TACIT KNOWLEDGE
(Posted 2008-12-10 14:13:38 by ArchPaladin)

Of course, I make a post about having nothing interesting to post and then
stuff comes along.

The idea of food runners [
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009153.html ] [worldchanging.com] is
very novel.  It is very cool to see some form of volunteer work that is
beyond the normal set of things we often think of: soup kitchens, hospital
assistants, roadside garbage cleaning, and so on.  On a closer look, they
have basically taken a new spin on the classic idea of soup kitchens,
incorporating immediately perishable food into the works, rather than setup
a central repository of non-perishable goods.  Of course, the novelty is in
the fact that their food donations come from waste excess of other venues,
switching out waste disposal for a form of food recycling.

I believe this is an example of the kinds of solutions that will really
solve large-scale problems in this world.  Solutions will be sustainable
and scalable.  They must focus on eliminating waste through redistribution
rather than discarding.  They must be scalable through appropriate use of
communication tools, avoiding dependency on tacit knowledge [
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Tacit_knowledge ]
[wikimedia.org] by building specialized knowledge into the system rather
than requiring skilled human oversight.

To an extent, you can see this in the world already.  Solutions that aren't
sustainable eventually produce themselves die when their supply chain
falters or when they pollute themselves out of a client base.  Solutions
that depend on specialized knowledge only grow as far as the knowledge can
be effectively communicated.

--------

There are no comments on this post.