In hard times, humans have persevered. Plumbob is a part of the wave of sustainability moving all over the world right now. Plumbob is taking aim at the inefficiencies of how we build our living, working, and learning structures by re-discovering passive solar principles and re-aligning community to live by the Sun as an energy foundation. Our society is hanging on the question; what will we leave the next generation?

I am developing Plumbob to catalyze a shift towards re-designing/building single-family homes to be oriented to maximize the sun's energy that reaches us every day. A small example; currently we rely on electricity for most of our daytime lighting, where passive solar design would open up the roof to the Sun's light during the day. It's more efficient, and it's more inspiring and healthy to live, learn, and work in.

Passive solar structures build community

In times of economic insecurities, the most important thing we can do, and maybe the only catalyst for real change, is building community that cares for each other. And I believe there is no better vehicle to carry community building than participating in building a passive solar structure. Combined with local organic agriculture and all the primary education standards we hold our society to can be mapped to this process. And if we consider the stock of single family homes in this country that could potentially be rebuilt, we have a perfectly sized canvas for Americans to blaze a trail of an innovative education opportunity, inter-generational care, a sensible energy foundation, and a commerce frontier.

Development

I envision Plumbob as aligning foundational information infrastructure that can be freely(as in speech) replicable, borrowing from the open source community and their example. Plumbob leverages the LAMP stack and their communities, and most of all, Drupal and it's amazing global community. But software and the internet are not our main focus.
Plumbob focuses first on re-weaving the social structure through re-building houses with passive solar techniques. But Instead of developing and building quickly and with "throw away materials", why not slow things down by involving the local community, and use existing materials in the house itself or salvaged materials from others, first.
This mindfulness of resources I believe will pay us back hugely if we divert the construction waste stream to community work shops or on-site at a house being re-built. Each house could become a classroom and job site, a resurgence of the local apprentice/master economy.
This solution broadens when we consider that every aspect of career and technical training can be mapped to the functions of living, learning, and caring for each other in a passive solar structure. For me, the most exciting possibility of this solution is that we have an opportunity to re-unit the generational cycle of living/caring. And I believe that will happen as we shift our collective brain-power to a passive solar foundation. We will recognize that, when we split up the generations as industrial development unfolded, we created three problems out of a perfect solution. For the record, I love my alone time, but I think the developing world needs to let go of the dream of indefinite individualism and let ourselves heal from it.
For all career and technical areas, Plumbob supports California's upcoming assembly bill that would mandate a career and technical option starting in public middle-school.

Becoming a Business

I am currently working on making Plumbob a business. I am still undecided as to what kind of non-profit status it should be and am open to suggestions. I gravitate towards co-operative models, or educational models. But I really believe that there is a world of innovation to be developed in flexibility of interoperability of the non-profit model in general.
I envision Plumbob.org being core infrastructure that can be used to create any kind of non-profit. If we can apply certain attributes of computer code and to non-profit "business code", the non-profit model might take on a life similar to an open source software community. That is, easily copyable, and highly customizable, and globally distributed administration and development.