Let’s talk about addressing climate change with holistic living models. Through ultra-sustainable teacher/demonstration hubs that provide more enriching and enjoyable environments, we can demonstrate a better way of living that is also carbon neutral or even carbon negative.
The teacher/demonstration hubs One Community is designing will also teach others how to live this way too, making it easy enough, affordable enough, and demonstrating it as attractive enough to spread on its own. A self-replicating model like this, spreading globally, is capable of launching the massive socio-economic and mindset changes that could address and even solve our current climate crisis.
Click on each icon to be taken to the corresponding Highest Good hub page.
One Community’s physical location will forward the movement of addressing climate change with holistic living models as the first of many self-replicating teacher/demonstration communities, villages, and cities to be built around the world. This is the April 11th, 2021 edition (#420) of our weekly progress update detailing our team’s development and accomplishments:
DONATE | COLLABORATE | HELP WITH LARGE-SCALE FUNDING
CLICK HERE IF YOU’D LIKE TO RECEIVE AN EMAIL EACH WEEK WHEN WE RELEASE A NEW UPDATE
One Community is addressing climate change with holistic living models 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 edits on the Earthbag Village Footer, Foundation and Flooring development Doc. This week’s focus was verifying calculations, making general edits, finalizing research of past contributions, wrapping up the video & resource reviews, etc. through page 47.
We think this is most likely the next-to-the-last review of this doc. See pictures below for some screenshots related to this.
`Addressing Climate Change With Holistic Living Models ” Footer, Foundation and Flooring Dev Doc.
The core team also began what we hope will be the 2nd-to-final check of the Murphy bed instructions. We checked “Material Components”, “Material Boards”, “Material Lumber”, “Tools”, “Pre-made Components”, and started checking “Wall” sections. We also created a list of comments and suggestions to improve readability of the instructions. The screenshots below show some of this work.
Dean Scholz (Architectural Designer) continued helping with the Earthbag Village (Pod 1) 4-dome cluster designs. This week was week #218 of Dean’s work and the focus was more creating and testing the Murphy Bed furniture textures and texture combinations. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Jose Luis Flores (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 37th week helping finish the Net-zero Bathroom component of the Earthbag Village. This week Jose Luis completed the heating elements effectiveness calculations. The calculations were done in order to quantitatively determine how many heating elements should be used depending on the climate.
The calculations determined how long the water or rain water storage room would take to reach freezing temperatures. Knowing the time was crucial to maximize the efficiency and cost effectiveness of the type and quantity of heating elements necessary to keep the room and rainwater at above freezing temperatures.
The section added covered the heat loss associated with the structure such as the walls and the roof and the heat loss of the water stored in the top center barrel. The findings help determine where to install the heating elements to further maximize their effectiveness. Illustrations were added to the section to help visualize the placement of the heating elements.
Jose Luis then began updating the roof plan to coincide with the latest additions to the SolidWorks rendering such as drip edge flash on the edge of the exterior roof panels. He also began rearranging the AutoCAD models to follow the order of the Net-Zero Bathroom tutorial/instructions. The pictures below show some of this work.
Mark Wambua (Civil Engineer) completed his 13th and final week working on the Parking Lot and Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping guides. This week Mark’s work was primarily focused on making written revisions to the Roadway Design and Roadway Drainage tutorials. Pictures below show some of this work-in-progress.
Vicente J Subiela (Project Management Adviser) completed his 12th week working on the solar microgrid design, sizing, and cost analysis specifics. This week Vicente added new tabs to the sizing tool: a specific one for the Earthbag Village energy demand and another for the feasibility analysis and economic balance vision on the long term.
This tool allows having a vision of the evolution of the annual energy & economic balances, and how the economic rates affect the net balance. Vicente also continued the follow-up of the collaboration team. He has repeated the simulations with SAM to find the best match with the outcome from a potential PV supplier. Pictures below are related to this work.
Aidan Geissler (Sustainability Researcher) completed his 9th week helping with 2nd-to-final review, feedback, and content editing. This week, Aidan’s work for the week was devoted to compiling information for the Insulation Comparison Spreadsheet.
He researched and assigned point values to features pertaining to sustainability, safety, and effectiveness for various insulation products made with wool, straw, hemp, keraf, and magnesium oxide from seawater.
