One Community is developing a blueprint for holistic living that is better than how most people are living now. It includes open source and sustainable approaches to food, energy, housing, education, for-profit and non-profit economic design, social architecture, fulfilled living, global stewardship practices, and more. This is the March 20th, 2022 edition (#469) of our weekly progress update detailing our team’s development and accomplishments.
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One Community’s physical location will forward this movement as the first of many self-replicating teacher/demonstration communities, villages, and cities to be built around the world. This is the March 20th, 2022 edition (#469) of our weekly progress update detailing our team’s development and accomplishments:
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One Community is developing a blueprint for holistic living through Highest Good housing that is artistic and beautiful, more affordable, more space efficient, lasts longer, DIY buildable, and constructed with healthy and sustainable materials:
This week the core team wrote an email to Aircrete Harry to see if he had any feedback regarding shrinkage of light and standard aircrete mixes and stuccoing details. We then digested Aircrete Harry’s response and summarized our thinking based on his input. We continued to make and populate a more presentable table with aircrete compression testing results and had meetings with the Compression Testing Team and the Center Hub Team. Pictures below are related to this.
Dean Scholz (Architectural Designer) continued helping with the Earthbag Village (Pod 1) 4-dome cluster designs. This was week #243 of Dean’s work and he is now working on the actual renders. The picture below shows the newest perspective with updated sky dome and finalized door details.
Stacey Maillet (Graphic Designer) completed her 67th week working on the final edits and revisions to the Murphy bed instructions. This week Stacey continued resizing of information to be larger and more clear and adding lumber sizes and cut dimensions to the closet sections. She also started adding the different screw lengths and replacing old icons. As pages are completed, they are replaced and re-saved to the shared document. Screenshots below are related to this latest progress.
Jose Luis Flores (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 86th week helping finish the Net-zero Bathroom component of the Earthbag Village. This week Jose Luis began working on the design of the outer rain barrel support structure. He began by first analyzing the first wooden concept initially thought of for dimensional and orientational purposes. The challenge is to design a structure that optimizes the use of space, while being cost effective, durable, and easy to install.
To optimize the space each outer column was rotated 30 degrees in respect to each adjacent column, until forming a complete circle, omitting one to leave room for access. To connect them together, he looked into using 30 degree unistrut fittings. After rendering the two unistruts connected with brackets, he found the design to be complex in terms of installation when using 3 sided hole punched unistruts, as the tolerances had to be high. Slotted unistruts were looked into, but were found to not be flexible for the design, since the slots are located on one side only.
Jose Luis then rendered the columns connected with unistrut beams running radially outwards and having crosslinked unistrut beams to serve as the base of the rain barrels. The lack of symmetry between the cross linked unistruts would not provide even distribution of loads based on the renderings. He will next begin to continue researching other unistrut accessories or modifying existing ones to weigh out the possible options to effectively accomplish the task. The pictures below show some of this work.
Daniela Andrea Parada (Civil Engineering Student) completed her 37th week helping with the Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping, Earthbag Village, and the final Aquapini & Walipini website updates. This week Daniela worked on the cost analysis excel sheet for the roadways.
She double checked revisions that were made last week and made sure that the calculations were accurate and properly formatted. She then finished the cost analysis table for the parking lot and added the formatting that explains the chart. Daniela added to the narrative for the minimized and unlimited expense plan based on the changes made to the cost analysis of the parking lot and then used AutoDesk to ensure that the AutoCAD files in the Dropbox for the parking lot were the most updated ones.
Afterwards, she used AutoDesk to measure the length of the original parking lot design and deleted the length from the tables in the excel sheet that originally incorporated the parking lot. Daniela read through and addressed comments making sure that all suggestions she made on the Roadways, Walkways, Parking Lot and Gutters Report were addressed and portrayed on the website. Lastly, she used Jae’s suggestion to measure the percentage runoff for the domes in Earthbag Village. Pictures below are related to this work.
The Compression Team consisting of Dominick Banuelos (Civil Engineering Intern), Jarot Tamba (Civil Engineering Intern), John Paul D. Matining (Civil Engineer Intern), and Marcus Nguyen (Civil Engineering Intern) completed their 25th week helping with the Aircrete and earthbag compression testing.
This week the team did compression testing on the cylinders that had cured for 1 week. The team tested a total of 30 cylinders, 5 for each mix. The team also finished recording which aircrete cylinders collapsed from the light and standard batches. All compressive strength data collected to date have been recorded in the data sheet. Pictures below are related to this work.
Yuran Qin (Volunteer Web Editor) completed her 17th week helping with web design, this week focusing on the Sustainable Roadways, Walkways, and Landscaping page. This week Yuran checked all content was correctly added and the page was formatted correctly. She crossed off content as she did this and commented on each of those sections. She also addressed all comments made for web designers and checked the quality of all images and for missing images. Pictures below are related to this work.
