Resilient Village: Permies Help Needed in Ukraine

I joined Permies.com recently after realizing my wild ideas will never succeed without your help, folks!

Bear with me, please. There's so much I want to share, but so little time right now.
I have a few posts you can check out and I'm struggling to build a profile page (hope I can get my profile pics up by adding to this post!?!!?).

#1 highest priority: getting RMH plans for off-grid heating into the hands & phones of Ukrainian without power -- or much of any infrastructure.
I've been working in Ukraine (temporarily in Hungary & Poland) designing off-grid solutions to share with Ukrainian friends & partners. I creted a simple 2-page intro to RMH that we can start dispersing electronically and soon personally, especially around Kharkiv. My partners fled from there and now take emergency aid to family regularly. I'm a semi-retired disaster services manager devoting the rest of my time to helping Ukraine recover.

I WILL spread the word on RMH heating solutions and other off-grid urgent needs as I find time (potable water & off-grid power next on the list.)

Just started retooling my website. Main page only so far. Check out:

https://www.roadmaptolife.org/

You can download the PDF and please give me feedback! Hope to have the Ukrainian version done and uploaded this weekend.

Permie Glenn Herbert moosaged me about putting together simple plans for Ukrainians which I'll then translate and put up as a page on my website.

I am one crazy old lady making the most of her Social Security, but this is what I've been doing for over a decade: Haiti, Tajikistan, and now Ukraine.

Please help me get this ball rolling!

Hi Leaslie!

This is great! I Don't have the time right now to put energy in online work, but should be available pretty soon. I believe what you are working on should be shared worldwide. I don't have a lot of experience with rocket stove, but I can help translate from english to french and provide some insight with online sharing.

Here is another roadmap points that would be important:

- Communication: I've found an article about putting out offgrid communication servers (or in other words, offgrid internet) with solar panels, SBC (Single Board Computer) and routers. As you've kinda mentioned, information matters a lot. By having simple infrastructures filled with important data, this can help provide the required knowledge for different situations.

I am very interested in this project. I've been spending lot of time recently gathering data for self sufficiency and searching for people/communities with similar interests . Some countries have been hit harder with tragedies than others and now is a very good time to bring solution and insight to different world problems. I might be able to reach out for more people/communities to bring their help, but so far, it has been hard to gather people.

Hi Jordan!
3b? I have fond (and not so fond) memories of that hardiness zone on Madeline Island where I maintained a 120-bird ranch gardening & landscaping about 3 of our 14 acres. My hat's off to you!

Your enthusiasm is infectious. I really can use that about now. But I am determined to devote the rest of my days to mainstreaming much-needed permaculture & off-grid principles in the rich "soil" of devastated regions of Ukraine. In many respects, we are helping to rebuild new and green (mandatory for EU membership!) from the ground up. If ever there was a perfect time to bring rocket stove technology to Ukraine and the region, it is now.

Communications: Your thoughts go beyond my knowledge, for sure. I've thought about checking into a satphone (prices coming down) and Starlink. But your ideas would be much more practical for communities.
I also plan to get back into freelance writing and more faithful posting on my digital platform as time allows. I wish my video skills were better. Hoping someone will come along as we gain momentum. I also continue to seek partner nonprofits or businesses to give the work a better status.

On "gathering people": I know what you mean! Since branching off on my own for most of these last 11 years, very few have joined in my efforts either in Tajikistan or Ukraine -- so far. It's one of my reasons for reaching out to all of you Permies. There are some great world changers here. I hope I can be your "boots on the ground" in Ukraine through the hard years ahead. Muddy boots!


Sharing worldwide: My start is small, but that is my goal. Your help in online sharing will be much appreciated. My website has some links to other parts of my social media platform in the footer. None are really current. I have over 1000 disaster response & emergency managers on LinkedIn that I'll be reaching with posts & articles. This generates tweets on Twitter. I'm thinking of Instagram for serial videos (especially on building the first stove -- which might start soon here in Velence, Hungary!) I'm worst at Facebook. Let me know your thoughts if you can check out any of them. Here's the full set:
Public Channel:   https://LLWilsonUkraine.t.me/
LinkedIn:  linkedin.com/in/llwilsonservices
Website:    https://www.roadmaptolife.org/
Twitter:    https://twitter.com/agiazw
Instagram:  leslielwilson   https://www.instagram.com/leslielwilson/
Facebook:    https://www.facebook.com/leslie.wilson.524381?fref=comp
Slideshare:   https://www.slideshare.net/LLWilson?utm_campaign=profiletracking&utm_medium=sssite&utm_source=ssslideview

Linking these better and SEO optimization are also areas I could use help.

Welcome aboard, Jordan!

