About a month ago I attended the founding meeting for the Open Sustainability Network (see also: http://www.appropedia.org/Open_Sustainability_Network). Their idea is this:-
Thousands of organizations and millions of people are currently working to effectively tackle a set of profound global challenges through the creation, adoption and commercialization of sustainable approaches and clean technologies. Our efforts are fragmented. It is time to promote a culture of working together while maintaining our own special niches by leveraging shared and openly licensed solutions.
A week ago I also met a couple people who are starting http://dianovo.org with a similar idea in mind.
At OSN some of what we talked about is a vision for a way to help connect these thousands of organizations, as they say. Their proposal is a website providing listings & descriptions of these organizations. The idea is to help make connections that way. There isn't enough on the dianovo site to say much about their approach.
A most interesting thought I brought from the OSN conference is the affordability of sustainable technologies. Most of the world is in need of technical help to live above subsistence levels. But the way technology is developed in normal commercial means, it ends up being too expensive for the worlds poor. This means that 'sustainable' technologies developed in the normal closed source proprietary commercial pattern could be developed but remain unused by most of the worlds population because of the resulting level of expense. But having sustainable technologies developed in an open source fashion it can positively benefit the move to sustainability by keeping it within reach of the worlds poor.