One Community is developing a blueprint for holistic living through a Duplicable and Sustainable City Center that is LEED Platinum certified/Sustainable, can feed 200 people at a time, provide laundry for over 300 people, is beautiful, spacious, and saves resources, money, and space:
This week Luis Manuel Dominguez (Research Engineer) completed his 42nd week helping with research related to the City Center Eco-spa designs. This week Luis focused on his development and verification of the head loss calculations for the City Center Spa design. These calculations are essential to the performance analysis of the pumps and blowers.
Luis is currently cross examining his findings to ensure they are an accurate estimate of the reduction in performance. He is also focusing on the development of the heat transfer simulations and deriving an analysis for the findings to be included in the website too. Pictures below are related to this work.
Carlos Lillo (Engineering Technician) completed his 28th week helping with the pallet furniture designs for the Duplicable City Center guest rooms. This week, Carlos added dimensions for all the furniture, correcting unnecessary lines in the views, and creating blocks for the mending plates, screws, nails. He also merged, created and assigned new layers for several items. Because of the existence of many unnecessary lines (especially on the Pallet Bed), more deleting, correcting and selecting lines, along with assigning them to the layers is still needed. Pictures below are related to this work.
Xuanji Tang (Architectural Designer) completed her 25th week working on Duplicable City Center updates, now focused on the City Center Lighting updates. This week she updated the roads, added the bridge to the herb garden from south side and east side, revised the floor hatch of the West entrance space, added the fence for the animal area, and updated the vehicle driveway in the landscape floor plan. Pictures below are related to this work.
Huiya Yang (Volunteer Architectural Designer) completed her 24th week working on the Duplicable City Center architectural review and updates related to the structural code. This week Huiya continued work on the Duplicable City Center Window Schedule updates. She did research on Window 5 and Window 6, and selected types of R-5 windows. Huiya also accomplished the work of modeling the SketchUp model for Window 5 and Window 6 and finishing the CAD details for Window 5 and Window 6. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Yuxi Lu (Architectural Designer) also completed her 22nd week working on the Duplicable City Center architectural review and updates related to the structural code. This week Yuxi discussed feedback with the team related to changes to door selections from last week. The D2 exterior corridor entry required more durability and a weather-proof option.
In finding a product, Anderson Window and Door Company could provide the aesthetic feature that goes with general interior design, while being capable of providing energy savings and waterproofing. Due to consideration of appearance coordination, other doors like D7 and D13 were updated too. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Raj Patel (Mechanical Engineer) completed his 13th week helping with the Duplicable City Center hub connectors design and testing. This week Raj changed the multi-layered bracket back to a single thick bracket to see if adding the center gap has now reduced the stress on the brackets. He ran multiple simulations to get the least stress possible on the hub connector. Raj also worked on the geodesic dome paper to add content per the feedback received from Sangam. Pictures below are related to this work.
Maya Callahan (Sustainability Researcher) completed her 10th week helping with research and web design, now focused on review and edits to Shreyas’ solar microgrid design specifics related to electric vehicles. This week, Maya continued her work editing the Solar Farm Battery Analysis Final Report. This included re-formatting some of the figures and content so that any text referencing a figure or graph was placed above its figure, this makes the page more consistent and easier to follow for the reader.
Maya also added more information on the Ford F-150 Lightning, its new charging station, and sources for additional information on the Tesla Wall Connector. She finished the first full proofread through the analysis and fixed any small errors along the way while commenting on content that requires additional feedback before it is edited. The pictures below are related to this work.
One Community is developing a blueprint for holistic living through Highest Good food that is more diverse, more nutritious, locally grown and sustainable, and part of our open source botanical garden model to support and share bio-diversity:
This week the core team completed additional edits on the Chicken Coop Assembly Doc through page 126. This included edits to the doc, mathematical recalculations and confirmations, requests for drawing alterations and other related changes. Though this process is occasionally semi-excruciating and painstakingly slow for the editor, in the end the corrections will save time and labor in the field by avoiding reconstruction. Pictures of some of this work are below.
A different core team member was the editor mentioned above who worked on creating and updating images and text, and replying to the comments on the same Chicken Coop Building instruction document.
The core team also updated the Aquapini SketchUp model and generated images with dimensions for the Aquapini ponds, comparing the heights for all ponds, all inside structural dimensions, a water flow image, and an image with dimensions for the internal terraces.
Brian Storz (Culinary Project Manager) completed his 21st week helping lead the completion of the Transition Food Self-sufficiency Plan, Transition Kitchen designs, Food Procurement and Storage plan, and related menu and meal plans. This week Brian redesigned the layout of the kitchen to encompass one shelter for the kitchen and one for the dining room. Brian also added some equipment to the costing sheet. Then Brian redid the action items for the interns. Brian also worked on recipe testing this week, including Chow mein. Below are some images related to this.
Adam Weiss (Chef) completed his 5th week helping with the completion of the Transition Food Self-sufficiency Plan and related menu and meal plans. This week, Adam worked on the recipe converter calculator. It is pretty close to working and will be almost ready to present for approval and others to help clean it up. He also continued to help with the layout of the dining area and setting up stations to help diners and decrease the amount of back and forth to the kitchen. The pictures below relate to this work.
