Earth-care cooperatives can demonstrate regenerative living that will help people, communities, and our planet. One Community is creating the open source plans needed to launch these. They include DIY and sustainable approaches to 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 of designing earth-care cooperatives as the first of many self-replicating teacher/demonstration communities, villages, and cities to be built around the world. This is the January 17th, 2021 edition (#408) of our weekly progress update detailing our team’s development and accomplishments towards earth-care cooperatives:
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One Community is designing earth-care cooperatives 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 working on the Most Sustainable Flooring Materials staging page. This week we finished and integrated the social media infographic, restored and backed up missing resource links, and began editing the next article: Best Small and Large-scale Community Polystyrene & Styrofoam Recycling, Repurposing, and Reuse. Pictures below show some of this work reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Dean Scholz (Architectural Designer) continued helping with the Earthbag Village (Pod 1) 4-dome cluster designs. This week was week #210 of Dean’s work and the focus was designing the custom shelving and seating along the South wall. See pictures below reflect efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
This week Jose Luis Flores (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 26th week helping finish the Net-zero Bathroom component of the Earthbag Village. This week Jose Luis began updating the SolidWorks rendering of the Net-Zero Bathroom to illustrate the use of a roof saddle and roof flash in tandem for water sealing the roof access. The updated renderings include the roof saddle assembled in layers instead of one solid piece to show more detail on the installation process. The first layer of the roof saddle has wooden rafts cut from 2 by 4 at multiple angles to compensate for the roof inclination.
The second layer was the OSB sheathing shaped into a triangle to fit over the rafts and was secured in place with screws. The third layer involved installing roof flash around the roof access piece by piece to accurately illustrate the order of the flash. The order of the flash is important because the flash should be overlapping each layer starting from the roof saddle down to minimize water collection around the roof access.
The fourth layer had sheet metal cut into two triangular pieces to cover the frame followed by a strip of the sheet metal to cover the gap in between the frame. The final layer will cover the sides of the frame to prevent any water from seeping through the wood and the interior roof. The pictures below show some of this work reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Stacey Maillet (Graphic Designer) completed her 23rd week working on the final edits and revisions to the Murphy bed instructions. This week Stacy finished updating the clothing and storage, nightstands and electrical sections, submitting her final questions about brackets and hardware numbers and locations. She was able to reduce the nightstands pages down by 1 page by combining steps onto a page that had free space. Cutting pages are nearly complete too. Pictures below are related to this latest progress reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Hannah Copeman (Structural Engineer) completed her 21st 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 made a new section for the tutorial write-up of the horizontal wing insulation around the dome, researched options for interior trimming to protect the insulation around the edges of the floor envelope, and she re-designed the wall envelope above the graded backfill and below the first earthbag layer to include a vapor barrier to prevent moisture damage. You can see some screenshots of this work below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Haozhen “Andrew” He (Civil Design Engineer) also completed his 2nd week as a member of the team. This week’s focus was finishing his setup process by setting up Civil 3D software as well as getting familiar with connecting Sketchup and AutoCAD. Haozhen met with Mark and Samson for the Earthbag village work splitting, and Haozhen reviewed the Sustainable Parking Lot Construction Guide and Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping Guide. To better understand how to manipulate the piping network, Haozhen also participated in a Civil 3D webinar lectured by Bentley software engineers. Pictures below are related to this work reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Mark Wambua (Civil Engineer) joined the team and completed his 1st week working on the Parking Lot and Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping guides. This week Mark worked to figure out a viable temporary parking lot option while also researching codes and regulations for the permanent parking lot. Pictures below show some of this work-in-progress reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Zhiheng “Samson” Su (Civil Engineer) also joined the team and completed his 1st week working on the Parking Lot and Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping guides. This week, Samson finished the onboarding process, reviewed the parking lot, roadway, and walkway webpage, had a meeting with Andrew and Mark, and then began working on the pavement design tutorial by following the Caltrans Highway Design Manual.
This week he listed out the project specific conditions for the evaluation (pavement design life, traffic considerations, soils characteristics, etc.) and wrote a detailed explanation of pavement design life, traffic considerations, and calculation of equivalent single axle load (ESALs), Lane distribution factor and Traffic Index (TI). The pictures below show some of this work reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
One Community is designing earth-care cooperatives 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 created a new graphic showing the locations of all the main plumbing fixtures. We integrated this into the Duplicable City Center Plumbing page and also wrote the What and Why sections there. Pictures below show some of this work reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Angela Mao (Sustainability Researcher) completed her 20th week as a member of the team and working on content for the Most Sustainable Lightbulbs and Light Bulb Companies and the Best Small and Large-scale Community Options for Sustainable Processing & Reuse of Non-recyclables tutorial. This week, Angela revised the company information, the summary, and made an overall edit of the entire tutorial. For her non-recyclables tutorial, Angela narrowed down the best methods and is refining their descriptions. Pictures below show some of this work-in-progress reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
This week Ksenia Akimov (Plumbing Engineer) completed her 17th week working on the Duplicable City Center plumbing designs. This week Ksenai checked and updated the hot water calculations based on the latest floor plan clarifications from the core team. Pictures below show some of this work reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Qiuheng Xu (Landscape Designer) completed her 15th week helping with the Duplicable City Center, now focused solely on the landscaping design. This week Qiuheng updated the road system and the planting plan and put together an initial planting list. The planting plan was also imported to SketchUp for future modeling and perspective renderings. Below are some images showing her work reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
And Ian Oliver Malinay (Energy Modeler/Analyst) completed his 6th week helping run the energy analysis calculations to help us achieve LEED Platinum status for the Duplicable City Center. This week Ian was able to transfer the site data of the project into DesignBuilder. He then focused on filling in the construction assembly of materials and checking if the information corresponds to ASHRAE 90.1 standard. Progress photos are below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
One Community is designing earth-care cooperatives 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 rewriting/finalizing the chicken coop doc step-by-step instructions. The focus this week was edits and revisions relating to rafter and roofing installation while reviewing articles and videos related to such. Pictures below show some of this work-in-progress reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Here are some of the new graphics created too. These images are all related to updating parts dimensions for the east wall assembly pages that have the chicken door and two venting openings.
