Executive Director of Appropedia Foundation

Hi! I am an industrial engineer from El Salvador. I have dedicated ten years to organizations focused on social development and volunteer mobilization. My previous experience comes from Habitat for Humanity El Salvador, where I worked for eight years prior to Appropedia Foundation. I also led Reacción, a project to enable low-tech communication in rural areas, for which I became an Innovator Under 35 in 2015.

Over the past few years, I have also collaborated with different organizations such as the Latin American Fab Lab Network, Reacción and Fundación Insitu in the design and execution of technological projects and initiatives by using participation as a medium for collaboration with non-technical communities to solve social and environmental problems.

I am also an adjunct professor at ESEN (Introduction to Innovation and Digital Fabrication) and the Digital Media for Development Seminar at at Brandeis University (2020, 2021), a board member of Internet Society El Salvadorand chapter lead of Creative Commons El Salvador.

My work at Appropedia[edit | edit source]

Since 2019 I serve as the Executive Director of The Appropedia Foundation. Some of the activities that I am currently involved in are fundraising, site development and community building. Sometimes, I'm editing help pages or fighting spam; some other times I'm helping facilitate work with professors who are running classes on Appropedia and organizations documenting hardware and international development projects.

Editing tasks[edit | edit source]

The following is a list of current projects on Appropedia, including pages under edits

November 2022[edit | edit source]

October 2022[edit | edit source]

My subpages[edit | edit source]

This is a list of my subpages (mostly dev stuff and notes).

Maintenance pages[edit | edit source]

These are some of the pages I'm slowly building.

Discussion[View | Edit]

Greensmiley2.jpg

Hi, Emilio - Welcome to Community action for sustainability wiki, and thanks for your recent edit or edits to our wiki articles! Philralph (talk) 16:44, 3 October 2019 (UTC)

Captcha[edit source]

Hi Emilio, thank you for replying about the captcha issue. Sorry for the late reply, I was checking whether my IP was actually permanent... how can I send it to you? I'd rather not post it here, nor on twitter... TFardet (talk)

Hi, you can send it to emilio[dot]velis[a]appropedia.org. I found one entry of your IP in April 30th (your post just now) and it seemed that the post was approved! Can you not post stuff in other pages?--Emilio (talk) 17:20, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

CAS[edit source]

Hi Emilio, thanks for getting in touch. Pleased that you read the content! and happy to share stuff re my interests and plans. Can we do that here to start with? (or my talk page if you prefer?)

On twitter I use @caswiki (rather than the personal account).

Don't really have much time today, but hopefully can list a few thoughts re my interests and plans tomorrow. Philralph (talk) 17:15, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi, Philralph. I would love to chat a bit tomorrow, either through here or a call. Let me know what works for you!
Hi Emilio, here's a quick overview of how CASwiki is developing: it's largely news driven, with other stuff tending to flow from that. 2 topics which from my perspective are likely to come even more to the fore are Climate change or Climate emergency (including of course Climate action) and Community involvement or what Extinction Rebellion and others are referring to as future democracy.
Beyond that I've been trying to develop our calendar and event pages. The international stuff (International sustainable community events) is quite well advanced, but the UK pages, which are partly intended to show how this can be done quite easily for other areas, still need a fair bit of work.
Look forward to hearing back from you with any thoughts and questions you may have. Regards Philralph (talk) 16:33, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
Unfortunately don't really have any more time tonight, but hopefully around more tomorrow Philralph (talk) 17:31, 7 January 2020 (UTC)
No problem. Tomorrow would be a great day. I'd love to talk to you about our strategic proposal to see how we can fit CAS into it. My goal is to help develop a community around the great work that you do, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. --Emilio (talk) 23:45, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Appropedia community[edit source]

Sounds great! Spot on. Interested to hear more from you. But a few thoughts:

Could be seen as 2 aspects to this: 1. strengthening community amongst existing appropedians (in the widest sense: editors, supporters, allies etc.) 2. attracting new people (including editors/contributors/sharers of course)

As with any community it has to be not only created but also sustained.

