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The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

hexayurt.com

11–20 of 22 posts

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#11

I think you're doing an epic job, keep up the good work. As for suggestions: I think that you should recognize that the entities who are most likely to be able to deploy hexayurt broadly for humanitarian reasons (air drops, etc) are established businesses, well-funded startup companies, or individuals and groups who are in some way tightly coupled to the larger business community. Although these may groups vary on a…

This is a Hard Problem.

I could have taken the politics out in one of 99 ways, but I did not, and I'm willing to sacrifice 5 or even 10 years of hexayurt growth to keep the politics in.

The reason is simple: I want to politically organize the people who grow up in hexayurt refugee camps, getting their education over wifi and dreaming of a better, fairer world. So if I sell out my core values now to reach the refugees faster, I'm going to have a vastly less powerful offer of aid when I finally arrive there.

It's a very dark calculus, but the years of active sabotage that I've faced from aid organizations like UNHCR and Red Cross blocking the hexayurt's participation in testing programmes and similar bureaucratic interference have convinced me that the only way out of this mess is to disintermediate UNHCR and the Red Cross - to route around them as dark legacy - and to have refugees directly raise funds themselves over (say) YouTube and Bitcoin (or, hey, Ethereum) rather than hope for political change in the big orgs.

The big orgs need to lie that the status of refugee is temporary, and not tied to deeper political problems. But the average refugee is in the field for 15 years, and lying about their status being temporary is great for fund raising and locating host governments who are willing to have them, but absolutely horrible for the refugees: endless years in boiling hot / freezing cold tents, no services for education and long term health care, and so on. It's just garbage: if it was you in one of those camps, you'd think you were in a prison camp.

So we stand in defiant opposition to those lies: refugee is a generation-long or longer condition in most cases, and we insist on cycle-of-life support for the people who will be spending an entire phase of life in these camps.

In the short run, this insistence on truth costs me the short term support of the (hugely corrupt) NGOs. In the long run, I hope it buys me recognition and credibility among the refugees and former refugees that I hope will be the backbone of hexayurt deployments in the fullness of time.

I have to speak the truth as I recognize it today, in order to be recognized as not having been full of nonsense by the refugees when they are assessing where to put their support later.

Hard calls all round. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#12

I think you're doing an epic job, keep up the good work. As for suggestions: I think that you should recognize that the entities who are most likely to be able to deploy hexayurt broadly for humanitarian reasons (air drops, etc) are established businesses, well-funded startup companies, or individuals and groups who are in some way tightly coupled to the larger business community. Although these may groups vary on a…

PS: we've got at least five or seven companies doing short run commercial hexayurts for Burning Man, and one start up in the UK doing different markets.

I bless all of 'em, without wanting to get too involved (for fear people will think I'm picking favorites - my political neutrality (ironically) is important!)

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#13

I think you're doing an epic job, keep up the good work. As for suggestions: I think that you should recognize that the entities who are most likely to be able to deploy hexayurt broadly for humanitarian reasons (air drops, etc) are established businesses, well-funded startup companies, or individuals and groups who are in some way tightly coupled to the larger business community. Although these may groups vary on a…

This is a Hard Problem. I could have taken the politics out in one of 99 ways, but I did not, and I'm willing to sacrifice 5 or even 10 years of hexayurt growth to keep the politics in. The reason is simple: I want to politically organize the people who grow up in hexayurt refugee camps, getting their education over wifi and dreaming of a better, fairer world. So if I sell out my core values now to reach the refugees…

Thanks for the reply sir! Yeah it's definitely a Hard Problem. The futurist in me does agree with you that eventually a form of crowd-sourcing will likely come along which helps dramatically reduce bottlenecks and waste in the overall aid pipeline while increasing transparency for individual donors. I think that this is likely to come about due to the onrushing incline in global smartphone penetration rate paired with donation systems may which leverage emerging technology around micro-transactions. The first wave of low-cost android smart-phones will hit the developing markets in the not too distant future, so suddenly everyone will have a camera, and I think once that happens it'll be a whole new ball game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV3fgqhat60&t=16m <-- Dave McClure does a great job of explaining that phenomena and what it could mean to the IT startup ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#14

Neat designs; open source FTW. Would love to go to BM, but my VW would probably dance its exhaust system off 50 miles out of town because it's "too cool" for emissions standards, right before deciding it's also time to nom-nom-nom the (nonadjustible) clutch. :'(

What kind of VW is that? I've got a '71 Super Beetle and a '71 Karmen Ghia. I'd love to find an old camper to go with them (but rust here in central Pennsylvania hasn't left many locally).

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#15
post #7
post #3

Hi, I'm Vinay, the hexayurt guy, a Hacker News regular, also the release coordinator for Ethereum. You might remember me from a post I did about Ethereum recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977146 I'll be around if you have any questions.

I just watched one of your youtube/talks, and you address the rural-vs-cities issue by saying half of everyone lives rural and its much harder to solve cities so its a place to start. But as the suburbs have taught us, sprawl is incredibly costly. Raising the standard of living for spread out peoples is harder because by definition its going to involve more transport energy cost and less economies of scale. Also, at…

> Castle doctrine and every-man-is-an-island and all that.

Careful. You're fighting millenia of human nature here. That typically doesn't end well.

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#16
post #3

Hi, I'm Vinay, the hexayurt guy, a Hacker News regular, also the release coordinator for Ethereum. You might remember me from a post I did about Ethereum recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977146 I'll be around if you have any questions.

Why focus on housing? Housing is one thing that people will find no matter where they are. It's hard to beat corrugated steel and tents in terms of cost. The bigger issue is land. Where are you going to put these yurts, aside from burning man?

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#17
I don't see any discussion on that page about how this project helps house "the world" (which I assume to mean the developing world). It looks like the only places this has been used is in burning man, and there is no discussion of plans to deploy or sell them elsewhere.

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just watched one of your youtube/talks, and you address the rural-vs-cities issue by saying half of everyone lives rural and its much harder to solve cities so its a place to start. But as the suburbs have taught us, sprawl is incredibly costly. Raising the standard of living for spread out peoples is harder because by definition its going to involve more transport energy cost and less economies of scale. Also, at…

> Castle doctrine and every-man-is-an-island and all that. Careful. You're fighting millenia of human nature here. That typically doesn't end well.

You think single-family homes are human nature?

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#19
post #3

Hi, I'm Vinay, the hexayurt guy, a Hacker News regular, also the release coordinator for Ethereum. You might remember me from a post I did about Ethereum recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977146 I'll be around if you have any questions.

Why focus on housing? Housing is one thing that people will find no matter where they are. It's hard to beat corrugated steel and tents in terms of cost. The bigger issue is land. Where are you going to put these yurts, aside from burning man?

> It's hard to beat corrugated steel and tents in terms of cost.

From TFA:

> In disaster relief applications the hexayurt can cost less than a tent, and be constructed in far larger quantities than tent supplies allow.

Re: The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World

#20

I don't see any discussion on that page about how this project helps house "the world" (which I assume to mean the developing world). It looks like the only places this has been used is in burning man, and there is no discussion of plans to deploy or sell them elsewhere.

It's been built in Haiti, Africa, Sri Lanka - test units, results positive. Getting over the hump on a deployment with refugees living in one (rather than the odd aid worker / volunteer) is taking time.

There's also this: http://files.howtolivewiki.com/somalia_or_sudan.mp4 I found the video on a search, and have not discovered who made it or what the story is, but it's clearly the kind of diffusion we've always hoped for!

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