Common Tools conference

Last month I joined some interesting thinkers at the Common Tools mini conference, invited to speak by Luis Felipe R. Murillo, as part of the SEEK Commons project.

I talked a bit about GOAT and the problem space of assistive tech in the U.S. and around the world. Gear that we as disabled people need, such as wheelchairs as well as other AT is expensive, not easily maintainable or fixable. By gathering, publishing, and preserving DIY assistive tech, we can help people get (or make!) what they need. We can also make a dent in the problems of e-waste if we are able to repair our technology, and not throw away resources, for example, lithium batteries!

Battery re-use was also a theme for Criptastic Hacker’s presentation on his wheelchair battery spot welder, which both uses something that would otherwise be thrown away, and can be used to for complex repairs!

The conference asked: “How can we help each other make sense and respond to pressing socio-technical-and-environmental problems? Looking in our past and present we can find collaborative tools, approaches, and sociocultural practices to answer this question.” There were some presenters in person at Sudo Room maker and hacker space in Oakland, and some (like me) online since it was a hybrid event.

Here are the abstracts from the event, and I’ll come back to add a link to the video recording, once it’s public!

Paths to assistive technology: Repair & DIY, Right to Repair, and Reverse Engineering
by Liz Henry

There is a lot of home-grown wisdom in disabled communities about adapting or making “assistive tech” – things like wheelchair modifications, small devices that make life easier. And there are inventors—often disabled inventors—creating super complicated devices as well. There are also books, papers, and research with plans for DIY assistive tech. Grassroots Open Assistive Tech aims to collect, preserve, and propagate that info and encourage the use of open licensing to make ecosystems for building & sharing so that more people can get the adaptive equipment they need!

Community Digital Territories: Baobáxia
by Vince Tozzi

“The idea comes from the Baobab, an African tree that lives for thousands of years and symbolically represents the collective memory of the territory. Baobáxia is the union of baobabs with galaxies. Galaxies of memories of community territories, on the Baobab Route, on the Path of the Stars..” Baobab is a network of mucuas, computers with free software, GNU/Linux, operating on the community network through the local Wi-Fi, even without internet. The mucuas host different galaxies of knowledge and digital applications such as collections, maps, blogs. All mocambolas can share their knowledge in the form of audio, videos, articles, documents, images, maps and soon much more. The knowledge of each mucua can be synchronized with the others, over the internet or on the local network through mobile mucuas. A mucua can be a very robust computer, like Madiba, which is located at the Community Data Center of the Tainã Cultural Center, or even a simple USB stick. This way, knowledge is maintained in our territories and shared on our networks. Baobáxia is created by Rede Mocambos, a collaboration between quilombolas, indigenous peoples, Nartisans, and artists from all over Brazil and beyond.

The WBSW (Wheelchair Battery Spot Welder)
by Criptastic Hacker

An eco-soluton to reporposing batteries for useful projects! Every year, many thousands of large lead-acid batteries from wheelchairs are discarded to landfill because they don’t offer enough torque for the motors to push a human across city blocks, or even around the house. However, these batteries still have a lot of instantaneous JUICE to create— sparks! This project repurposes my old wheelchair batteries into a fully functional portable spot welder. With spot welding, you can repurpose EVEN MOAR by taking recycled laptop and car Li-ion and LifePo cells and creating new packs from them—for your DIY projects like robots, outdoor sound systems, and so much moar! It’s reporposing batteries to repurpose batteries. And since the materials used in batteries are some of the most toxic to our planet and have major health and worker rights issues around the materials mining for them, getting the most life out of them possible – and de-investing from that industry – is very good for both people and the planet.

Resisting Contextual Collapse: How an Internet of Places (iPlaces) can help Field Stations and Marine Labs Operationalize FAIR and CARE Principles for Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice
by Erin Robinson & Neil Davies

Research stations help scientists gather data at source and witness the resilience and fragility of our planet firsthand. Despite their role in understanding the complex physical, biogeochemical, ecological, social, and economic interactions that constitute place, station contributions and those of the local community often remain unrecognized. Metadata describing the samples/data they help originate is too easily stripped or lost as value is added downstream. To fight this “contextual collapse,” we present a new publishing platform (iPlaces) that empowers investigators to publish descriptions of their field projects (marker papers) in a station journal, providing each project with a landing page and a digital object identifier. Through the familiar manuscript review process (with the station director acting as editor), iPlaces introduces a way to layer ethical, legal, social, and scientific metadata to field research. Part of a collaborative ecosystem, iPlaces links and leverages a suite of online services (e.g., GEOME, ORCID, DataCite, iSamples, Local Contexts), promoting their uptake in place-based research. In this talk, I will focus on our recent work with Local Contexts, where iPlaces enables a station to issue ‘notices’ for a proposed project, thus initiating dialogue with local communities and combatting “parachute science”. Communities can then issue ‘labels’, a form of social metadata (e.g., Prior Informed Consent), to projects and their downstream field samples/data, helping to operationalize CARE as well as FAIR data principles. As data and samples move downstream, value-added products are linked automatically through the global open science infrastructure, ensuring the connection back to place (the station and its associated communities). iPlaces thus positions stations as crucial partners connecting nature and communities to the global research enterprise, supporting scientific discovery and environmental stewardship in the service of people, places, and planet. (link to FAIR: https://fairisland.org/)

Community Science Air Quality Monitoring for Environmental Justice
by José Ramon Becerra Vera

Open hardware and community science provide populations overburdened by pollution with the tools, knowledge, and data to advocate for environmental justice. Communities are often the first to notice pollution in their homes and neighborhoods. Yet, they are frequently excluded from scientific research that follows initial reports of smells, tastes, and health symptoms. This disconnect misses the opportunity to teach communities about pollution while neglecting local experiences that could help understand exposure, identify toxic sources and high concentrations, and contribute to environmental science. Implementing open technologies like DIY air monitors in community science can teach and empower participants as experts in instrumentation, data, and analysis and enable communities to explore research questions shaped by their unique experiences. Open hardware allows pollution-affected communities to harness their lived experiences, newly developed expertise and collected environmental data to drive meaningful environmental justice efforts.

Air Quality
by Eseibio Halliday aka “The Revolutionary Eseibio The Automatic“

Rap song written by Eseibio will be performed live to close the event.