Is it time for Open Source sustainability-related technology? Open source solar trackers?

editors | 14 June, 2010 15:33

By editors, editors@JournalofSustainability.com

In a well-considered book, “The Starfish and the Spider” (Portfoilio, 2006), Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom give a name to something that many of us have been vaguely aware of: decentralized organizations. Unlike traditional hierarchical organizations, decentralized organizations are leaderless, flat and thrive when divided. The preferred metaphor for the latter characteristic is the starfish, which can replicate itself from a single arm, because as a decentralized organism it contains all major organs in each arm; but the mythological Hydra is just as appropriate a metaphor.

Historians are aware of the success of the decentralized Apaches against the centralized Spanish. Hackers are aware of the success of eMule and Bittorrent, and Open Source software (the old Informix datablades, the Sun servers, Mozilla, to name a few). The rest of us have heard of Wikipedia, Alcoholics Anonymous, and communes. Brafman and Beckstrom didn’t discover the phenomenon. They just publicized it. I wouldn’t say they discovered it. I refer the reader to manuscripts by Rainer E. Zimmerman, posted on arxiv.org 4 and 5 years before Brafman and Beckstrom’s book. The articles are entitled “Decentralization as organizing principle of emergent urban structures,” and “Reconstructing Bologna.”

The authors introduce a nuanced approach to the phenomenon, placing hierarchical and decentralized organizations on either end of a continuum. They then give examples of “hybrid” organizations that fall somewhere in between these two extremes, on a so-called “sweet spot.” One might think of it as a “Goldilocks effect.” GM, for example, was a traditional hierarchical organization that granted partial autonomy to the lowest levels.

Is it time for Open Source sustainability-related technology? The question is timely, given that for example many of the pioneering solar patents of the 1960’s and 70’s have run their course. One of our favorite solar trackers is 4,175,391 (1979), a passive tracker by Steve Baer of Zomeworks (A promising candidate for 2014 is an active tracker, 5,317,145 (1994) by Ron Corio of Array Technologies, also here in Albuquerque.). Baer’s tracker is passive and uses Freon (TM). It could easily serve as a platform for an open source passive solar tracker.

We googled the phrase “open source solar” and found some postings relating to open source electronic circuits for a solar tracker. There is an organization that publishes “Open Source Ecology” (http://openfarmtech.org/index.php/Main_Page). Their website has a blog with Forum containing several open source hardware designs. But otherwise there is no equivalent of http://sourceforge.net for solar technology. For those of you who are not hackers, Source Forge is a leading depository for open source software. Sourceforge is not a not-for-profit organization. According to their website, “SourceForge.net is owned and operated by Geeknet, Inc., a publicly traded US-based company.”

The Journal of Sustainability would like to host open source sustainability-related technology. The Journal is owned by Research & Design, formerly an S-Corporation, now a partnership. We formerly hosted ads on the Journal website. Now, like Twitter, we simply lose money on it. We have an open source product of our own that we have been working on for a few years now. Stay tuned and we’ll be announcing it shortly.