WEBVTT

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I, like many of you,

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am one of the two billion people
on Earth who live in cities.

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And there are days --
I don't know about the rest of you --

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but there are days when I palpably feel

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how much I rely on other people

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for pretty much everything in my life.

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And some days, that can even
be a little scary.

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But what I'm here
to talk to you about today

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is how that same interdependence

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is actually an extremely
powerful social infrastructure

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that we can actually harness

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to help heal some
of our deepest civic issues,

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if we apply open-source collaboration.

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A couple of years ago,

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I read an article by New York Times
writer Michael Pollan,

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in which he argued that growing
even some of our own food

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is one of the best things
that we can do for the environment.

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Now at the time that I was reading this,

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it was the middle of the winter

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and I definitely did not have room
for a lot of dirt

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in my New York City apartment.

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So I was basically just willing to settle

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for just reading the next Wired magazine

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and finding out how the experts
were going to figure out

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how to solve all these problems
for us in the future.

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But that was actually exactly the point

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that Michael Pollan
was making in this article --

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it's precisely when we hand over

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the responsibility
for all these things to specialists

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that we cause the kind of messes
that we see with the food system.

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I happen to know
a little bit from my own work

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about how NASA has been using hydroponics

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to explore growing food in space.

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And I started to learn

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that you can actually
get optimal nutritional yield

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by running a kind of high-quality
liquid soil over plants' root systems.

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Now to a vegetable plant,

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my apartment has got to be
about as foreign as outer space.

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But I can offer some natural light

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and year-round climate control.

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Fast-forward two years later:

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we now have window farms,

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which are vertical, hydroponic platforms

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for food-growing indoors.

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And the way it works
is that there's a pump at the bottom,

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which periodically sends this liquid
nutrient solution up to the top,

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which then trickles down
through plants' root systems

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that are suspended in clay pellets --

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so there's no dirt involved.

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Now light and temperature vary
with each window's microclimate,

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so a window farm requires a farmer,

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and she must decide

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what kind of crops she is going
to put in her window farm,

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and whether she is going
to feed her food organically.

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Back at the time,

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a window farm was no more
than a technically complex idea

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that was going to require
a lot of testing.

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And I really wanted it
to be an open project,

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because hydroponics

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is one of the fastest
growing areas of patenting

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in the United States right now,

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and could possibly become
another area like Monsanto,

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where we have a lot of corporate
intellectual property

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in the way of people's food.

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So I decided that,
instead of creating a product,

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what I was going to do

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was open this up
to a whole bunch of codevelopers.

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The first few systems that we created,
they kind of worked.

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We were actually able to grow
about a salad a week

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in a typical New York City
apartment window.

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And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes

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and cucumbers, all kinds of stuff.

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But the first few systems

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were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers

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that Martha Stewart
would definitely never have approved.

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(Laughter)

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So to bring on more codevelopers,

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what we did was we created
a social media site

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on which we published the designs,

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we explained how they worked,

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and we even went so far

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as to point out everything
that was wrong with these systems.

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And then we invited people
all over the world

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to build them and experiment with us.

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So actually now on this website,

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we have 18,000 people.

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And we have window farms
all over the world.

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What we're doing
is what NASA or a large corporation

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would call R&D,
or research and development.

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But what we call it is R&D-I-Y,

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or "research and develop it yourself."

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So, for example, Jackson came along

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and suggested that we use air pumps
instead of water pumps.

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It took building a whole bunch
of systems to get it right,

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but once we did, we were able to cut
our carbon footprint nearly in half.

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Tony in Chicago has been taking on
growing experiments,

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like lots of other window farmers,

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and he's been able to get
his strawberries to fruit

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for nine months of the year
in low-light conditions

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by simply changing out
the organic nutrients.

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And window farmers in Finland
have been customizing their window farms

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for the dark days of the Finnish winters

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by outfitting them with LED grow lights

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that they're now making
open source and part of the project.

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So window farms have been evolving

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through a rapid versioning process
similar to software.

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And with every open source project,

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the real benefit is the interplay

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between the specific concerns
of people customizing their systems

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and the universal concerns.

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So my core team and I

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are able to concentrate
on the improvements

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that really benefit everyone.

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And we're able to look out
for the needs of newcomers.

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So for do-it-yourselfers,

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we provide free,
very well-tested instructions

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so that anyone, anywhere around the world,

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can build one of these systems for free.

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And there's a patent pending
on these systems as well

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that's held by the community.

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And to fund the project,

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we partner to create products

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that we then sell
to schools and to individuals

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who don't have time
to build their own systems.

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Now within our community,
a certain culture has appeared.

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In our culture,
it is better to be a tester

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who supports someone else's idea

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than it is to be just the idea guy.

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What we get out of this project
is support for our own work,

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as well as an experience
of actually contributing

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to the environmental movement

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in a way other than just
screwing in new light bulbs.

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But I think that Eleen expresses best

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what we really get out of this,

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which is the actual joy of collaboration.

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So she expresses here what it's like

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to see someone halfway across the world

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having taken your idea, built upon it

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and then acknowledging
you for contributing.

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If we really want to see
the kind of wide consumer behavior change

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that we're all talking about
as environmentalists and food people,

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maybe we just need
to ditch the term "consumer"

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and get behind the people
who are doing stuff.

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Open source projects
tend to have a momentum of their own.

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And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y

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has moved beyond
just window farms and LEDs

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into solar panels and aquaponic systems.

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And we're building upon innovations
of generations who went before us.

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And we're looking ahead at generations

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who really need us
to retool our lives now.

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So we ask that you join us

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in rediscovering the value
of citizens united,

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and to declare
that we are all still pioneers.

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(Applause)