Appropriate Technology

One avocation these days is finding ways to "travel with a purpose" and apply my technical skills toward improving the quality of life in developing countries around the world - you could say that my work in high tech fields (e.g. permanent magnets for consumer electronics, etc.) and disposable (single use) medical devices also helps folks... but only where they can be afforded.

I am not much of an organization joiner any more, after years of belonging to almost everything imaginable and it it didn't exist I tried to start something new to meet the need, but these days I am a card carrying member of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) and ETHOS (Engineers in Technical and Humanitarian Opportunities of Service). The first is involved in the widest possible range of aid opportunities, while the second tends to focus on cooking technologies, particularly ones using biomass as a fuel.

I helped start the Appropriate Technology Design Team (ATDT) of the local chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-SFP) in late 2005 as a way to deploy locally sustainable "technologies" in a rapid fashion when called upon - whether theses needs relate to clean water, disaster relief, cooking stoves, shelter, energy generation, or whatever. The first project that came to me was known simply as the Darfur stove, for cooking in Sudanese refugee camps - there is plenty to read on the web about its present progress, and the key part to me is that it can be made from sheet metal and somewhat simple tools, right in the camps, by the residents. Because of my R&D and industrial background I have peculiar interests and hopefully potential contributions - manufacturing, quality control, efficiency and process optimization, simple statistics for such aspects, technical documentation, integration of somewhat redundant global efforts, effective dissemination of technology (treating new, to the geographic area at least, innovations as "new products" and using commercial models for such), technical troubleshooting/problem solving and root cause analysis, metallurgy and materials science, global sourcing of innovation and resources, research and development efforts and design of experiments, data mining and global sharing of AT, historical uses of similar lower technologies, and so forth. I advise as a consultant, but usually volunteer my help for the appropriate ability to participate in programs.

Some key links for these include:
EWB-USA is the national organization - http://www.ewb-usa.org/
EWB-SFP is our San Francisco Professional chapter - http://www.ewb-sfp.org/
My general site and posts just for the ATDT - http://ewbappropriatetechnology4.blogspot.com/
My site/posts on improved stoves in particular (ETHOS oriented) - http://improvedstoves.blogspot.com/
My site/posts just on the subset of stoves which address IAP is here - http://iapstoves.blogspot.com/
And a Tom Miles miracle site/forum used for many ETHOS members when posting global stoving articles about their experiences and developments (and I post here - see the Contributors tab for a list; related forums an discussion groups on gasification and terra preta are near here too) is here:
http://www.bioenergylists.org/
The conference proceedings of past ETHOS conferences are here:
http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/ethos/proceedings.php. You can always find out more about my most recent activities by Googling on "Charlie Sellers" plus some key word such as "stove", "biomass", "appropriate technology" or similar.

Some of my work is done through established organizations such as these and many similar technical NGOs, and my general interest in bottom up change also leads me to solo, self funded, efforts where I try to increase my knowledge of the field or situation - before I represent myself as a potential adviser.  I travel easily, very basically, and often.
I work on topics such as clean water, shelter, disaster relief, alternative energy, metallurgical and small factory operations problem solving, biofuel gasification, new "technology" introduction and social change from a community's point of view, and a focus of mine tends to be cooking stoves - for household, commercial use, or institutions (orphanages, hospitals, prisons, etc.). This tends to be a technology and manufacturing oriented field so my technical skills can be put to good use - 3 billion people depend on biomass for their cooking needs every day, a few billion have limited electricity, and a billion have no electrical power. It turns out that the field of appropriate technology (and even improved cooking stoves) is huge, and the number of different different technically oriented groups working on technical approaches to poverty alleviation is substantial. A relatively new organization for advising on these things is Catapult Design (http://catapultdesign.org/), a veritable SWAT team of experienced engineers striving for social change in the developing world via careful introduction of locally sustainable technologies.