Campus Center for Appropriate Technology partners with the internet's largest wiki for sustainability to bring thirty years of projects to the world.
One of the oldest, student run, sustainability centers in the U.S., has partnered with the internet's largest wiki for sustainable development. Cal Poly Humboldt's Campus Center for Appropriate Technology (CCAT) is a student run organization focused on student and community created sustainability. Every year CCAT creates and demonstrates new appropriate technology projects with the help of Cal Poly Humboldt students and class projects.
Appropedia is a website for collaborative, free, open source solutions in sustainability. CCAT will now use Appropedia to host the methods and lessons of the Center's thirty years of projects in order to maintain continuity and share successes and stories with a wider audience.
The thirty years of CCAT's history and experimental systems are stored in various places, distributed between hard copy and digital formats. A few CCAT-sponsored engineering projects that are already hosted on Appropedia have gained wide popularity. This wider reach was one of the inspirations for CCAT to use of Appropedia as medium to share knowledge. Another inspiration was the ease for project creators to describe their projects, and subsequent project users to add their experiences.
CCAT began in 1978 with a group of students dedicated to promoting appropriate technologies and sustainable living. Every year thousands of people work with and are exposed to CCAT's principles. Each academic year CCAT works with approximately 25 courses offered at Cal Poly Humboldt. By institutionalizing sustainability into academia, students gain access to experiential learning and alternative pedagogies.
Jeffrey Steuben a CCAT Co-Director said, "By consolidating our projects on Appropedia the information will be accessible to a wider audience – thus, furthering CCAT's mission to help others live sustainably."
Appropedia is nearly two years old, and many similar partnerships have helped it grow to its current size. It uses the same format as Wikipedia to allow users anywhere to share and gain knowledge of appropriate technologies and sustainable living solutions. The international Appropedia team is dedicated to creating a user-friendly environment for collaboration in sustainability.
Appropedia's founder, Lonny Grafman is an Environmental Resources Engineering lecturer at Cal Poly Humboldt. He said, "I am really excited about CCAT using Appropedia to archive its thirty years of experience, because it is work that needs to be shared with the world. The fact that both Appropedia and CCAT began here in Humboldt County makes this relationship only natural."
To take part in the effort, visit the CCAT category at Appropedia - https://www.appropedia.org/CCAT or CCAT's homepage at http://web.archive.org/web/20100629034647/http://www.humboldt.edu:80/~ccat/. For more information, call Lonny Grafman at (707) 826-3649 or CCAT at (707) 826-3551.
