write.less

A workshop on (not only) wireless networking in Pokhara, Sept 14-24, organized by

• WirelessU
• NSRC
• ISOC
• NepalWireless

brings together about 30 participants from a.o. the Nepal Wireless villages, the Nepal NREN, ISOC Nepal, supporters and activists.

The first 5 days will be classroom/lab training, followed by deployments in 2-3 villages.

The workshop aims at

• preparing the next phases of the Nepal Wireless network extension
• empowering villagers to run and maintian their own networks
• establishing a series of upcoming training events, by training future trainers and assembling a training hardware kit.

The workshop agenda (changes possible) is at

https://ws.edu.isoc.org/trac/wirelessu/wiki/PokharaWorkshopCurriculum

here are some views i find useful in (work) life – none of them are entirely my own.

see for example the work at

• the 16 guidelines
• center for wisdom and compassion
• the potential project

do i live up to them today? no.

do i have time to write them down, really? no.

all in all, the perfect moment to write them down. maybe they are useful.

taking the opposite view

whenever you find that you hold a certain view very strongly,
test its negation or absolute opposite,
and ask yourself whether you could support that view too.
very often you will find that you will.

the most irritating person reminds you of … yourself

when you find that a certain quality or feature of another person deeply irritates you strongly,
look for the same quality in yourself.
you are very likely to find it.

for example, when the greed or ambition of another person puts you off,
most likely this corresponds to an unsatisfied need or tendency within yourself.

or example, show-offs always get me worked up,
as they remind me of my own tendency to appear as what i am not,
to satisfy more than i can.

the most irritating person is your mirror.

seeing that makes is a lot easier to forgive and cooperate.

we desire soooo what has already been given to us

so there is something you really desire and want to own.
the fact that you see it means
it has already been given to you.

for example,
when you cycle by a flowershop and the wonderful scent makes you want to buy a bunch -
you have already enjoyed the wonderful scent of flowers.
there is no need to buy.

you look onto that beautiful house across the street and you want to be the owner.
however, if you lived in that house, you would not be able to view and admire it like you do right now.

sometimes it is better to live in the ugly block across the street – with a view.

and to bike on with the scent of flowers in your mind.

embrace the result – no matter how it comes to be

when you want something to happen, and just before you yourself can make it happen -
it happens without your contribution (or so you think) -

be happy!

you wanted it to happen, it has happened.

without you knowing, you have created the situation for it to happen. even if invisibly so.

if your wish has been sincere, it is perfect.
if it does not feel perfect, examine the wish you had in the first place.

engage fully – then let go

when you are working to make something happen, go for it with all your energy.

at the moment results begin to show – let it go, no matter if the outcome is 100% identical to what you wanted.

sometimes things come to work in an unexpected way, and maybe better than if they worked according to plan.

here is the difficult one

mastering the stretch between these two:

• understanding that at work we are acting in a role, and being able to separate role from full human being

(this we are often taught in standard management training …)

but at the same time

• bringing everything to the path – engaging fully, with all we are, all our shadows and ghosts and past mistakes

both are important.

constructing realities

so she or he has said something irritating to me the other day.
i say i will sleep on it, think about it.

and then i “think about it” -
with no additional information from outside whatsoever,
the negative picture begins to form.

and i answer angry the next morning.

when we say “i will think about it”, we mean
“i will construct a reality within myself and then i will repsond to what i have built”.

we are constructors. it is our choice what we build.

slides from a talk given at reboot11, on 26 june 2009.

topics: action, (user owned) networks, new technology & new business models in africa.

(PDF, 3.2 MB)

reboot11_-_action_in_africa_-_compressed

Triggered by this SocialSquare blog post (danish only) – it talks about Extreme Transparency (workshop on this topic 17 June 2009), mostly in the context of product and corporate information –

An interesting thought in the discussion of new media, new channels,
and the challenges these pose to both classical journalism and corporate communications – and slightly extending this to the private level:

As they effectively lose control of all communication channels,

full integrity, full sincerity become the only feasible option for both corporate and private entities.

A welcome side effect?

Today, 07 October 2008, the website and network WirelessU has been launched:

“We are a group of dedicated professionals working towards a world-wide, people-centered, inclusive Information Society. Our goal is to make it easier for existing groups and institutions to offer wireless training courses. We invite you to browse, download, comment and contribute. Each training unit has been composed and presented by experts in teaching wireless networking.

WirelessU.org is:

• An open access repository of educational materials: All training materials are available for any person to download.
• A tool for educators: WirelessU makes it easy to distribute your training materials to your students—just upload & share the link. We keep track of all of your revisions and translations, making it easy to find, share, and collaborate on training materials.
• A community: WirelessU connects people. Whether you are interested in learning about wireless technology, teaching a wireless training session, or holding a training event at a local venue, WirelessU will help you connect to the people who make all of this possible.”

“South African children call for end to global hunger on the eve of Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday

Spectacular aerial portrait urges world leaders to act on the global food crisis

Over 2,000 school children gathered today to form a visually spectacular human portrait of Nelson Mandela with the message ‘Freedom from Hunger.’