In order to compare the costs of these products while taking into consideration differences in R-values, Aidan calculated the average price per square foot per R-rating for each product. The pictures below relate to this work.
Jeson Hu (Mechanical Engineer Assistant) completed his 6th week helping with research related to the solar microgrid design, sizing, and cost analysis specifics. This week, Jeson researched the best solar inverters and studied the related specs. He also finalized the best solar harvesting technology research.
The answer to the best technology or company or product is not clear without the cost input, which he is struggling to find. Almost all the companies contacted did not have much interest in this 2MW project. However, Jeson provided their product specs and contact info for future reference.
He also determined that, if One Community wants to have a battery bank, a battery based inverter would probably be the choice. The pictures below share some of this developing work.
Indiana Mann (Atmospheric Scientist) also completed her 5th and final week doing research for One Community. Her focus this week was finishing researching a new addition to the Most Sustainable Toilets tutorial. Pictures below show some of this work and content.
Gabrielle Williams (Sustainability Researcher) completed her 4th week helping research natural greywater processing pond design for the Earthbag Village and Duplicable City Center. This week Gabrielle started taking notes on Wheaton’s Permaculture podcast titled “Wheaton Permaculture – 076 Create an Oasis With Greywater”.
She also found a copy of the reference book online and began taking notes on that too. The pictures below relate to this research.
Zachary Melin (Graphic Designer) also returned to the team and completed his 1st week helping complete the editing of the Tree House Village (Pod 7) online book. Shown below are this week’s edits that were addressed.
One Community is addressing climate change with holistic living models 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, Qiuheng Xu (Landscape Designer) completed her 27th week helping with the Duplicable City Center landscaping design. This week Qiuheng adjusted the road system access to the domes and the herb gardens, and replaced some of the plants with 3D options from the Lumion plant library. Pictures below show some of these changes.
Ksenia Akimov (Plumbing Engineer) completed her 27th week working on the Duplicable City Center plumbing designs. This week Ksenia focused on making changes to the plans according to Evan’s review and notes. She added floor traps in all bathrooms, put a sink in the boiler room, and changed pipelines in bathrooms 13, 15, and 16. Pictures below are related to this work.
Ian Oliver Malinay(Energy Modeler/Analyst) completed his 15th week helping run the energy analysis calculations to help us achieve LEED Platinum status for the Duplicable City Center. This week Ian processed the target illuminance level per space zone. He checked all inputs are correct, considering also the ASHRAE standard.
Ian also checked the lighting control from the electrical consultant and the mech vent per area requirements. He arranged the Lux Level according to space type/uses, processed the percent openability of each glazing on the dome, and changed the material of the dome entrance. Ian also finalized the heating and cooling load calculation of the project.
Please see below progress photos for reference.
David Na (Project Management Adviser/Engineer) completed his 9th 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 started the week holding a meeting with his team to assign action items.
David was responsible for the review of Samson and Mark’s technical writing work as well as overseeing their CAD design work, which includes the new driveway, landing, basement door and garage roll-up door. David also put time into the grading calculation excel worksheet/template for his design team and future design teams to use for grading quantities.
Lastly, he has also begun creating a tutorial/checks and balances sheet for the hydrology report he is preparing for the City Center. Pictures below are related to this work.
Sunitha Paraselli (Mechanical Design Engineer) completed her 6th week working on the Duplicable City Center connectors we’ll use to build the domes. This week Sunitha worked on the comparison of the small bracket and the big bracket (increasing the length).
She also compared the bracket with less number of holes to a bracket which has more holes. The bracket which has more holes has more stress resistance. Then she ran the simulation for the safety factor; galvanized gauge steel has more factor of safety when compared to aluminum. The pictures below relate to this work.
Daniela Andrea Parada (Volunteer/Consultant Civil Engineering Student) completed her 2nd week helping with the Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping tutorial development. This week Daniela joined the weekly meeting with David’s team concerning the Earthbag Village project.
For this team, she adjusted the widths of the streets to 20 feet and added an access road turnaround to one end of the site, this is all for fire truck access. She then updated this design and ensured that both the north and south ends of the site had proper access road turnarounds. She also continued last week’s work on the Aquapini/Walipini design documentation.
