This is a post I made a couple years ago on my fossilized
http://www.openideaproject.org/ site:
Organic farming meets Free & Open Source Software? Learn organic
farming during a "guerilla coding" retreat. Learn programming,
networking and other home-grown computer skills while building an
organic garden.
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) IS the computer world's organic
gardening. They would be like whole grain bread and thermal
grease...perhaps not. Both tend to favor non-commercial, royalty/
patent/IP safe, collaborative methods.
Combine these ideas to get geeks eating organic produce and organic
farmers building wifi mesh networks.
World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF - http://www.wwoof.org/)
is an organization that provides volunteers to work and learn on
organic farms in exchange for room and board. Programmers and other
technologists who believe in FOSS often work to fund their
contributions. Given the opportunity to "code for food", would many
geeks go for it? Free broadband!
Host sites would provide room and board as well as equipment,
materials, and transportation. Some WWOOF hosts are open to volunteers
even during the winter months. Volunteers, for example, could
contribute 5 6-hour days with one day a week doing "something else".
This could help foster a spirit of "knowledge sharing". This could be
putting up a tower for wifi antennas or deer-resistant fencing to help
protect crops, teaching a class, firewood fetching, facility
construction, or other community needs.
Other volunteer opportunities could exist such as camp staff, tour
guiding, or custodial work at community sites.
From an IRC discussion on freenode's #esp recently:
"One of the things that came to mind regarding http://wiki.espians.com/Day_Riva
and coworking, wrt WWOOF, is the aspect of building a location from
scratch in the "typical" coworking situation as well as harvesting
trees, making lumber, building structures, and more... really
bootstrapping, and dealing with the same processes elsewhere."
The general idea is coworking to build a rural coworking space in
rural upstate NY. It would share the "traditional" coworking day-use
venue facilities with lodging, facilities for small seminars,
conferences, and retreats. There would also be facilities for
artists, writers, and the like. The http://wiki.espians.com/Day_Riva_Setup
page is a list-in-progress of many of the aspects involved in the
planning and development of the project.
One of the goals is to provide work space to artists and provide a corresponding virtual studio for product sales. Uploading images and other media to a server is no fun over the marginal dialup service that is available. There is no affordable broadband access yet, but the facilities to really use it aren't there either.
The area is popular for summer retreats, and it's ripe for vacationers to need coworking space or general internet access.
Everything is in the planning stage, construction of first solar microhouse prototype starting in July.
Feel free to contact me for more info at jjarchambeault at gmail dot com. I will have a site specific to this project up fairly soon.