GOAT Notes #4: Archives and partnerships!
Welcome to the newsletter for Grassroots Open Assistive Tech!
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Events
Coming up in April, we will have a table and repair station at the Bernal Heights Earth Day Stroll - Saturday, April 19th, 11am - 3pm. We’ll be right near Pinhole Coffee and Avedano’s butcher shop on Cortland. Come by with your mobility gear for a little inspection and tune up - and a free kit + zine!
Our Love Your Ride workshop was very interesting! We did a pilot of the “Fix-It Kits” and zine. You can read a report on Love Your Ride on the GOAT blog for more details.
From that experiment, I now have great ideas for version 2 of the Fix It Kit zine. It will have more illustrations of things like tools and specific kinds of bolts and screws; a different structure with more space to gather personalized info; and space for local information to add for readers who aren’t in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Partnerships
As a bright spot in a difficult month for me, I had a lovely visit from Meier Goldblum Haigh from Disability Culture Lab. We spent a couple of hours on a sunny winter day, lying on a picnic blanket and pillows in my garden. Result: I fixed some little things that came loose during air travel on Meier’s new scooter, gave them a Fix-It Kit, and we have a plan for DCL’s merch shop to carry version 2 of the zine, once I write and produce it - likely later in April or in early May.
I felt a surge of pride that from one of my worst mobility and pain flare-ups in years (unable to even stand up so I had to scoot down the front steps on my butt) I got to play host and be welcoming to another wheelchair user and also brokered a deal. (Where “brokered a deal” is our fancy term for gossiping and agreeing to work together, while eating clementines on a picnic blanket surrounded by hummingbirds and small hand tools). It was so cheering! This is how we do it folks!!!
I forgot to take a pic with Meier, but here I am in the garden that day, feeling very jazzed up.
The other partnership we have in the works is with Jennifer Mankoff from University of Washington & CREATE. We have been chatting and have a lot of common ground. Jennifer has a new project, A11yhood, that will be a catalog of assistive tech that is intended for open, DIY use. I love that the vision includes many different media, including software, textiles and knitting, as well as electronics and 3D printing.
My intent is for GOAT to mobilize volunteers to take the scans that our archive team is putting up on the Internet Archive, go through them, and pull out individual devices and plans to put into the A11yhood online catalogue. There may not be color photos in our entries, but there will be excellent metadata! And many low-tech devices you can make at home, cheaply, with common materials.
In short, we may be able to use a11yhood as a front end interface for our archival materials, adding it to the LibraryThing catalog and the repository of scans.
Archive Team
So far, we have catalogued 86 items, and uploaded scans of 29 of those. And, great news, we handed over a small box of our scanned and catalogued material to the Prelinger Library, their new home!
Our little librarian team has a great time, meeting roughly one afternoon a week, poring over the boxes of booklets and papers, showing each other interesting finds, and having lunch or tea as we work and chat.
Again, I am struck by our ability to do great work in a sustainable and enjoyable way. We are slow and steady in our progress, and we have a great time!
In the summer, our pace may pick up considerably as I hope to have extra help and potentially, paid interns doing the high speed book scanning out of the Internet Archive’s office. That’s one thing that your donations will go towards!
Here’s a cool example of what we are scanning: How to Make It Cheap, volume 1, from The Independence Factory of Middletown, Ohio, in 1980. (We also have volumes 2 and 3!) We didn’t find these anywhere in WorldCat - ie they aren’t discoverable in any libraries, and aren’t online anywhere either. A lot of our scans are tagged “uniq:0” in LibraryThing — meaning we couldn’t find them anywhere else in the world! The archivist and historian in me find a lot of joy in preserving this kind of material. And I love it for so many reasons. The 70s hippie whole earth vibe, the way it’s clearly such a labor of love, the simple but thoughtful illustrations and instructions. Part of the value of this material is that it exposes people to the idea that adapting your home and environment is POSSIBLE.
I forgot to take a pic of Megan and I having tea, but we had a good chat as she came to pick up the box of GOAT archive stuff, about our work, about gardens and geology and foraging wild native plants, about her teaching as a master birder at the California Academy of Sciences, . She also brought me some fascinating tea made from dandelion and burdock, from a friend at Shakewell Herbalism. Talk about hippie vibes! It is tasty but (and?) feels a bit like I am drinking the actual Earth itself.
Other interesting stuff!
A contact from a DIY assistive tech Facebook group, Muhammed Hussain Shah, is doing a lot of work in Pakistan manufacturing low cost wheelchairs in his community. He is also a wheelchair user. Anyway, he has a fundraiser going to help his organization do more welding and metalwork to supplement their chair making. Wood is easier to work and readily available but of course makes for a clunky, heavy chair. I believe he is working off of Erik Kondo’s open source wheelchair designs and wants to expand to make more metal chairs. An exciting project! I encourage you to read about his work and donate if you can.
The Center for Independent Living (CIL) and their Assistive Tech program folks recently ran a little field trip to the Tool Lending Library in Berkeley. I missed it unfortunately (this darn flare up!) — but what a great idea!
And last but not least, thanks to some very generous donors in January and February, we are going to be able to expand activity, print more zines, make more (and better) free toolkits for our workshops, and pay some summer interns!
What we do
Grassroots Open Assistive Tech’s purpose is to document, curate, preserve, make accessible, and freely share assistive technology designs and information under open licenses, as well as providing coordination and education to affiliated communities.
We support disabled people in making their designs and builds available for public good, and in having free to use designs available to them for their own use.
Please donate!
GOAT is a 501(c)(3) organization and your donations are tax deductible. EIN: 93-3313503.
We are also registered with Benevity for employer-matched donations!
You can donate via PayPal or via check.
PayPal donation email: liz@openassistivetech.org.
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