Measurements were taken from AutoCAD designs and more information on the project was brought to light. Many descriptions were further detailed and a new table was created to clarify watering information. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Minseok (Evan) Kim (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 3rd week leading the final design process for the City Center open source HVAC designs. This week, Evan reviewed and provided comments on the plumbing drawing. The plumbing design lacked detailed information in terms of piping system clarification, pipe size and piping route.
Also, each dome will have their own hot water heater systems. This design approach will minimize piping work and cut down unnecessary hot water loops. Evan also completed his preliminary HVAC design markup for a designer to use as a reference. Pictures of some of this work are below.
And long-term collaborator Bahy Ahmed (Architect) continued with his 3rd week helping with Duplicable City Center architectural details. Bahy’s focus this week was a roof proposal for the Living Dome. Pictures below relate to this work.
One Community is addressing climate change with holistic living models 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 returned to working on the open source Chickens tutorial, moving text from the research Google Doc to the One Community WordPress site and formatting it. We also found and added an infogram to better explain chicken combs terminology for farming beginners. Pictures below are related to this work.
Henry Vennard (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 26th week helping continue the development of the climate batteries for the Aquapini/Walipini structures. Henry continued his work on digging into the HVAC handbooks in order to find relevant information relating to the climate battery design.
Working with the existing recommendation for greenhouses and incorporating specific climate battery recommendations he put together a first draft of a climate battery design guide. Pictures below show some of this work-in-progress.
One Community is addressing climate change with holistic living models 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 addressing climate change with holistic living models 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 22 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 17th week working on improving the content for all our Values Pages. This week we finished the behind-the-scenes editing of the value of Open Source.
We re-read the content and made final edits for clarity, transformed/fixed additional passive voice issues, added web-links to the mind map, and passed it along to Jae for final review and integration into the live page. Pictures of some of this work are below.
TEKtalent Inc.(a custom programming solutions company) also continued with their 40th week helping with the Highest Good Network software.
This week Nithesh and the TEK Talent team made links in the Profile Links section open in a new window/tab so the person doesn’t automatically leave the app, so the Create New User role is “volunteer” by default, added a size limitation of 50 kb for profile pics and a popup that tells them how to compress their image, updated the top of the Profile page to say “Favorite badges section coming…”, and added a new user role section to the Profile page that is visible to all but editable only by an Admin. They also fixed a bug where editing Skype, Zoom, etc. preference did not save. Pictures below show some of this work.
Jaime Arango (Graphic Designer) completed his 25th week helping, returning to creating images for the One Community Updates Blogs like this one. This week Jaime created images for weekly progress updates #463, #464, #465, #466 and #467. You can see all these new images below.
Yueru Zhao (Software Engineer) completed her 10th week working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Yueru planned to work on the estimation hours, classification, and resources filter in the tasks reporting page but she was not able to pull data from the tasks table. She spent time on debugging the issue but still was not able to get the tasks data.
The other tasks filter functionality is blocked until the task data issue is resolved. Yueru also spent time working on modifying the people report page UI. Now the blue square data is showing in a table format. Next week, she will continue the estimation hours, classification, and resources filter if she can pull the data. Pictures below are related to this work.
Abderrahmane “Abdel” Boulahdour (Full Stack Web Developer) also joined the team and completed his 1st week working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Abderrahmane focused on editing the team member tasks table. He changed the view of the lines in the table by adding the collapse feature and an arrow icon to open it.
For the users who have more than one task, the collapse will be opened with fixed size and a scroll bar will appear to display the rest. Abdel also made this table responsive like the leaderboard table. He’s now focused on fixing problems finding data for the progress bar of each user’s task and making the eye icon work as requested. Pictures below show some of this work.
And, last but not least, Jin Hua (Web Marketer and Graphic Designer) helped update our site to the latest Google Analytics code, addressed an indexing error we were getting, created an ad campaign for the Most Sustainable Flooring Materials tutorial and Pictures below are related to this work.
AND WE PRODUCED THIS WEEKLY UPDATES BLOG – CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE
DONATE | WAYS ANYONE CAN HELP | MEMBERSHIP
CLICK HERE FOR ALL PAST UPDATES