Learning from others: although I'm not officially signed up to Extinction Rebellion, from my participation in related discussion I'm liking the decentralised structure and the 'movement of movements' feel to it.

Presumably we're talking about online community in the first place, even if it might be hoped to progress to face to face meetups/gatherings, etc in time?

Reaching out beyond appropedia: at the moment the two platforms I use for this are twitter and facebook. I'd love to replace the latter with something like Loomio.

In the early days of 'Wikicities', a few of us created something called 'wikisocial', which included visual stuff such as speech bubbles (borders) and profile icons. Although the markup for this probably lost, irrespective of whatever else we do, if there's enough interest it might be fun to try and recreate something similar within appropedia. I'm a great believer in us being able to do much more with wikis than most people realise is possible, but of course it's finding the time to actually do stuff like this! Philralph (talk) 14:53, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

The first one is key, especially from an organic perspective. We are currently considering a major overhaul to Appropedia's data model, and I want to focus on a couple of areas, one of which is education. But I am interested in how we can develop some of the work of CAS for people to gather information regarding sustainability issues worldwide, through sprints and educational programs. One of these ideas is related to using data to generate sustainability maps and charts, and the other is to create a program for high school students to map out sustainability on city/town pages of Appropedia. I wanted to ask you if you saw that as feasible? --Emilio (talk) 17:31, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

Wow! Emilio, what a challenging question! On the one hand I'm loving the ambition, and if we could get there that'd be an amazing development. But of course the downside to this is that, at the present moment it's difficult to see how what you ask might be feasible. Primarily because there wouldn't seem to be enough people who could help with the preparation. But happy to explore this further.

Some further thoughts:

Data and visualizations, etc can be used to show a current state (snapshot in time), but the real prize would seem to me to be showing changes over time. Particularly progress indicators in relation to activism.

In the context of CAS I might tend to think in terms of starting small, possibly to some extent local, and specific. So for example carbon accounts in relation to climate change, etc. But even just in a UK context this seems formidably daunting without more collaboration.

Within CAS(wiki) the Citizens data initiative 'strand' might be seen as a relevant starting point to explore some of this further.

Earlier versions of CASwiki did include a few fairly simple maps, for example some sustainability projects in specific locations. And probably at least some (creative commons) visualizations, etc produced by others.

One of the most challenging and time consuming parts of preparing for something like this I imagine would be identifying suitable data sources.

It is challenging, but I want this to be one of the points from which we can fundraise. I am preparing a small pilot project in San Salvador, so I would love to start thinking about ideas with you. For example, students can be given a physical workbook from which they learn about mapping aspects of sustainability in their local areas, and then we can add to specific pages. I would love to talk to you about developing content standards and the such, that will ease moderation and editing.
Data and visualization can be reproducible, and I'm interested in how we can use open datasets to develop a community that can a) learn to code simple scripts for visualisations, and to b) generate content that can be easily modified and updated (perhaps even automatically, in the future?). --Emilio (talk) 19:26, 9 January 2020 (UTC)

All sounds good. Hope I'll be able to help with the pilot project. The one thought I have straightaway about this, is if I were involved with something like this with adults, I'd want to get an idea of what they saw as their quality of life concerns in their community before going on to introduce perhaps more general aspects of sustainability.

It's exciting how our conversation is sparking lots of ideas for me about how CASwiki might evolve in the future. Philralph (talk) 15:46, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

It is exciting! I agree with that you say in regards to learning about quality of life. That could be a starting point for gathering information. In the case of an educational program, for example, to spend a first part of the program interviewing adults in their local setting to learn about what quality of life means to them.
Are you based in London? I might be there in about three weeks. Do you think you'd have time to meet? --Emilio (talk) 18:05, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Yes, probably will have/make time, may just depend on dates. Not in London but easy enough to get there. Let me know when you've more info. Philralph (talk) 18:30, 13 January 2020 (UTC)

Hi, Emilio, just added an internal link to my user page so that you can use email to contact me later on if you prefer. Philralph (talk) 10:43, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

SMW[edit source]

Hi! It's been a while I did SMW, but happy to help where and when I can. Best to do this directly on the wiki.