On the topic of gathering people, here is my experience:

Online communities didn't really work here. This isn't just my own, but also other's. People told me that it wasn't working very well. Local communities seem to work much better. That's the case for me and that's what I've been told. These communities are mostly around self sufficiency. My aim (which has been similar to these other communities) was to make people join or start new local communities. I think there's a lack of trust in people in general and there is also an information sharing problem. There's too many channels/groups and too much information flowing everywhere. It seems that most people are more interested in (controversial) news rather than solutions. I suppose the lack of education around technologies is the real culprit. Technologies should not be used to replace real life social interaction. That is my stance so far. My conclusion is that online communities should be about working together to advance knowledge. There is already people working on open source science, there's the open source software movement that attract more and more people and of course, permies is a great collection of this online and real life team working.

As for sharing, my focus is more on storing data and sharing it than the marketing of it. Once the product (which is refined knowledge) is good enough, it should share on its own. Although, I truly believe it will be shadowed somehow. At least, that seems to be the case for some open source oriented communities, they sometimes get attacked in some way. I wouldn't be surprise it would have been the case with Permies in the past (or even currently).

Anyway, I think we should focus on organising knowledge to make it more accessible. That would be the first topic I would put time into. It shouldn't be something time consuming, as this can easily become a problem to focus too much on how things are stored and presented to make people want to read it. I think it should be organised in a way that most important topics (like energy efficiency such as RMH) should start with doable steps to start without much hassle and then explore more if needed. Something along these lines. Maybe we should focus on gathering worthy data and give it to people who wants to organise it their own ways and present it.

I've already started gathering data on my own. I advise everyone to do so. Simply put a folder on your main computer that has some space and organise stuff however you want. Everything you find interesting online, save the page (there are extensions that collects html and images and put it on a file that can be stored), videos, your own experiments, etc. For people who are more interested in this data gathering, I could share some of the stuff I've done to make it more efficient.

That's it for me today. I hope this was clear enough. I still have lot of work to do before I can be more available for this. Thank you Leslie!

I think we should focus on organising knowledge to make it more accessible. That would be the first topic I would put time into.

Totally agree with this and your other thoughts. Personally, I'm drowning in collections of digital data on so many interrelated concepts in this complex project that my feeble old brain gets overloaded repeatedly. I would love to see your data collection of anything you feel is relevant to the work.

Totally with you on direct interaction with the people. Problem is the long-term visa. Likely I cannot get back in until December, then for a max of 90 days again. At that point, I interact like crazy with a community of people I'll be sharing life with -- a very challenging life. During that time, the work should attract the attention of a group/agency that loves what we're doing and will provide the needed letter of invitation to stay much longer.

Leslie Wilson wrote:

I think we should focus on organising knowledge to make it more accessible. That would be the first topic I would put time into.

Totally agree with this and your other thoughts. Personally, I'm drowning in collections of digital data on so many interrelated concepts in this complex project that my feeble old brain gets overloaded repeatedly. I would love to see your data collection of anything you feel is relevant to the work.

Totally with you on direct interaction with the people. Problem is the long-term visa. Likely I cannot get back in until December, then for a max of 90 days again. At that point, I interact like crazy with a community of people I'll be sharing life with -- a very challenging life. During that time, the work should attract the attention of a group/agency that loves what we're doing and will provide the needed letter of invitation to stay much longer.

There should be other people that will be able to share  somewhere else.

Here is a couple of software I use:

- Brave browser: it is a chromium broswer, like chrome, except it doesn't spy on you and remove ads.
- Single file extension (chromium, works with brave) : allows you to download a web page with images. It generally works well. There might be better tools tough, this one worked fine for me.
- youtube-dl : download online video from a console. It works on different plateform (Youtube, bitchute, odysee, etc). I think there is one better program for that apparently, but it worked fine enough for me. Except the cookie thing for 18+ videos. I don't know why, it used to work but didn't for some video. If you're not computer savy, I recommend looking up a video tutorial.

I personally host my own NextCloud server to make everything available in my local network. This can be achieved with a simple raspberry pi 2Go (although an Odroid HC4 or similar that allows bigger storage) or an old unused computer. It might be overpower, especially if you are alone using it. A NAS  storage would be more appropriate for basic data storage at home. But the advantage of hosting something like NextCloud at home is getting into data sharing with permission, collaborative work and other helpful features without that much hassle (it is quite well made for non-computer savy and it is free, because it is open source). This can help making collaborative data gathering and sharing within home.

I'd also recommend starting getting into Linux. It is quite simple to start using it, it can be booted on a USB key and launched from there without having to remove anything on your computer's drive (look for some video tutorial). For those who've never got into linux, just use Ubuntu (more complete) or Linux Mint (more simple and Window's like). Linux isn't an operating system on its own. There's many Linux operating system, it doesn't really matter which one you choose. Once you're more acquainted, you can decide to switch (something more easy to do on linux).