This book began as a conversation over lunch. Within three months it had been written, edited and published. Thank you to everyone who has been part of that.
On Vinay Gupta’s advice, we used a corner the Appropedia wiki and used it to edit the contributions people had sent us. Appropedia exists to be the Wikipedia for appropriate technology: a place where a community of thinkers and doers are documenting and sharing knowledge about important, practical stuff. We’re grateful to them for letting us hide out in one of their darker corners.
Then we used PediaPress to turn those wiki pages into a typeset, Print-On-Demand book. The main purpose of PediaPress is to make it easy to create printed books from the material on Wikipedia and similar sites. But that also means you can use it to print anything you want, if you have the text on a MediaWiki site. You don’t get a whole lot of control over the formatting, so there are a few quirks here and there, but it’s an astonishingly simple way to produce a decently-printed book with no overheads whatsoever.
Everyone involved gave their time for free - and we won’t make any money from the sales of this book. That’s not because we’re conscientious objectors to money, although we do like the motto of the old Pick Me Up email zine: ‘Think what you’d do if only you had the money, then figure out how you could do it anyway.’
The Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road, London generously agreed to host our launch, despite us having no budget. Thanks to Shelagh, Peter, Rose and Rachel for making that happen.
You’ll see lots more notes about the sources of the text, etc. That’s a PediaPress thing. Basically, though, the terms of the CC license mean you’re free to share and remix our words. If you want to reprint them in a newspaper, magazine or anything like that, please get in touch with us to talk about it.
You can join in the conversation at the New Public Thinking website. We’re always open to contributors, so let us know if you’d like to write for us. We’ll also be posting articles from the book on the site, so you’ll be able to talk to their authors and pick up on any loose threads you found.
www.newpublicthinking.org | @NewPubThink