One Community is building the foundation for conservation collaboratives. These will form a global network of teacher/demonstration hubs designed to help people replicate and evolve sustainable environments integrating ecological and “Highest Good” approaches to food, energy, housing, education, for-profit and non-profit economic design, social architecture, fulfilled living, global stewardship practices, and more. Doing this so they are easy enough, affordable enough, and attractive enough to spread on their own is a path to global sustainability within our lifetime.
Click on each icon to be taken to the corresponding Highest Good hub page.
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 May 10th, 2020 edition (#372) of our weekly progress update detailing our team’s development and accomplishments:
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One Community is promoting conservation collaboratives 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 began creation of the Best Small and Large-scale Community Paper Recycling, Reuse, and Repurposing Options open source guide. This week we set up the initial formatting, created and tested the table of contents links, and created the header and social media graphics. We’d say this brings this page to about 30% complete. The Earthbag Village is the first of 7 to be built as the housing component of One Community’s open source model for conservation collaboratives. See pictures below.
Ashwini Ramesh (Civil Engineer and Project Manager) returned to the team after almost 3 years off! In her 1st week back she focused on reviewing and adding content to the Sustainable Site Selection page she’d previously worked on, researching various Earthbag constructions all over the world, and working on developing a standard format for a Master Table for the entire Earthbag Village list of Materials, Tools and Equipment, Cost Analysis and Bill of Quantities. The Earthbag Village is the first of 7 to be built as the housing component of One Community’s open source model for conservation collaboratives. You can see some of this work-in-progress below.
Dean Scholz (Architectural Designer) continued helping with the Earthbag Village (Pod 1) 4-dome cluster designs. This week was week #186 of Dean’s work and the focus this week was finishing the new stairway design. This new design saves materials, allows for better views from the dining room and fixes a head clearance issue. The Earthbag Village is the first of 7 to be built as the housing component of One Community’s open source model for conservation collaboratives. See pictures below.
Ziqian Zheng (Architectural Designer and Drafter) continued working on the Earthbag Village walkthrough and completed his 26th week as a volunteer designer with our team. This week’s focus was adding more bushes and greenery where requested, putting the Lion King back on the TV in one of the shots, fixing multiple shelving objects, adding more shelving objects, fixing a couple places where the walkthrough went partially through a wall, removing a leftover TV mount, and creating a final flyover video of the complete village.
The Earthbag Village is the first of 7 to be built as the housing component of One Community’s open source model for conservation collaboratives. You can see some screenshots of some of this work below.
Oluyomi “Yomi” Sanyaolu (Technical Writer and Researcher) completed his 23rd week with the team and continued research for the Best Small and Large-scale Recycling, Reuse, and Repurposing Options tutorials. This week, Oluyomi worked on finishing a 1st proper draft of the paper and styrofoam waste processing tutorials. See below for screenshots of the work he completed.
His research brought the following conclusions to be reached: DIY compost and DIY insulation blocks are the best recycling methodologies for paper and polystyrene respectively. The reasons behind these choices were the low labor, inexpensive, and sustainable aspects of each of these processes. The Earthbag Village is the first of 7 to be built as the housing component of One Community’s open source model for conservation collaboratives. See pictures below.
Angela Mao (Sustainability Researcher) also completed her 2nd week as a member of the team and researching Clothing Recycling/Repurposing Options. This week Angela started researching textile recycling options for more rural areas, which encounter different obstacles when it comes to implementing an effective recycling program.
Angela also began researching and developing a guide to starting one’s own for-profit textile recycling business. After doing all of that research, Angela has completed most of her tutorial and is now focusing on refining and editing it. The Earthbag Village is the first of 7 to be built as the housing component of One Community’s open source model for conservation collaboratives. You can see some of this behind-the-scenes work below.
One Community is promoting conservation collaboratives 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 continued on conservation collaboratives updating the Duplicable City Center 3D model to match the updated floor plans and interior design details.
This week we continued with elements within the Social Dome. As part of this we designed the triangular tables and leather sitting chairs for the main room, moved the bathroom wall, added the water fountains, added one more urinal, added the frame for the bathroom mirror, added wood area under the bathroom sinks and redesigned the sinks themselves, and updated the window frames. The City Center will be built along with the first of the 7 villages as part of One Community’s open source model for conservation collaboratives. Pictures of all of this are below.
One Community is promoting conservation collaboratives 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 researching rabbits and compiling our findings on the behind-the-scenes research Google Doc. This week’s focus was researching rabbit food, water, and exercise details. Highest Good Food is an important part of conservation collaboratives with One Community’s open source plans. See below for pictures.
The core team also continued developing the open source permaculture design content. This week various iterations were made to produce mind maps to condense and make more visual and organized the text within Step 2 of the Permaculture Design Case Study, beginning with the Food infrastructure. Coogle was selected as the mind mapping tool after looking into several open source options. The free version of Coogle was the most straightforward in terms of ease of use and intuitiveness and was able to make hyperlinks in the same format as those on the current website. Highest Good Food is an important part of conservation collaboratives with One Community’s open source plans. You can see some of this behind-the-scenes work below.
