1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,000
I, like many of you,

2
00:00:02,000 --> 00:00:07,000
am one of the two billion people on Earth

3
00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:09,000
who live in cities.

4
00:00:09,000 --> 00:00:12,000
And there are days -- I don't know about the rest of you guys --

5
00:00:12,000 --> 00:00:16,000
but there are days when I palpably feel

6
00:00:16,000 --> 00:00:18,000
how much I rely on other people

7
00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:21,000
for pretty much everything in my life.

8
00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:24,000
And some days, that can even be a little scary.

9
00:00:24,000 --> 00:00:26,000
But what I'm here to talk to you about today

10
00:00:26,000 --> 00:00:29,000
is how that same interdependence

11
00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:33,000
is actually an extremely powerful social infrastructure

12
00:00:33,000 --> 00:00:36,000
that we can actually harness

13
00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:40,000
to help heal some of our deepest civic issues,

14
00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:44,000
if we apply open source collaboration.

15
00:00:44,000 --> 00:00:46,000
A couple of years ago,

16
00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:49,000
I read an article by New York Times writer Michael Pollan

17
00:00:49,000 --> 00:00:53,000
in which he argued that growing even some of our own food

18
00:00:53,000 --> 00:00:55,000
is one of the best things

19
00:00:55,000 --> 00:00:57,000
that we can do for the environment.

20
00:00:57,000 --> 00:00:59,000
Now at the time that I was reading this,

21
00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:01,000
it was the middle of the winter

22
00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:04,000
and I definitely did not have room for a lot of dirt

23
00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:07,000
in my New York City apartment.

24
00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:09,000
So I was basically just willing to settle

25
00:01:09,000 --> 00:01:11,000
for just reading the next Wired magazine

26
00:01:11,000 --> 00:01:13,000
and finding out how the experts were going to figure out

27
00:01:13,000 --> 00:01:16,000
how to solve all these problems for us in the future.

28
00:01:16,000 --> 00:01:19,000
But that was actually exactly the point

29
00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:21,000
that Michael Pollan was making in this article --

30
00:01:21,000 --> 00:01:23,000
was it's precisely when we hand over

31
00:01:23,000 --> 00:01:26,000
the responsibility for all these things to specialists

32
00:01:26,000 --> 00:01:29,000
that we cause the kind of messes

33
00:01:29,000 --> 00:01:32,000
that we see with the food system.

34
00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:35,000
So, I happen to know a little bit from my own work

35
00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:39,000
about how NASA has been using hydroponics

36
00:01:39,000 --> 00:01:42,000
to explore growing food in space.

37
00:01:42,000 --> 00:01:46,000
And you can actually get optimal nutritional yield

38
00:01:46,000 --> 00:01:50,000
by running a kind of high-quality liquid soil

39
00:01:50,000 --> 00:01:53,000
over plants' root systems.

40
00:01:53,000 --> 00:01:55,000
Now to a vegetable plant,

41
00:01:55,000 --> 00:01:57,000
my apartment has got to be

42
00:01:57,000 --> 00:01:59,000
about as foreign as outer space.

43
00:01:59,000 --> 00:02:02,000
But I can offer some natural light

44
00:02:02,000 --> 00:02:04,000
and year-round climate control.

45
00:02:04,000 --> 00:02:06,000
Fast-forward two years later:

46
00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:08,000
we now have window farms,

47
00:02:08,000 --> 00:02:10,000
which are vertical, hydroponic platforms

48
00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:13,000
for food-growing indoors.

49
00:02:13,000 --> 00:02:16,000
And the way it works is that there's a pump at the bottom,

50
00:02:16,000 --> 00:02:19,000
which periodically sends some of this liquid nutrient solution up to the top,

51
00:02:19,000 --> 00:02:22,000
which then trickles down through plants' root systems

52
00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:24,000
that are suspended in clay pellets --

53
00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:27,000
so there's no dirt involved.

54
00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:29,000
Now light and temperature vary

55
00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:31,000
with each window's microclimate,

56
00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:33,000
so a window farm

57
00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:35,000
requires a farmer,

58
00:02:35,000 --> 00:02:37,000
and she must decide

59
00:02:37,000 --> 00:02:40,000
what kind of crops she is going to put in her window farm,

60
00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:44,000
and whether she is going to feed her food organically.

