Programmer, hacker, #solarpunk, educator, activist and a wannabe writer fascinated by how technology is portrayed in culture - and how that affects human lives.
Co-author of @SolarpunkPrompts #podcast , exploring realistic stories of our climate future with all their traumas and hopes.
Languages: 🇦🇺 🇵🇱
Everything I share is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Background illustration from https://storyseedlibrary.org/
@Murse open source medical devices are a huge step, lowering cost and spreading access. OpenFlexure is a great example.
There will be a conference in Bulgaria this year about the future of medicine from a sociological perspective, I know some open medicine people will be there!
@tofu wait till you hear about https://storyseedlibrary.org/
@Viking_Hippie actually agrivoltaics work pretty well and help farming :)
@SteveKLord I don’t have any good articles on that on hand, but I’ll get back to you when I do.
In the meantime, you might be interested in https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol27-2-political-economy-of-science/rethinking-open-science/
@SteveKLord yes, you’re right, I’m just cranky. I work with a lot of African activists and I’m just really annoyed by another Western economic approach of What Should Africa Do To Help Itself.
I’d love to see more focus on existing structures such as cooperatives which are really HUGE in a lot of Subsaharan countries.
The language of western economy stops us from seeing a lot of what’s there. What if the transport is not public or private, but communal, coop-owned instead?
@SteveKLord I’d love to hear some voices of African economists who understand the situation of the Coop Bank, Saccos, Chamas and what’s really on the ground, not only some guys from Michigan who see everything from an American standpoint. :S
@SteveKLord the way I read it supports IMF / World Bank by embracing the language they use to talk about finances.
What’s wrong with coop banks? Why does that state need to be involved (which would require IMF to be an intermediary)?
@SteveKLord even the article mentions https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/africa-structural-adjustment-did-not-trigger-fast-growth-had-contractive-impact
> In Africa, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank do not have a good reputation. Many people consider them agencies of misery, poverty and social distress. This perception is driven by the experience of the structural-adjustment programmes that the international financial institutions (IFIs) insisted on in the 1980s and 1990s.
IMF insisted that free education of Africans is a waste of money.
@SteveKLord Africa has quite a few well-functioning community-owned green banks! Even in Kenya the Sacco Banks are very important.
It’s just that they don’t mesh well with “development funds” which require African states to be dependent on the Western definitions of progress, capital, sustainability.
@Valmond I don’t think I’m seeing a question there, just topics ;)
Could my https://lenses.alxd.org/ help?
@Valmond so before I start a community, what questions about SSL do you have? :)
@Valmond we mostly hang around #solarpunk and #storySeedLibrary tags
@Valmond feel free to ask them, I’m over here on Mastodon. I’m not experienced in Lemmy spaces, do you think that setting slrpnk.net/c/storySeedLibrary would make sense?
@iii @aka i think what people need are the tools to imagine what can change. We specifically created https://storySeedLibrary.org/ for that :)
@SteveKLord we have a similar initiative, https://storySeedLibrary.org/ , which draws a hard line on using AI to promote.
@SteveKLord reading about it it’s pretty sad that they offer accommodation, but not food :<
The amount of AI graphics on their page is also problematic.
@stabby_cicada I previously reached out to a few artists who created Solarpunk art for games - and the copyright on these is pretty strict :/
@stabby_cicada the point of the Story Seed Library is to simplify the license and openly say “my work can be shared freely on the Internet”. Without it, it gets complicated and its not obvious whether I can illustrate a blogpost by just crediting them.
Nothing against works outside of Creative Commons, I just want to build a repository of works we can all use freely :)
@fruitycoder it’s by https://www.bbaw.de/en/young-network-transeurope and it’s in Varna, Bulgaria, in July 2026. I don’t think it has a public name / webpage yet, but I can ping you when it does :)