Mohammad Almuzaial (Civil and Construction Engineer) continued with his 24th week helping with the Aquapini/Walipini engineering details.
This week he researched steel mesh ceiling products and calculated the required quantity, collected references for the structural analysis and started the structural analysis for the structures, finished the structural design for all structures, calculated the proper sheet size for the structures to minimize waste (6′ SolaWrap sheets for the small structures and 5′ SolaWrap sheets for the large structures) and continued editing/updating the property topo. Highest Good Food is an important part of conservation collaboratives with One Community’s open source plans. You can see some of this work work-in-progress below and we’d say we’re now about 90% complete with the structural details.
One Community is promoting conservation collaboratives 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. 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:
This week Dan Alleck (Designer and Illustrator) completed his 76th week helping with conservation collaboratives render additions and finishing work for the rooms in the Ultimate Classroom. This week he finished this view of the main area looking South by fixing shadows and lighting levels and adding objects and people. The One Community model of combining forward-thinking education with sustainably built classrooms like this is an excellent example of conservation collaboratives. You can see the final render below and it is now on the website too.
Zebao Chen (Structural Designer) also completed her 3rd week working on the conservation collaboratives Ultimate Classroom structural engineering details. This week Zebao added options for a service area layout, including toilet rooms, sinks, drinking fountains, a storage room, a janitor room, and extra shelves. We tried a symmetric toilet layout but it won’t work for our building length. There is no space for circulation and other service rooms. The adjustable layout has toilets and storage rooms on two sides of the middle hallway, and keeps the back door in the middle of the building. Another consideration is the floor under the sink could be wet, especially children using more frequently.
To keep the floor dry and separate it from the main circulation area, a third option was proposed with toilet rooms and sinks in an enclosed space and the main building space accessible from the back door directly, instead of passing the sink area. Zebao also verified the roof space is enough for having HVAC ducts and storage in the ceiling.
The storage area is 400 square ft. For the shallow roof slope, the roof system will only use straw bales as membrane material, not the structure elements. The One Community model of combining forward-thinking education with sustainably built classrooms like this is an excellent example of the highest good eco-community solutions. You can see some of work below and we’d say this brings the engineering of this building to 5% complete.
One Community is promoting conservation collaboratives 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 Ross Edwards (Chief Imagination Officer, G3) completed his 3rd week helping promote our project, conservation collaboratives, and the One Community helping page to educators, engineering schools, and possible funders. Ross is someone who found our project, loved what we are doing, and offered to just help contact people he (and we) thought might be interested in it. This work helps One Community’s mission of conservation collaboratives. You can see this last week’s list of who he contacted below.
Alvaro Hernandez (Open Source Tech Consultant, Developer) completed his 7th week as a member of the Highest Good Network software team. This week Alvaro documented the leaderboard component on HGN Functional Specification Documentation, made some very basic unit tests to the leaderboard component (WBS 1.2), contributed to the development workflow and github, and updated the style of some of the software documentation docs to match the One Community Software Documentation Design Guide and Template. This work helps One Community’s mission of conservation collaboratives. You can see some of this work below.
Henry Nguyen (React Developer) completed his 15th week with the team and working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Henry fixed bugs on the drag and drop function to move tasks on the Work Breakdown Structure. Now users can drag tasks to re-order them and all the children task’s ID will be updated once a task is moved. He also added a function to display a long list of resources by using an expand button to view more people if the task has more than 2 people who are working on it. This work helps One Community’s mission of conservation collaboratives. You can see some of this work below.
Tengxiao Wang (Software Engineer) completed his 15th week working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Tengxiao continued work on the Timer component. He researched best practice for MongoDB data modeling and came up with two options: (a) embed the timer data in the userProfile collection or (b) create a separate collection for timer data. Reasons for (a): Timer data is always loaded together with user profile data when opening the app.
They are both one-user-to-one-xxx relationship and can be queried by user ID. Embedding makes reads faster. Reasons for (b): Timer data is updated frequently while user profile data isn’t. Separate collection would avoid frequent updates to userprofile collections and makes writes faster. This also wouldn’t make any change to the current user profile data model. He also added auto-linking functionality. This work helps One Community’s mission of conservation collaboratives. You can see some of this work-in-progress below.
And Andon Ignatov (Senior Web Developer) joined the team and completed his first week working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Andon began the work on WBS #1.6 by first going over all the documentation, initial local development environment setup, updating the “HGN Functional Specification Documentation”, creating a mockup of the Weekly Summary section (WBS 1.6) and then began coding the UI component based on the mockup. This work helps One Community’s mission of conservation collaboratives. You can see some screenshots of this work below.
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