AKVO.org is an initiative well worth supporting!
Here below is the intro by one of the founders, and there’s also a video interview of Mark Charmer conducted by Vinay Gupta.
“Billions of people live under crushing poverty and 40% of the worlds population doesn’t even have adequate sanitation, they go behind the nearest bush, or use a bag as their toilet and throw it over the nearest wall. Something which causes more death every year 1 than all the ongoing wars put together, untold misery, sickness and lost opportunities.
I would argue that the real economic revolution comes when the billions living in poverty are lifted out of this misery and are not only given a chance to live a decent life, but also become active participants of the world economy. It is now generally accepted that the cheapest way to lift people out of poverty is to tackle the water and sanitation issue. Each dollar spent on water and sanitation has a knock-on effect in other areas of US$3 to USD$34 2, i.e. spend money on water and sanitation and you get poverty reduction for “free”. And we plan to use open source as a tool to do this. It is actually around this central idea that Akvo was conceived, with a focus on the water and sanitation issue and not limiting ourselves to the idea that hardware has to be made by other machines and be consumer electronics to be valuable open source.
People in the water and sanitation sector, working with so called appropriate technology, have been working with an open source philosophy for a long time, albeit without the quite sophisticated licensing that most open source software comes with, i.e. GNU GPL licenses and the like. Many, if not most, water and sanitation appropriate technology solutions are in the public domain, an even more open version of open source if you will.
We started Akvo to promote this type of information about open hardware water and sanitation solutions as well as actually create a repository of information, the Akvopedia, as we found that specifications, instructions, and other information which is needed to make water and sanitation hardware, was surprisingly hard to find on the internet.”