Solar C³ities is an international platform with the intention of providing an open-source virtual Hackspace for "Biogas Innoventors and Practitioners" and training and resources for all  those researching, developing and deploying sustainable solutions for flourishing societies.
Our motto is "Yes, you can! Please DO try this at home!"

Politically we define ourselves as "a loose federation of like-minded individuals who are interested in the kind of problem solving that provides the greatest benefits for the greatest number and diversity of both human and non-human beings."  We share knowledge and material resources so that we may continue our co-evolutionary development and not just survive, but thrive.

We have no overt hierarchy, but rather conduct ourselves in space-time the way jazz musicians do, all following the logic and form of a given song that we all find pleasant to play, but allowing each musician to express him or herself "out of the pocket" through solos, improvisation and harmonies that go beyond the original structure on the chord chart.  You might consider Solar CITIES a kind of experimental  "jazz of flourishing development".  We groove on emergent properties and improv and allow the circumstances and matrix of each project to determine roles and responsibilities.  Our "play book", the charts we use to guide the song, so to speak, is our charter, our mission -- to cooperatively innovate and implement least-cost/most-benefit solutions to the existential problems facing sentient life, seeking the smallest negative externalities and the largest positive externalities.

We embrace tinkerers, bricoleurs, hackers, DIY-ers, open-sourcers... everyone who wants to give meaning to life through meaningful participation in "The Great Conversation", the unending dialog between instantiations of ever-evolving and co-evolving sentience on Earth. We encourage every being to give of themselves to give life a chance and give peace a chance, recognizing, as our hero Buckminster Fuller stated,

“We humans are manifestly here for problem-solving and, if we are any good at problem-solving, we don't come to utopia, we come to more difficult problems to solve.You can't better the world by simply talking to it. Philosophy to be effective must be mechanically applied.You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete"...

One of the models we are working together to force into obsolescence is that of crippling dependency on exogenous sources of energy, food, water and, yes, expertise.  We believe that wth a free flow of interconnected open source information and the right start-up building blocks,  every community can develop a self-sustaining core level of dignity and independence, beginning at the household level and radiating outward in permacultural concentric and overlapping circles.

We start with BIOGAS at the center of any fluorishing society  -- as the missing piece of the sustainable development puzzle.

One  of our fairly unique contributions to the evolving dialog about energy and waste management has been our early embrace of food waste grinders (once called 'garbage disposals', henceforth known as "feedstock preparation devices") as one of  "the most important environmental technologies for the 21st century (T.H. Culhane described it as such during the Q and A at the  National Geographic Explorer's Symposium in 2010 after using them for a year with small scale biogas and composting systems around the world).
 

Another of our contributions has been the innovation of IBC tank based home scale biodigesters for basements, backyards and other urban and suburban uses.   IBC tanks can be found used in almost every country in the world, and make great biogas systems once filled with dirty water and a few hundred kg of  easily obtained microbes (sourced from any animal manure, including your own "humanure" and/or  lake or pond mud).

With microbial transformation of food and toilet wastes and other organic residuals as the center piece -- things which everybody everywhere has in abundance,  things that formerly were considered "problems" and sources of "dis-ease" -- all other technologies can be more easily placed around the eternal fire that results from  this natural hearth.  Most other energy systems are intermittent. Biodigestion is a bacterial constant, producing just enough baseline energy and nutrient rich fertilizer to allow homes and communities to relax and integrate all of the other solutions for sustainable in a meaningful way, enabling the flowering of true solar cities around the world.

That is the magic of the movement that we invite you to join us in moving forward.