Template:OKH_Manifest and Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:OKH_Manifest look like a good start. Did you also set up a Page Form for this? You may be able to drop Google Forms entirely and let people directly enter data on the wiki. Of course you'd have to deal with authentication (and keeping spammers out) in this case.

I'll watch this page so I'm likely to get an email if you reply here. Guaka (talk) 19:49, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Hi Guaka! Thanks so much! I gave it a thought but I wanted to make sure that I was doing it correctly before testing. I imagine that the steps are: 1. Defining the properties, 2. Filling out the forms/entering information on pages, 3. Making pages with queries to display projects? What I can do for now is to use the script to generate the infobox and either edit one by one, or finally learn to use Pywikibot. I am so grateful for your help, seriously. You're the best! --Emilio (talk) 21:22, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
In my experience, you can never do SMW correctly without testing ;)
I've used pywikibot quite a lot. Can definitely recommend getting started with it. Guaka (talk) 21:50, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
In that case, I'll have to start testing. I can generate the infoboxes, but I'm still confused on how to generate the SMW properties... can you point me out to a well-done example? I've been reading the documentation but my issue is that I honestly don't know where to begin. As for the Pywikibot, I will test it out and ask you some specific questions, is that okay? I want my script to add text, but that I'm able to edit or remove afterwards if needed (for the sake of maintenance of the content). --Emilio (talk) 22:10, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
Honestly, I've used semantic properties but never completely grasped them. IIRC there is a way to generate Forms, Templates and Properties automatically with a form, but I forgot the details of this. I'll try to refresh my memory here. It's a good way to get the basics going.
Happy to help with pywikibot. It's a really great framework if you know both python (even if very basic) and mediawiki. Wanna set up a github repo for it? Guaka (talk) 08:59, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
Yaron Koren's book Working with MediaWiki was helpful when I dove into SMW. Now I see there is a second edition which mentions Cargo. Hadn't heard of Cargo, but can be good to check this out. I think it's also worth to get the book (2nd edition). Guaka (talk) 09:33, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

typo in Fablab Latin Network link?[edit source]

Looks like a typo, but how would you fix it if nobody tells you? Normally on the wiki I would make the fix myself, but not on someone's user page :-) --CurtB (talk) 01:18, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Oh no! Thanks so much, CurtB! --Emilio (talk) 01:42, 5 June 2020 (UTC)

Blocking bug 2020[edit source]

Thank you for the unblocking! Good luck with fixing this bug, and avoiding catching bystanders when blocking spammers. Shapoklyak (talk) 19:19, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

Our pleasure! Let us know if anything else shows up. We're looking forward to making Appropedia much better for you! --Emilio (talk) 20:20, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

Open robot hardware[edit source]

Hi Emilio

Why take out Open robot hardware? When I find possible partners that are appropedia related I often create such stubs...with the idea I (or someone else) can go back later and bring them into the appropedia community. Did you have concerns about their reputability?

Thanks Joshua Pearce (talk) 19:26, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi, I restored the page. I was just doing some routine cleanup for some pages, and saw that this only had one link. I just thought it was an abandoned page. We can keep track of these pages in any way to avoid this from happening, perhaps? Also, let me know if I've deleted any other page by mistake. --Emilio (talk) 19:38, 26 November 2020 (UTC)
Thank you -- I always put a stub tag on them -- do think that is a good way - or some other as it could provide a place for those wanting to build appropedia to look for essentially content requests? -- Joshua Pearce (talk) 19:45, 26 November 2020 (UTC)
We'll do that. I'll make it part of in our to-do list with Sophivorus, as we'll continue implementing new things in the near future. --Emilio (talk) 19:47, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

open hardware licenses[edit source]

