the side of the greenhouse was also removed. Pictures below are related to this work.
Henry Vennard (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 24th week helping continue the development of the climate batteries for the Aquapini/Walipini structures. This week Henry worked on updating the 3D model of the climate battery system and continued his work organizing the main research document. He met with Amin (a senior engineer who has joined the team to consult on this component) and discussed an approach for moving forward with the project, including more research and use of the ASHRAE Handbook. Pictures below show some of this work-in-progress.
One Community is implementing global change through Highest Good education that is for all ages, applicable in any environment, adaptable to individual needs, far exceeds traditional education standards, and more fun for both the teachers and the students. This component of One Community is about 95% complete with only the Open Source School Licensing and Ultimate Classroom construction and assembly details remaining to be finished. We’ll report on the final two elements to be finished as we develop them.
With over 8 years of work invested in the process, the sections below are all complete until we move onto the property and continue the development and open sourcing process with teachers and students – a development process that is built directly into the structure of the education program and everything else we’re creating too:
One Community is implementing global change through a Highest Good society approach to living that is founded on fulfilled living, the study of meeting human needs, Community, and making a difference in the world:
This week the core team completed 28 hours managing One Community emails, social media accounts, interviewing potential new volunteer team members, and managing volunteer-work review and collaboration not mentioned elsewhere here.
The core team additionally completed our 15th week working on improving the content for all our Values Pages. This week we finished editing the value of Community Contribution, completing both the draft webpage and the mind map, addressing passive voice and doing a final review before passing it along to Jae for his final review and updates to the live page on the site. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Wen Zhang (Software Engineer) completed her 43rd week as a volunteer working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Wen created a delete confirmation popup to prevent actions that accidentally delete and badges. She also created information icons for badge functions. She has been adjusting the text and styling based on Jae’s feedback and requests. Other miscellaneous tasks include making the ranking field accept integers only, making 0 the highest number in sorting rankings, and adding a secondary sort by names for badges with the same ranking. Pictures below are related to this work.
Vy Dao (Software Developer) completed his 9th week working on the Highest Good Network software. For this week, Vy updated more feedback on the PR#45 (which is related to Forgot-password changes”. He also tested and approved related Badge features. Vy additionally started to go over many different old unit-test files and update them so that the total fail test cases of the project will reduce down as much as possible before he continues to work on more unit-test files. Pictures below show some of this work.
Yueru Zhao (Software Engineer) completed her 8th week working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Yueru continued working on showing tasks data on the project report page. She used the WBS ID to filter all the tasks data to render the tasks that belong to the specific project. Now the task data is rendered to the project report page with information about the task name, priority and status. She also added the priority level and status filter options. Next week, she will be working on filtering the tasks based on the options that the user choses. Pictures below are related to this work.
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