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This site was launched in February of 2009 to make more efficient use of time and money on the part of Government and other stakeholders in the effort write California’s new greywater standard.
Goals
* Facilitate the frictionless exchange of information between all greywater stakeholders—regulators, academics, manufacturers, system users. If you find a cool study and post it, we all can put our fingers on it.
* Consolidate a blizzard of stakeholder comments on California’s new greywater standard into a refined consensus on new suggested language, or at least a smaller number of less conflicting points
* Develop a consensus model code for tier one and two greywater systems.
* Support each point in the comments/ model code with references to studies / rationale
* Share information amongst others working concurrently in other states and nations.
How to get involved
Anyone can read anything in the whole site.
Anyone can post comments (just have to enter anti-spam bot code)
Anyone can sign up for the listserv, or participate in the forums.
Contributing Editors
Art Ludwig, Oasis Design
Ecological designer, author, Create an Oasis with Greywater, Builder’s Greywater, originator of several new public interest greywater designs, consultant on greywater policy.
Jim Rowland, Doug Hensel, California Department of Housing and Community Development
Lead contacts at HCD for authoring California’s new graywater standard.
Raphael Garcia, Rana Creek Living Architecture
Greywater engineer and landscape architect
Cathy Stanton, Soap and Detergent Association
Head of graywater research at the SDA.
Jeff Moeller, Water Environment Research Foundation
Head of graywater research at WERF.
John Calvert, Crystal 3 Technologies,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Webmaster
Site Sponsors
Oasis Design
Providers of integrated, original designs for living better, cheaper and more ecologically since 1980
Providers of accurate, up-to-date greywater information since 1991
Crystal 3 Technologies, www.crystal3.com
Complete web design solutions and state-of-the-art hosting for organizations and small businesses whose goals and vision are compatible with peace, justice, and sustainability. Specializing in custom content management websites using the award-winning Joomla! framework.
It is natural to wonder what such a cool tool costs, who is paying for it, why, if you are required to contribute (no), and how you can contribute if you want to.
This site has cost about $1000 out of pocket for webmaster services, server space, domain registration and software thus far (2/27/09) and about a hundred hours of volunteer time (yes, that is cheap, because everyone involved is fast and good).
All the expenses have been borne by Oasis Design, so far.
Oasis has a strong tradition of activism. This has included pouring tons of time and a fair bit of resources into various causes we believe in.
Ninety percent of the site traffic for oasisdesign.net is for information that we've not only put there for free, but that we don't even have any mechanism for turning into revenue (see Legalize Sustainability , and Dengue Fever Information for a couple random examples out of hundreds).
Our book Create an Oasis with Greywater is the number 1 landscape book on Amazon, and the #2 plumbing book (our water storage book is #1). Increasing sales of these books enable us to take chances on supporting cool things.
We are looking to shift all of oasisdesign.net over to a database-driven content management system, so we're getting some good secondary benefit in terms of gaining experience with the technology in a this smaller scale experiment.
The ongoing maintenance of this site will, over time, dwarf this initial investment. We're gambling/ hoping that support will materialize for it's long-term maintenance from deeper pocketed (or perhaps just numerous) other stakeholders/ volunteers.
Here's things you could do to help us help you help each other (more creative than writing a check):
1) Link to oasisdesign.net and graywater.org from your web site(s)— Include the word "greywater" in the context of the link. If we can beat out wikipedia and greywater.com for the #1 spot on searches for grey water, greywater, gray water and graywater, we'd probably sell enough more books to support graywater.org indefinitely. Astoundingly high google rankings for a wide diversity of searches is, more than anything, what we live off of.
2) Buy books from oasis design —Support us directly and get informed at the same time.
3) Give our Create an Oasis with Greywater , Builder's Greywater Guide , and Water Storage books good raves on Amazon —But don't buy our books there, por favor--we make less than a third as much on Amazon sales.
4) Hire us to develop a code compliance package or write policy for your jurisdiction —Government entities in New York, New Mexico, Arizona, and California have done so...your organization should too.
5) Help out with an in-kind contribution —Got an extra CPU liscence for Adobe in Design 3 or 4? A box of laser printer paper? A not quite state of the art mac? Time to do some research? Let us know .
6) Send us a tip —Via pay pal, credit card, or e check
7) Work to make the planet's life support systems functional for our kids —That's what this is ultimately about.
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