Wellington Sneak Peek – Danyl Strype

Software Freedom Day Wellington is being run as an unconference – but several of Wellington’s finest have already put their hands up for a speaking spot. We’ll be telling you about several of them to give you an idea of what to expect.

1130 – 12 : Danyl Strype –  Hacking for Resilience: Free Culture, Permaculture, and Disaster Relief

Danyl has been interested in participatory media since high school, where he turned the school’s radio club into a a consensus-based collective, co-running a magazine-style show on local access radio station, PlainsFM. In 1997, he helped start Smog, a community newspaper for the inner-city east area of Otautahi (Christchurch). In 2001, he was one of the founders of Aotearoa In­dymedia. He was active as a member of the development network behind the site for 7 years, and continues to contribute articles to the website. In 2007, he was technical co-ordinator, and a core management collective member, for the Oblong community internet space in the Left Bank, Te Whanganui-a-Tara.

As well as developing Disintermedia, which he started in 2008, Danyl has been donating his community development skills to the Aotearoa/ New Zealand localisation of the CreativeCommons project, since it kicked off in late 2005. He also set up the Permaculture in Aotearoa project, to provide email lists and wiki spaces for Permaculture in NZ working groups, which were set up at their hui in 2010.

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From the hacking together of the Sahana (Shinalese for ‘relief’) software in Sri Lanka, to the ‘remote relief’ CrisisCamps of the CrisisCommons, and their concept of low-carbon aid work, geeks across the planet are responding to the needs of communities hit by natural disasters.

Permaculture-inspired relief efforts go back at least as far as 1999, with crews of permies helping communities across the world recover from a range of disasters. In Haiti, following the devastating earthquake there, both PermaCorps International and the Biotecture Institute are helping survivors rebuild their homes and become more self-sufficient in the process.

Both the free culture mission of creating freely available software, and networked information tools, and the permaculture mission of cultivating community resilience, embodied in projects like TransitionTowns, create infrastructure that can help people survive and recover from disasters. Both tend to prefer ‘crowdsourcing’ methods of organising, which empower people to help others from afar, and to help themselves locally.

Danyl Strype has been on the ground in Ootautahi/ Christchurch, in the wake of the recent earthquake in Waitaha/ Canterbury, contacting groups like CrisisCommons, the Lytellton Time Banking group, Unite Union, the Space of Love, and the Rainbow Relief Camp, to help synergise the diverse community responses to the disaster. He will be share a brief history of the ‘crowdsourced’ relief efforts run by both
geeks and permies, and talk about his recent experiences in the quake zone.