Specification of a program to manage the resources of a ecovillage in a cyclical closed-loop system.
Village resources are defined as:
| Resource | Unit |
|---|---|
| 💧 Water | Liter |
| 🌱 Food | Joule |
| ⚡ Energy | Joule |
Village resources are provided by village components, primarily:
- Houses
- Shared Infrastructure
Each individual house in the village can be thought of as a sub-component to the overall system with resources managed by House Resource Management Module.
Shared infrastructure components would vary from village-to-village based on unique needs, desires, and interests, but may consist of:
- Electrical vehicles and / or charging station
- A "common house", community spaces, or community center
- Centralized village power and electrical grid (may feed into wider municipal grid)
- Plumbing and waste-water treatment center (performed ecologically using centralized bio-gas digestion)
A resource is defined as something humans need to live. A distinction is made between three kinds of resources: primary, secondary, and tertiary resources.
A primary resource is defined as a non-negotiable human requirement for survival, and includes (in order of importance):
- 💧 Water
- 🌱 Food
A secondary resource is defined as a non-negotiable requirement for survival because a human depends upon it for the attainment of a primary resource.
Examples may include:
- 🏠 Shelter, when you depend upon your shelter for collecting, storing, and purifying rain-water
- ⚡ Energy, when depend upon energy for heating a greenhouse in winter for growing food.
A tertiary resource is defined as a negotiable requirement for a desired standard of living. For example, a desired modern standard of living might require the following tertiary resources:
- 🌐 Internet
- 🚗 Transportation
Secondary and tertiary resources should be configurable to meet the needs of different villages and people.
A village, as well as village components can be defined in terms of I/O, or inputs and outputs.
This view lends the village and individual components to modeling by material balance equations.
Inputs result in resource generation.
Some inputs are universal, such as sunlight ☀️. Although, the amount of that input will vary based on location and may be insufficient for requisite resource generation.
Other inputs are unique to a geographic location or bio-region.
For example, in the mid-west of the United States, an input to a house may be rain-water.
The house would have a rain-water harvesting sub-component that adapts the input of rain-water to the resource of water.
Other geographic locations may have different inputs that lead to water resource generation such as ground-water, salt-water, river-water, glacier-water, or spring-water -- and each water input would need a different sub-component to adapt it to a water resource ready for human consumption.
- Human waste 💩
- are there others we care to model?
- Assist in village planning.
- Allow village simulation.
- Assist in automation of resource management to free-up human time.
- Assist in village improvements, resource attainment efficiency, policy, and decision-making.
- Applicable to existing ecovillages such as Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage.
The following principles should be observed by the system and guide overall design and decision making.
Each principle is not mutually exclusive, and may tie into other principles.
- Universal
- Applicable to any geographic location and unique bio-region.
- Accessible
- Available to any person regardless of disability: deaf, blind, vision or hearing impaired, amputee.
- Low Cost
- Financial cost to individuals should be minimized.
- Global
- Applicable to any person, culture, or language in the world.
- Open Source
- The code should be freely available and observe the four freedoms of open-source software.