Jiayu Liang (Landscape Designer) completed her 16th week helping with the Aquapini & Walipini internal and external landscaping details. This week, Jiayu updated the outdoor landscape renders by adding more detail. She also continued adding to the animation for Walipini 1. Hence, reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Henry Vennard (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 15th week helping continue the development of the climate batteries for the Aquapini/Walipini structures. This week Henry met with members of the team and discussed the complicated heat transfer equations involved in modeling the climate battery. It was decided that incorporating the thermal lag in the soil will be too difficult and an estimate will be sufficient. Henry then worked on incorporating all the new information into a new matlab script. You can see some pictures related to this work below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Md Amanullah Kabir (Mechanical Engineer) also continued with his 4th week on the team, now focusing on the Aquapini/Walipini electrical layout. This week Md began creating the electrical plan and conducting related research. Initial placement of components (Mechanical, MEP, etc) was sketched out, a central location for the individual walipini panel was suggested, and locations for the thermometer, heater, backup heater, humidity sensor, etc. were considered. There are picture below related to this work-in-progress reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
One Community is designing earth-care cooperatives 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 such as designing earth-care cooperatives:
One Community is designing earth-care cooperatives 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 also completed our 5th week working on improving the content for all our Values Pages. This week we completed work on the Communication page. We improved readability from ‘needs improvement’ to ‘OK’ by converting passive voice to active voice, and re-wrote some content for added clarity. We also reviewed the resources section and removed links that were bogged down with advertisements. Picture below show this work towards designing earth-care cooperatives and some additional work we did adding our recycling rollout details to our complete phased-in rollout plan.
Henry Nguyen (React Developer) completed his 45th week with the team and working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Henry completed the popup editor with the backup function. He also moved the popup management to under the “other links” dropdown. He changed the number of times for backing up to 2 (vs 7) and displayed a confirmation to make sure the user knows what they are about to do. Current popups which can be modified are: Delete Project, Delete WBS, Delete Task in WBS, and Import Task in WBS. Pictures related to this work are below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Wen Zhang (Software Engineer) completed her 33rd week as a volunteer working on the Highest Good Network software. This week Wen worked on the “assign badges”, coding and debugging. The categories of badges have been updated in the badge model and a third layer of authorization check was included. The “badge management” link is only available to Admin roles now and the non-Admin roles have no access to the badge data, for the table containing all the badge editing info, and can’t submit the “assign badge” request.
The second and third authorization checks are in place in case someone bypasses the UI and tries to access these components of the app. Pictures of some of this work are below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
TEKtalent Inc.(a custom programming solutions company) also continued with their 30th week helping with the Highest Good Network software. This week Nithesh and the TEK Talent team were focusing on the documentation and completing the suggestion and wrapping the create new user profile functionality. This week Nithesh and TEK talent team migrated the REST API to azure and the dev site is now working in azure with both react and REST API. The pictures below relate to this work reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Noor Qureshi (Insurance Researcher) completed her 22nd week helping research One Community’s insurance options. This week Noor finished ranking the insurance plans by their coverage type and associated cost. Depending on the cost associated with the coverage, she gave the cell a specific color. Darker colors were associated with better benefits and lighter colors were considered to be not good costs for the associated coverage. You the development so far of the spreadsheet ranking everything below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Chris Weilacker (Software Engineer) completed his 17th week working on the Highest Good Network software. This week, Chris worked on the Summary Bar component, putting it on the timelog page and removing the summary bar from the timelog component. He also double checked the related functionality and went through and fixed several warnings in the console and lots of compile/style warnings in multiple files and pushed the changes. You can see some pictures related to this below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Jaime Arango (Graphic Designer) also completed his 16th week helping with various graphic design work for the project, continuing this week working on the new badges for the badges section on the Dashboard of the Highest Good Network. This week he finished the “X Minimum Hours” badges and started the “No Blue Squares” badges. Pictures of the new badges are below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
Robert Pioch (Graphic Designer) completed his 6th week also helping with the new badges for the badges section on the Dashboard of the Highest Good Network. This week, Robert completed award badges for Highest Good Energy. You can see pictures of the new designs and development process below reflecting efforts towards designing earth-care cooperatives.
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