One Community is developing a blueprint for holistic living through Highest Good education that is for all ages, applicable in any environment, adaptable to individual needs, far exceeds traditional education standards, and more fun for both the teachers and the students. This component of One Community is about 95% complete with only the Open Source School Licensing and Ultimate Classroom construction and assembly details remaining to be finished.
With over 8 years of work invested in the process, the sections below are all complete until we move onto the property and continue the development and open sourcing process with teachers and students – a development process that is built directly into the structure of the education program and everything else we’re creating too:
Adolph Karubanga (Civil Engineer and PMP) joined the team and completed his 1st week helping with the Ultimate Classroom Structural Engineering. This week, Adolph reviewed the drawings, preliminary data for calculations, and made reference to technical specifications and codes of practice.
This included basis of design, use and occupancy structural classification, and exposure conditions (fire*, wind, snow, earthquake loads). This data was very important in the preceding stages of the analysis, design, and detailing of structural elements. Adolph found out that the preliminary data was in line with the specifications and therefore was to be used in the preparation of detailed design calculations during his 3rd week.
Adolph will also obtain data on the materials that were not captured in the preliminary data, i.e. straw bale, timber species, type of cement, earthen plaster, waterproofing membrane, polystyrene roofing material, gypsum and details on foundations. Adolph also researched and obtained a timber construction reference manual and 3 other reference materials for straw bale construction.
One Community is developing a blueprint for holistic living through a Highest Good society approach to living that is founded on fulfilled living, the study of meeting human needs, Community, and making a difference in the world:
This week the core team completed 22 hours managing One Community volunteer-work review not included above, emails, social media accounts, web development, new bug identification and bug fix integration for the Highest Good Network software, and interviewing and getting set up new volunteer team members. Pictures below show some of this.
Aidan Geissler (Sustainability Researcher) also completed his 37th week helping, now focused on the Most Sustainable Urinals, Hand Dryers, and Shower Heads pages. This week Aidan focused on the Hand Dryer page. He continued to work on incorporating content from a spreadsheet, doing minor formatting, and proofreading and editing the content of each page. Pictures below show some of this work-in-progress.
Kevin Begin (Full Stack Web Developer) also completed his 4th week helping with the Highest Good Network software. This week, Kevin dug into the issue with last week’s badge fix not functioning as expected on the Dev site. Initially, it seemed like the fix wasn’t working, but upon further inspection, the user’s profile on the live backend is taking over 5 minutes to update the user’s info (despite the database being instantly up to date). This is causing any badge assignments done within that timeframe to add not only the desired badge(s), but all of the badges that were previously deleted.
He’s enlisted the help of more senior engineers in hopes of finding a solution, but so far is still in the troubleshooting phase. Kevin also helped HGN’s new engineer, Elyse, get comfortable with React and helped familiarize her with the app. In addition, he worked with her on troubleshooting her bug that deals with a user’s time being logged for the previous date. Although they haven’t yet found a solution, they were able to replicate the bug and isolate the issue. They are poised to resolve the bug next week. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Miguel Fernandes (Full-stack Developer) completed his 2nd week helping with the Highest Good Network software. This week Miguel finished reformatting the frontend using Prettier and ESLint. He solved some other conflicts and raise PR #374. After that, Miguel spent time analyzing the Dashboard and TeamMemberTasks component to try to figure out what can be refactored in order to make the loading time smaller. During that time he figured out the Dashboard is making 200+ calls to the API, and tracked down what API calls need to be refactored. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Phu Nguyen (Software Developer) also joined the team and completed his 1st week helping with the Highest Good Network software. This week, Phu had his interview and completed the onboarding process. He then set up his local React environment, read the Volunteer Documentation lists, and got familiar with the HGN system. Phu contacted Irene and Rachit to understand the tasks and reviewed Rachit’s pull request, Rachit was waiting for Chris’s reply to fix his code though. After that, Phu continued reviewing other pull requests. Pictures of some of this work are below.
Elyse Lam (Software Developer) joined the team too and also completed her 1st week helping with the Highest Good Network software. This week, Elyse set up and got familiar with the front end codebase, looked for specific React components associated with the Time Logging bug, and found the timezone was hard coded as “America/Los Angeles”. in the TimeEntryForm.
She tested various changes in “dateOfWork: moment().tz()” by passing in properties of userProfile.timeZone and also tested leaving the app open overnight and starting the timer the next day. She confirmed the issue probably has to do with the time the user logs in as well. Then Elyse worked on the selectedBadge bug and looked for potential errors in the way badgeCollection includes existing badges being selected again [4]. This screenshot shows different array sizes and she will look into debugging this with Chrome dev tools the following week. Pictures of some of this work are below.
And, last but not least, Jin Hua (Web Marketer and Graphic Designer) helped us identify solutions and an approach for dealing with a PHP update that is coming and may break our website. See pics below related to this.
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