I’m excited to share with you news from the Working Groups (WGs), all 6 of which have now begun work on their Kickstarter projects. Despite the name, these have no relation to the crowd-source funding platform and are funded entirely by our friends at the WISIONS Initiative of the Wuppertal Institute.
You can find out more about each WG’s project and their progress to date on their discussion forums, but here is a summary of what each group is working on:
- Market Assessment WG: A global market assessment designed to identify the regions where small wind can offer a scalable solution to rural electrification and therefore make the greatest contribution to poverty alleviation.
- Maintenance WG: Producing a second edition of the Maintenance Manual that Gael Cesa presented back at WEAthens2014.
- Delivery Models WG: A critical review of the delivery models employed by WE members in order to develop a best practices guide.
- Education WG: A database of experts in participatory wind turbine construction courses.
- Technology WG: Design and prototyping of an open-source charge controller.
- Measurement WG: A review of international standards and a user survey that will feed into the ongoing collaborative development of the WG’s open-source datalogger.
The Kickstarter projects are designed to encourage collaboration and build capacity within the Working Groups (WGs). The project selection and definition process has been under way for several months now and if you haven’t been directly involved with these projects yet, please be aware that many of them involve collecting data from Wind Empowerment members. The outputs of these projects are designed to strengthen the capacity of Wind Empowerment member orgnisations, but in order to carry out these projects successfully they will require your participation.
So I know you are all very busy, but please do keep an eye out for surveys, interview requests and other invitiations to participate via email and take a few minutes out of your day to help build something that will benefit the entire community.