Daniel Spitzburg –
Mike Lin – Hand Crank Generators: Potenco.com

Break into pairs to work on paper that identifies and analyzes technologies.
Organization that facilitated product development posted on website along with those technologies.

Mike Lin Potenco:
Worked for squid labs. Company founded by MIT and Stanfod PDH and grad students.
Markani: harnessing wind at high altitudes. Use Kites to tap into the high winds. Venture capital funded to ensure that all projects are going somewhere and funding doesn’t go to deadend projects.

3 Other Start-ups:
1. Instructables.com: community generated instructions on projects. Community of people serves as a platform for open source development.
2. Howtoons: comics devoted to teaching kids how to make things
3. Opotiopia: low cost eyeglasses

Looking for communities with good distribution infrastructure. Not interested in developing stores. Develop product available to consumers. Aming to create a product that has retail price of 100 dollars. Manufacturing costs, taxes and tariffs, etc.

How do you distribute these inventions into the hands of the people once you’ve designed it? How do you get them into actual practice?
Strategic partnerships?

Sometimes products didn’t go out in one piece…been implemented in a number of different ways. Not intentionally, but how its been adopted by local practitioners.

Having modern tech at their disposal could have multiplier effects. If they were more savvy and had more up to date tools, they could do their job better. Built in business plan. What kind of software would benefit city governments? Good governments isn’t just a philosophical choice. Easy to be critical of such governments.

Derek: Julianne Administration; how was crime combated in New York: militant, no leniency, “Broken Window Theory”. If you see a broken window in a neighborhood, then they don’t care about their safety, community and are more prone to crime.

Tech can often be a facilitator to social practices. People are still solving the problems, but tech is helping organize ppl in a different way. NY crime reduction, they have a forecasting system for crime: let people see trends in different districts that different police chiefs were in charge of. Seeing patterns of crime. Created a social context and social structure. IE: Police chiefs would have to explain why their district still had such crime even with the forecasting technology.

See how technology would influence social structure. If one person had an energy source he would have a little more power. Would this lead to corruption?

Q: Why do bureaucrats need mobile laptops?
Derek: It’s like a pay raise (cynical way to look at it). In India, gov. system is very corrupt, so maybe software would make it easier to track this corruption through monitoring. Need some kind of program and structure to provide that transparency. From a social good perspective, creating good software could be a very useful thing.

Backtracking to: Mobile phones: 1% increase in phone penetration correlates to 5% increase of average per capita income. Potentially misleading statistic, but it’s getting close to just figuring out the economic impact.

GUEST PRESENTER: AMIT
Mechanical Engineer who’s been working on side project for past 6 months.
Idea: Human Power: a lot of potential.
Having LED lighting has a potential market for their village. Opportunity Cost.
Work at UCSD: Wind, pedal power, solar, micohydel-à Charge controller: need to make it better and cheaper! Charge controller helps with getting energy more efficiently. IE: Solar panel; Cloudy day vs. Sunny day, there is a more efficient way to get energy from the sun on each of these different days. Optimizes variable inputs. Cheap sources of energy are generally not consistent power source.

Bicycle: finding optimal level to pedal and get the most power out of the least amount of effort.

Kurt Kuhlmann, inventor in bay area
Designed 70W $25 pedal generator + MPPT charge controller. Can be attached to any bicycle. Marketed by Blakin inc. Field test starting in March. Are we scooped? =(

Convertibility in power outlets to charge cell phones (Albert wanted to buy a solar cell phone charger for his phone when traveling). AC vs. DC for charging cell phones. I have no idea what these mean. Sorry. =(

Extra Credit: attend lecture. Development of digital systems that accommodate multicultural interpretations. How tech pertains to development. India, Asia based. Discover bridging and bonding. Friday, 3:30, 4th floor of Atkinson. Check email from Bryant for more information.

Exploring Reciprocal Interactions: Emergent Media in Diverse Cultural Realms
This talk will be integrative in nature, directly exploring several dimensions of Dr. Srinivasan's global collaborative research with ethnic, cross-cultural populations, the focus being the iteration between diverse communities, technology co- production/design, and social/behavioral impacts. The talk will begin by focusing on his historical research revealing the means by which diverse cultural priorities and structures of knowledge can impact the design and ultimate sustainability of database-driven new media systems.
These findings demonstrate that locally-grounded, participatory and ethnographic approaches can successfully dovetail with relevant findings in community and cross-cultural technology initiatives. Therefore, via a series of applied projects to be introduced, Dr. Srinivasan will present the potentials of a culture and community-focused methodology toward:

a. The development of digital systems (and more generally globalized information systems) that can accommodate multiple, local cultural interpretations/ontologies -
based on a current NSF grant project for which he is PI. (collaboration with the Zuni tribe, NM, and Cambridge University (UK)).
b. The abilities for communities in the developing world to benefit from technologically-related development, e-governance, microfinance, and public health interventions in reflective and sustainable manners. This shall be the focus of the talk. (India-based projects)
c. The ability for diasporic groups to discover bridging and bonding social capital via information systems directly mobilize social networks. (Los Angeles-based project)
d. Impact social movements and educational infrastructures in parts of the world traditionally neglected within the ICT-development dialogue (Kyrgyzstan)

February 1, 2008
3:30 PM
Calit2 Room 4004, Atkinson Hall, UCSD


Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor of Information Studies at the University
of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) has focused his research globally on
the development of information systems within transnational and cross-
cultural contexts. He has studied how the cultural and social practices of a
community or organization can impact the design of a new media system,
particularly with respect to how a system represents, categorizes, and dis-
seminates the information it stores. His research has spanned such bounds
as e-governance, public health, development informatics, digital preserva-
tion, across Asian, African, Australasian, and North American field environ-
ments. His research has received international acclaim and has appeared
in top academic and international journals. For more detail, please consult
his web page: http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/srinivasan/index.html. He
holds a doctoral degree from
Harvard University, M.S from MIT's Media Laboratory, and a B.S from
Stanford University.

Biomass Gasifier Innovation
Cheapest source of energy. Almost 40% of population uses this? Need a good source of flame that is low-cost energy to increase marginal benefits. Quite large cylinder that modify the flame.
Hard to get social workers out to isolated areas to install these. Do they need a lot of scrutiny or can they stand alone with little maintenance?
Problem solving à new problem from user à synthesis
Design process takes re-modification repeatedly.
However, there is ~7.5 thousand dollars saved each year (enormous savings in these countries).
Results so far: Fuel that you put in is much more efficient (60% savings, burning efficiency of 35%). Flame is more clean and controlled., 35% more oil in the product.

Must have fuel prototype, industrial design based on ppl’s inputs, commercial prototype

What can result in bringing gasifiers to the mainstream? Entrepreneurs that focus on smooth user adoption of technology. Working group up, from users to manufacturers.

Q: Any environmental impacts? Just a little ash. Greenhouse gases…vs. burning a pile of wood, this is much more efficient.