61
00:02:44,000 --> 00:02:47,000
Back at the time, a window farm was no more

62
00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:49,000
than a technically complex idea

63
00:02:49,000 --> 00:02:52,000
that was going to require a lot of testing.

64
00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:54,000
And I really wanted it to be an open project,

65
00:02:54,000 --> 00:02:56,000
because hydroponics

66
00:02:56,000 --> 00:02:58,000
is one of the fastest growing areas of patenting

67
00:02:58,000 --> 00:03:00,000
in the United States right now

68
00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:02,000
and could possibly become

69
00:03:02,000 --> 00:03:04,000
another area like Monsanto,

70
00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:07,000
where we have a lot of corporate intellectual property

71
00:03:07,000 --> 00:03:10,000
in the way of people's food.

72
00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:13,000
So I decided that, instead of creating a product,

73
00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:15,000
what I was going to do

74
00:03:15,000 --> 00:03:18,000
was open this up to a whole bunch of co-developers.

75
00:03:19,000 --> 00:03:22,000
The first few systems that we created, they kind of worked.

76
00:03:22,000 --> 00:03:24,000
We were actually able to grow about a salad a week

77
00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:26,000
in a typical New York City apartment window.

78
00:03:26,000 --> 00:03:28,000
And we were able to grow cherry tomatoes and

79
00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:30,000
cucumbers, all kinds of stuff.

80
00:03:30,000 --> 00:03:32,000
But the first few systems

81
00:03:32,000 --> 00:03:35,000
were these leaky, loud power-guzzlers

82
00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:38,000
that Martha Stewart would definitely never have approved.

83
00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:40,000
(Laughter)

84
00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:42,000
So to bring on more co-developers,

85
00:03:42,000 --> 00:03:45,000
what we did was we created a social media site

86
00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:47,000
on which we published the designs,

87
00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:49,000
we explained how they worked,

88
00:03:49,000 --> 00:03:52,000
and we even went so far

89
00:03:52,000 --> 00:03:55,000
as to point out everything that was wrong with these systems.

90
00:03:55,000 --> 00:03:57,000
And then we invited people all over the world

91
00:03:57,000 --> 00:04:00,000
to build them and experiment with us.

92
00:04:01,000 --> 00:04:03,000
So actually now on this website,

93
00:04:03,000 --> 00:04:06,000
we have 18,000 people.

94
00:04:06,000 --> 00:04:08,000
And we have window farms

95
00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:10,000
all over the world.

96
00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:12,000
What we're doing

97
00:04:12,000 --> 00:04:14,000
is what NASA or a large corporation

98
00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:17,000
would call R&D, or research and development.

99
00:04:17,000 --> 00:04:20,000
But what we call it is R&D-I-Y,

100
00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:24,000
or research and develop it yourself.

101
00:04:24,000 --> 00:04:26,000
So for example,

102
00:04:26,000 --> 00:04:28,000
Jackson came along and suggested

103
00:04:28,000 --> 00:04:30,000
that we use air pumps instead of water pumps.

104
00:04:30,000 --> 00:04:32,000
It took building a whole bunch of systems to get it right,

105
00:04:32,000 --> 00:04:34,000
but once we did, we were able

106
00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:37,000
to cut our carbon footprint nearly in half.

107
00:04:37,000 --> 00:04:40,000
Tony in Chicago has been taking on growing experiments,

108
00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:42,000
like lots of other window farmers,

109
00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:45,000
and he's been able to get his strawberries to fruit

110
00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:48,000
for nine months of the year in low-light conditions

111
00:04:48,000 --> 00:04:52,000
by simply changing out the organic nutrients.

112
00:04:52,000 --> 00:04:54,000
And window farmers in Finland

113
00:04:54,000 --> 00:04:56,000
have been customizing their window farms

114
00:04:56,000 --> 00:04:58,000
for the dark days of the Finnish winters

115
00:04:58,000 --> 00:05:01,000
by outfitting them with LED grow lights

116
00:05:01,000 --> 00:05:04,000
that they're now making open source and part of the project.

