Sharing ideas you don’t have time for (Day 8 of Brianna at OASiS)

Posted on by

bags folded from newspaper_670
Innovation in action: Bags Pradeep folded out of newspaper. They use an ingenious weight bearing strategy.

I had trouble getting to sleep and waking up. I just wasn’t the right kind of tired. I had breakfast, started in on some writing and then started to calculate deadlines for the different “deliverables” of my internship (A guide to OASiS-style thinking, a detailed flow chart for the McMaster Social Innovation Lab and an example problem). I realized there was not a lot of time and I wanted to do so much.

In that moment, I catapulted into another stage of this experience.

Continue reading →

How to quantify impact (Day 7 of Brianna at OASiS)

Posted on by

slums temples green 670A wonderful, layered place, but it is not home

In the morning, I sat outside and watched birds pick impossibly large caterpillars from the trees. Hopping to the ground, they hit them against the pavement to stun them. “Thwack. Thwack,” I could hear from fifteen feet away. India is a wild place. As much as I am settling in and have settled in, every so often I blink and realize that this is not home. It is a wonderful, layered place but it is not home.

Continue reading →

GitHub — Tutorial

Posted on by

Over the summer, Social Innovation Simulation will be posting a series of technical tutorials designed to acquaint those interested with some of the technologies we’re working with.

This tutorial describes how you can use an online code repository called GitHub to store each working version of your code, and share your code with others.

Estimated time: 40min

Dependencies: Basic knowledge of bash or ssh code

Continue reading →

Searching for the one best solution (Day 5 of Brianna at OASiS)

Posted on by

I was awake at 6, but Anu was not feeling well today so we did not go for our walk. I used the time to do some more writing. I had breakfast with her and her mother a few hours later. Mrs. M. had clipped an article from the Delhi News for me – a travel guide to Toronto! It was a bit surreal to be sitting in their living room reading an article about home.

Continue reading →

Wanting to be what you are not (Day 1 of Brianna at OASiS)

Posted on by

brianna smrke - cow - img_1090_670I just walked by a cow eating mangoes from a garbage heap. I’m definitely not in Kansas anymore.

After a night in the swanky but labyrinthal Delhi Airport hotel and a quick but turbulent morning flight, I walked out of the plane, into the rain and onto a bus. We taxied over to the Bhopal airport terminal, where met Pradeep and his wife Shibani for the first time. It was only 22 degrees out. Lovely weather.

Continue reading →