The ambitious project, which could only be seen and photographed from the sky, took place in the sprawling township of Alexandra on the outskirts of Johannesburg”

Read more:

http://www.actionaid.org/main.aspx?PageID=1132

“JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA (AP) – Desmond Tutu, Kofi Annan and other members of Nelson Mandela’s global crisis task force turned their attention to world hunger on Wednesday, focusing on soaring food prices.

The Nobel laureates and human rights activists the former South African president brought together as The Elders at his birthday last year have sent peace missions to the Middle East and Sudan’s Darfur and spoken out against sham elections and political violence in Zimbabwe.

With the food crisis, they were taking on an issue that some experts say could lead to new wars, and that has touched all parts of the world, rich and poor.

Food riots have broken out in the poorest countries, and the crisis has set back efforts to lift Africa out of poverty.

Tutu, the Elders chairman and former Cape Town Anglican archbishop, called the right to food “fundamental.”

Tutu _ speaking after the meeting to an audience that included British entrepreneur Richard Branson, a main supporter of The Elders _ said world leaders were wasting resources fighting terror instead of poverty.

“We have it in us to make this a better world, a caring world, a compassionate world in which everyone would enjoy the right to food and freedom from hunger,” he said.”

Just having returned from South Africa where blackouts in the form of Load Shedding are common these days, i decided to follow the Earth Hour campaigns request and turn off all lights, all electricity in our apartment for one hour.

I dont need to reason about whether that is a good thing or not, whether candles actually produce more CO2 than low energy bulbs, or host any illusions about how much of a change it makes when a tiny country like denmark turns off the lights for one out of 8760 hours.

We used it as an educational hour for my son and me, to talk about energy consumption and saving, to turn out the computer for one hour, to play paper and pen based role play to the light of candles, and also to talk about what devices were still ok to use – like our solar radio and our wind-up torch (which children love because it s fun).

So we spent a positive one hour.

Did my son think it was an exciting and romantic thing to do then? No – he found it mildly boring and couldnt wait for the lights to come back on again, so he could better see his role play elves.

My PC surprised me with a funny pop up the other day:

In the news: “Mozambique to aid SA power crisis

Most of Cahora Bassa’s power already goes to South Africa

Mozambique is to increase power supplies to South Africa to help it cope with severe electricity shortages.

More than 75% of the power generated from Mozambique’s huge Cahora Bassa Dam is already sold to South Africa.“

This increase in electricity imports comes after the last months in South Africa have seen more and more frequent Load Shedding – the Eskom’s euphemism for (scheduled) black outs.

Or, in the words of the Wikipedia:

“Rolling blackout
(Redirected from Load shedding)

Rolling blackout also referred to as load shedding refers to an intentionally-engineered electrical power outage, caused by insufficient available resources to meet prevailing demand for electricity.”
Load Shedding has led to severe economic losses for companies, as well as worried looks ahead on a winter to come (soon) and the 2010 World Championships (Football/Soccer, later).

South african houses, be they rich or poor, typically have no isolation against the cold and bridge the cold months with electric radiators. Private electricity bills often peak in August. Thats if you can afford a radiator.

Coming back to the screen shot above: the background picture that has Africa so strong and red – that is taken from a so-called global solar insolation map. These are maps that tell you what parts of the earth are most blessed with energy, solar energy that is. Look:

source: http://howto.altenergystore.com/Reference-Materials/Solar-Insolation-Map-World/a43/

The dark red spot, roughly over the highlands of South Africa (Limpopo, Gauteng, North West, Northern Cape, Free State), Botswana and Namibia, indicates the spot of highest solar insolation in the world.

Now, nobody will blame a country for taking immediate measures in an immediate crisis, e.g. by importing power. But is there also courage to tackle the problem by its root, to take visionary steps into what could be a bright future for an extremely bright country?

Some small steps are visible: since early 2008, private households can get subsidies for converting their warm water supplies into solar powered types (i.e. put relatively inexpensive collectors on the roof and replace the expensive electrical geysers by .. well, water heated by the sun).

Other forms of solar power do not come quite as cheap, and serious investments and deployments of expensive technology out in the open (where solar panels want to be) in a country where large part of the population are still poor – thats easier suggested than done.

But it needs to be done. It needs to be done, subsidized, educated for.

To begin with, the typical South African household could probably bring down its power needs by at least a factor of 2, probably down to a third or less, if proper analysis of the power consumption were performed. Send skilled workers round the country to count and then throw out those geysers, flat screens, fridges. Yes, it is a significant one time investment, but has anybody done the cost analysis over the next, say, 25 years? Do it now. You could take most of the households in the country off the (mostly coal powered) grid.

Nobody will blame a country for taking immediate measures in an immediate crisis. Sadly enough, the fact that these measures remain the only visible reaction so far is yet another symptom for a local business disease: do not trust your own strength, dont trust your skills, dont grow – just buy.

A colleague described this to me as a pattern in the R&D sector and in technology and knowledge industries in the country , the other day.

Someone needs to be brighter than that. As bright and strong as the country.

Working at the Meraka Institute, http://www.meraka.org.za/ , i had the chance to visit the Ndlovu Medical Centre, a private Health Clinic and Community Centre in the Elandsdoorn Region of Limpopo, South Africa. Their approach and work is most impressive – read more here:

http://www.ndlovu.com/