A start from GOSH Open_hardware_licenses --Joshua Pearce (talk) 11:59, 4 December 2020 (UTC)

Sorry for not replying earlier. Thanks! I'm still thinking a lot about this! Emilio (talk) 04:33, 22 December 2020 (UTC)

Translated version of Appropedia pages[edit source]

Hello, thanks for the kind welcome :) apologies for not replying earlier. Do you know if Appropedia has any guideline pages for creating translated content? I'd like to work on some articles, but i haven't been able to find the best practices/style guide for this. Cheers, YuriNikolai (talk) 23:51, 9 December 2020 (UTC)

Hi! Translations have been very organic over the years, so we are still thinking about it. But here are some ideas: (1) We're working on Appropedia:Getting_started for now and Help:Editing must be translated to Help:Guia_de_edição. (2) We have an old guide at Appropedia:Translation but we need to update its. (3) I also found this: Technical_phrase_language_translations, and we could do something similar. Having said all this, is there any topic in particular you're interested in? --Emilio (talk) 00:24, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
Hello, i was interested in writing mainly about food production topics, including permacultures and PANC, since that topic has gotten quite a bit of traction in Brazil already and is probably going to be found by more people. What do you think?

I'll probably start by taking a look at the editing guide you linked me and expanding it if I can. The Appropedia:Translation page also allowed me to find a few templates i was looking for unsuccessfully before, so thanks for linking it too :) See you soon! YuriNikolai (talk) 15:59, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

My pleasure! Let me know if I can be useful in any other way. Emilio (talk) 16:01, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

Minor typo in sidebar[edit source]

Hello, Emilio! Just to let you know, your edit on MediaWiki:Sidebar has a typo ("Randome page" instead of "Random page"). I couldn't fix it because of the namespace it's in, so i thought I'd bring it up to you. Cheers :) YuriNikolai (talk) 23:36, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

You're the best! Thanks a lot! Emilio (talk) 23:56, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Question for Hexayurt page[edit source]

Hello,

I had a couple questions. On the https://www.appropedia.org/Category:Hexayurt_project page, I noticed that when I go to edit the page, I can only edit the header rather than the categories and subcategories.

Also, why is it that some links have empty previews? I was wondering if there was something I could do to fix that.

Thank you! -Anthony Apepitone (talk) 12:16, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Hi! The list Category:Hexayurt_project is created automatically with all pages that belong to said category. In order to make any changes, you must go to each page and edit their categories. Does that make sense? In regards to the empty previews, you can delete any headers at the beginning of each page (for example Introduction or Abstract) in order for the extension to pick up the first paragraph. An example is deleting ==Introduction== at Hexayurt basic education. Emilio (talk) 14:21, 30 September 2021 (UTC)

Your 2021 impact stats are right here![edit source]

Let's recap.png

Hi ! We thought you may want know that your top performing pages so far are:

  1. Rocket stove (22 786 page views) Update!
  2. Appropedia:About (15 828 page views) Update!
  3. Help:Getting started (13 507 page views) Update!
  4. Global Health Medical Device Compendium (11 889 page views) Update!
  5. GSTC Toolbox (9 790 page views) Update!

Overall, your impact has been of 155,365 page views, woozaa!

Also, your user page has received 2834 visits! People are interested in knowing more about you, edit your user page to tell the world what you've been up to.

Thanks for your contributions and for making Appropedia great, have a merry green Christmas!!

The Appropedia Team

thanks for input[edit source]

Hi! it was good to speak to you today. glad we could discuss these ideas. looking forward to helping out. thanks! --Sm-neutron (talk) 23:23, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Community action[edit source]

Hi! Great upgrade to Template:CASwiki footer. Really pleased with that, and thanks also for all the super cool improvements to Community action, Philralph (talk) 12:18, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

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