117
00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:06,000
So window farms have been evolving

118
00:05:06,000 --> 00:05:08,000
through a rapid versioning process

119
00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:10,000
similar to software.

120
00:05:10,000 --> 00:05:13,000
And with every open source project,

121
00:05:13,000 --> 00:05:15,000
the real benefit is the interplay

122
00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:17,000
between the specific concerns

123
00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:19,000
of people customizing their systems

124
00:05:19,000 --> 00:05:21,000
for their own particular concerns

125
00:05:21,000 --> 00:05:23,000
and the universal concerns.

126
00:05:23,000 --> 00:05:25,000
So my core team and I

127
00:05:25,000 --> 00:05:27,000
are able to concentrate on the improvements

128
00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:30,000
that really benefit everyone.

129
00:05:30,000 --> 00:05:33,000
And we're able to look out for the needs of newcomers.

130
00:05:33,000 --> 00:05:35,000
So for do-it-yourselfers,

131
00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:39,000
we provide free, very well-tested instructions

132
00:05:39,000 --> 00:05:41,000
so that anyone, anywhere around the world,

133
00:05:41,000 --> 00:05:43,000
can build one of these systems for free.

134
00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:46,000
And there's a patent pending on these systems as well

135
00:05:46,000 --> 00:05:48,000
that's held by the community.

136
00:05:48,000 --> 00:05:50,000
And to fund the project,

137
00:05:50,000 --> 00:05:52,000
we partner to create products

138
00:05:52,000 --> 00:05:55,000
that we then sell to schools and to individuals

139
00:05:55,000 --> 00:05:58,000
who don't have time to build their own systems.

140
00:05:58,000 --> 00:06:00,000
Now within our community,

141
00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:02,000
a certain culture has appeared.

142
00:06:02,000 --> 00:06:04,000
In our culture, it is better to be a tester

143
00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:07,000
who supports someone else's idea

144
00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:10,000
than it is to be just the idea guy.

145
00:06:10,000 --> 00:06:12,000
What we get out of this project

146
00:06:12,000 --> 00:06:14,000
is we get support for our own work,

147
00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:18,000
as well as an experience of actually contributing

148
00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:20,000
to the environmental movement

149
00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:23,000
in a way other than just screwing in new light bulbs.

150
00:06:23,000 --> 00:06:26,000
But I think that Eileen expresses best

151
00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:28,000
what we really get out of this,

152
00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:31,000
which is the actual joy of collaboration.

153
00:06:31,000 --> 00:06:34,000
So she expresses here what it's like

154
00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:36,000
to see someone halfway across the world

155
00:06:36,000 --> 00:06:38,000
having taken your idea, built upon it

156
00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:41,000
and then acknowledging you for contributing.

157
00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:45,000
If we really want to see the kind of wide consumer behavior change

158
00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:47,000
that we're all talking about

159
00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:49,000
as environmentalists and food people,

160
00:06:49,000 --> 00:06:51,000
maybe we just need to ditch the term "consumer"

161
00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:55,000
and get behind the people who are doing stuff.

162
00:06:55,000 --> 00:06:58,000
Open source projects tend to have a momentum of their own.

163
00:06:58,000 --> 00:07:00,000
And what we're seeing is that R&D-I-Y

164
00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:04,000
has moved beyond just window farms and LEDs

165
00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:08,000
into solar panels and aquaponic systems.

166
00:07:08,000 --> 00:07:10,000
And we're building upon innovations

167
00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:12,000
of generations who went before us.

168
00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:14,000
And we're looking ahead at generations

169
00:07:14,000 --> 00:07:18,000
who really need us to retool our lives now.

170
00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:20,000
So we ask that you join us

171
00:07:20,000 --> 00:07:22,000
in rediscovering the value

172
00:07:22,000 --> 00:07:24,000
of citizens united,

173
00:07:24,000 --> 00:07:26,000
and to declare

174
00:07:26,000 --> 00:07:29,000
that we are all still pioneers.

175
00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:31,000
(Applause)