
The Hexayurt Project: Free Hardware Housing for the World - rbcoffee
http://hexayurt.com/
======
Hexayurt
Hi, I'm Vinay, the hexayurt guy, a Hacker News regular, also the release
coordinator for Ethereum. You might remember me from a post I did about
Ethereum recently
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977146)

I'll be around if you have any questions.

~~~
cagenut
I just watched one of your youtube/talks, and you address the rural-vs-cities
issue by saying half of everyone lives rural and its much harder to solve
cities so its a place to start.

But as the suburbs have taught us, sprawl is incredibly costly. Raising the
standard of living for spread out peoples is harder because by definition its
going to involve more transport energy cost and less economies of scale.

Also, at an almost philosophical sense, the single-family dwelling is itself a
symptom of the problem. Castle doctrine and every-man-is-an-island and all
that. Shared walls mean shared lives, or more importantly, acknowledge the
fact that we have shared lives and need to make the best of it.

I don't think we solve this via 1-unit structures housing <10 people a pop.
And history shows that hundreds-unit structures over did it. How do we create
cheap, open-source 10 - 100 unit, 2 - 6 floor, structures. Something that
could actually go in those slums you mention (which these yurts would get
destroyed in).

Anyway hope this didn't come off too critical, I really appreciate that you're
even working on this problem and presenting it so clearly.

~~~
PopeOfNope
> Castle doctrine and every-man-is-an-island and all that.

Careful. You're fighting millenia of human nature here. That typically doesn't
end well.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
You think single-family homes are human nature?

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Implicated
There's a great AMA from the inventor for anyone interested -
[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2dnfyn/i_am_the_inven...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2dnfyn/i_am_the_inventor_of_the_hexayurt_made_for/)

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animefan
I don't see any discussion on that page about how this project helps house
"the world" (which I assume to mean the developing world). It looks like the
only places this has been used is in burning man, and there is no discussion
of plans to deploy or sell them elsewhere.

~~~
Hexayurt
It's been built in Haiti, Africa, Sri Lanka - test units, results positive.
Getting over the hump on a deployment with refugees living in one (rather than
the odd aid worker / volunteer) is taking time.

There's also this:
[http://files.howtolivewiki.com/somalia_or_sudan.mp4](http://files.howtolivewiki.com/somalia_or_sudan.mp4)
I found the video on a search, and have not discovered who made it or what the
story is, but it's clearly the kind of diffusion we've always hoped for!

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stealthf0under
I think you're doing an epic job, keep up the good work.

As for suggestions: I think that you should recognize that the entities who
are most likely to be able to deploy hexayurt broadly for humanitarian reasons
(air drops, etc) are established businesses, well-funded startup companies, or
individuals and groups who are in some way tightly coupled to the larger
business community. Although these may groups vary on a diversity of issues,
they all pretty much share one thing in common: they either

A. identify with what you would call a "statist" ideology or B. benefit
financially from being perceived as not opposing the prevailing social norms
of the local business community with regard to recognizing the state.

Therefor they are very likely weary of association with any project who's
leader argues for a dramatic reform of those community standards (no matter
how rational those underlying arguments may be).

My suggestion to you as someone who recognizes the enormous potential benefit
of hexayurt technology is for you to perhaps adopt a softer approach towards
corporate america and startup culture in general. Perhaps this approach could
highlight the potential for corporate entities to rapidly catalyze positive
externalities while generating strong network effects by leveraging a
technology with an architecture that could make an impact globally via a
relatively small pool of capital. To me it seems likely that the motivation
for this kind of an outreach project might stem from the ability to rapidly
surface a branding event by generating a humanitarian "PR wave" and then
surfing it. This overall approach could serve as a mechanism for expanding
global relationships, enhancing brand visibility in foreign markets, and even
facilitating entre into new markets.

As it currently stands any corporation contemplating research into the
deployment of a hexayurt grid as a humanitarian project faces several
challenges. One challenge is that they must first somehow leverage a PR firm
to figure out how to rebrand the underlying technology in order to separate
the positive humanitarian PR from the negative PR stemming from the fact that
the project was born out of a libertarian or anarchist social milieu, burning
man, etc.

Another challenge is how to motivate other businesses to join in to see how
far this can be developed and safeguarded all while fostering business
relationships and strengthening brand identity in emerging markets.

TLDR: If you feel that corporatism is a problem, then perhaps instead of
trying to attack that snake with a club, you could somehow tame it into
consuming it's own tail like the mythological ouroboros.

