Praxis Post! (What Are You Working On?)

I'm meeting with my local work union tonight to suggest a citywide Wikipedia half-day event where we improve pages about labour law and the history of work unions. I hope they'll like the pitch!

Finally secured funding to experiment in creating an open hardware automated factory. First goal is to assemble electric bikes frames.

In talks with the local recycling non profit to secure funds to make cheaper plastic scanners to make plastic sorting easier.

from my wife and i: we relatively recently received some free bikes from a colleague of mine. i'm fixing one up myself to be an ultimate commuter, but my wife said she didn't really want the other one - so we're fixing it up to give to a fifteen year old we know who needs reliable in-town transportation. it should be done this week, and he's getting it on Friday. i hope he likes it!

also, we're decorating for the holidays but in a sustainable, old-fashioned kind of way. my wife is a really good fabric artist and has crocheted a long holly vine that wraps around our living room. it's well off the ground, and so that's where we hang our ornaments so our two energetic kitties don't succumb to temptation and danger. we did hook up house lights this year, powered by rechargeable batteries that i recharge using our Jackery and a solar panel. it's small things, but it's a start.

i've mentioned it before but we're still planning on our community building chili feast, we've just had to move it to January due to our schedules. and we still host weekly zazen (Zen Buddhist meditation) at our house. we have four folks outside our family who come almost every weekend, and last weekend we did our first all-day sit on Saturday, from 8am to 5pm. i just launched a website for our group, in the hopes that anyone in our rural western Colorado locale that searches for "meditation", "Buddhism", or "Zen" and our city name will find our site and, if they feel like it, join us.

Trying to take a bit of a refresh with community building, I'm an organiser in a large (for me) solarpunk discord which I think has a lot of potential for praxis and movement building but I think it could do with a bit more direction and hopefully I can encourage some of the cool projects that are emerging there. I'm hoping to kickstart a local solarpunk community but it's in the early stages, I've got some typical projects in mind like seed bombing that are as much as anything a way to get the group together, but I'm hoping I can bring my learnings from that community back to a wider audience because it would be awesome to see communities like that springing up across the world

A lot of my project time is going towards the holidays now, but I'm making one present and ornaments out of salvaged lumber.

I'm also working on another photobash which I'm hoping to finish up this week. Then I can get back to simpler, smaller-scope scenes - planning to focus a few on different stages of a library economy next.

Edit: oh! Also learning how to jailbreak old EOL Chromebooks so they can run brunch, or a Linux OS. It's well documented, I just need to learn what to do.

As a Christmas gift I'm building a website for my friend to host their poetry and other writing. Motivates me to hone my skills and bring a project to completion.

trying to advocate for sustainability, social justice, privacy etc. via my local and federal school councils, which have (even if it is quite limited) political power. And running some workshops for folks wanting to move to open source software.

Trying to build an open-source flow battery using appropriate technology design principles to enable decentralized energy systems! Right now working on a "dev kit" of sorts and plan to run some workshops with it for students and interested folks. Then continue to scale the system up as it makes sense, ideally to the multiple kW/kWh scale. My fantasy is using such systems to enable renewably-powered housing communities and small industry.

If you want to follow along/contribute, we set up an open collective here: https://opencollective.com/fbrc#category-ABOUT which has links to our personal blogs/repos (I am also more active on mastodon at @kirk@social.coop)