R&D-I-Y : A web platform for mass collaboration

R&D-I-Y is a web platform with 18,000+ global citizens collaboratively innovating for environmental stewardship and quality of urban life. The platform is currently being developed, building on their alpha project. The community is working to integrate personal scale innovation for environmental stewardship + quality of life into the existing infrastructure of cities. They are applying open source software development techniques to physical systems development, developing hydroponic systems, LEDs, solar, aquaponics, sensor systems, nutrient sources and alternative energy . . . all using open source techniques and as many readily-available materials as possible. Check them out at http://www.rndiy.org/ or watch the TEDtalk…

App Inventor moves to MIT…:-)

The App Inventor Team informed us that…

“By the end of 2011 Google will be making the complete App Inventor source code publicly available under an open source license, so that anyone can study the code and modify it as they desire.

In order to ensure the future success of App Inventor, Google has funded the establishment of a Center for Mobile Learning at the MIT Media Lab.  Sometime in the first quarter of 2012, the Center plans to provide an App Inventor service for general public access, similar to the one Google is currently running.

In order for you to continue working with your projects in an open source instance (MIT or otherwise) of App Inventor you will need to download your data from appinventorbeta.combefore December 31st and later upload them to an open source instance as it becomes available.

Please visit the App Inventor user forums to get future updates on App Inventor.  You can also visit http://mobilelearning.mit.edu/ “

…is this good news or what..:-))

GardenBot – an open source garden monitoring system

Visit Gardenbot.org for a collection of tutorials for how to build things (like a soil moisture sensor), software for running GardenBot, resources, links, and more.

To get started, you will want to browse the “How-To” section to see what is required to build the various modules.

The ultimate goal of the GardenBot project is to be a complete garden monitoring and automation system. A key design consideration is to keep everything as easy as possible — especially for users new to Arduino and DIY electronics projects.

GardenBot is currently a work in progress. This project is built upon open source technology, so it is free to be used and modified in any way you see fit (provided you adhere to GardenBot’s license).

Open Source Ecology

opensourceecology.org – A Network of Farmers, Engineers, and Supporters Building the Global Village Construction Set. The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

OpenClipArt.org

Openclipart is the largest collaboration community that create, share and remix cliparts. All cliparts are released to the Public Domain so they can be freely used in any project for free.