~~~
Hexayurt
This is a Hard Problem.

I could have taken the politics out in one of 99 ways, but I did not, and I'm
willing to sacrifice 5 or even 10 years of hexayurt growth to keep the
politics in.

The reason is simple: I want to politically organize the people who grow up in
hexayurt refugee camps, getting their education over wifi and dreaming of a
better, fairer world. So if I sell out my core values now to reach the
refugees faster, I'm going to have a vastly less powerful offer of aid when I
finally arrive there.

It's a very dark calculus, but the years of active sabotage that I've faced
from aid organizations like UNHCR and Red Cross blocking the hexayurt's
participation in testing programmes and similar bureaucratic interference have
convinced me that the only way out of this mess is to disintermediate UNHCR
and the Red Cross - to route around them as dark legacy - and to have refugees
directly raise funds themselves over (say) YouTube and Bitcoin (or, hey,
Ethereum) rather than hope for political change in the big orgs.

The big orgs _need_ to lie that the status of refugee is temporary, and not
tied to deeper political problems. But the average refugee is in the field for
15 years, and lying about their status being temporary is great for fund
raising and locating host governments who are willing to have them, but
absolutely horrible for the refugees: endless years in boiling hot / freezing
cold tents, no services for education and long term health care, and so on.
It's just garbage: if it was you in one of those camps, you'd think you were
in a prison camp.

So we stand in defiant opposition to those lies: refugee is a generation-long
or longer condition in most cases, and we insist on cycle-of-life support for
the people who will be spending an entire phase of life in these camps.

In the short run, this insistence on truth costs me the short term support of
the (hugely corrupt) NGOs. In the long run, I hope it buys me recognition and
credibility among the refugees and former refugees that I hope will be the
backbone of hexayurt deployments in the fullness of time.

I have to speak the truth as I recognize it today, in order to be recognized
as not having been full of nonsense by the refugees when they are assessing
where to put their support later.

Hard calls all round. Thank you for your thoughtful comment!

~~~
stealthf0under
Thanks for the reply sir! Yeah it's definitely a Hard Problem. The futurist in
me does agree with you that eventually a form of crowd-sourcing will likely
come along which helps dramatically reduce bottlenecks and waste in the
overall aid pipeline while increasing transparency for individual donors. I
think that this is likely to come about due to the onrushing incline in global
smartphone penetration rate paired with donation systems may which leverage
emerging technology around micro-transactions. The first wave of low-cost
android smart-phones will hit the developing markets in the not too distant
future, so suddenly everyone will have a camera, and I think once that happens
it'll be a whole new ball game.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV3fgqhat60&t=16m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV3fgqhat60&t=16m)
<\-- Dave McClure does a great job of explaining that phenomena and what it
could mean to the IT startup ecosystem in the US and abroad.

------
Hexayurt
(and of course the hexayurt is those hexagonal pod things you see all over
Burning Man - I'm sure quite a few of you have camped in them and will be
camping in one again in a couple of weeks, having the time of your lives!)

------
bro-stick
Neat designs; open source FTW.

Would love to go to BM, but my VW would probably dance its exhaust system off
50 miles out of town because it's "too cool" for emissions standards, right
before deciding it's also time to nom-nom-nom the (nonadjustible) clutch. :'(

~~~
smoyer
What kind of VW is that? I've got a '71 Super Beetle and a '71 Karmen Ghia.
I'd love to find an old camper to go with them (but rust here in central
Pennsylvania hasn't left many locally).

~~~
bro-stick
'85 California Westy DeLuxe I got from Utah. I would go to the Westy / bus
forums and look for VINs sold and maintained in dry areas or away from the
coasts.

