EurAsianKiwi

Bhuu

Bhuu is an environmental entrepreneurship organisation based in New Zealand. The central idea is to create a decentralised network to collect and transmit environmental data to a central database. The resulting information is intended to be easily accessible through mapping and visualisation, and to provide the empirical foundation for modelling and simulation. Bhuu is conceived as an open project, so that both the hardware and thesoftware will be made publicly available

Name

The name is intended to appeal to both Western and non-Western peoples. Bhuu is a Sanskrit word, with meanings associated with earth in the sense of both planet and soil. It has strong Buddhist associations, including to Bhudh or Budh, to be awake or awakening. Bhuu forms the base for the name Bhuumi (or Bhumi), the Hindu Goddess of the Earth, and many other expressions in Hindi and other Sanskrit-related languages.

Philosophy

The Bhuu philosophy is that community (or "crowd") collection, analysis and publication of environmental information is empowering. The monopoly supply of information through state agencies and related institutions can be bypassed. Technological developments in fields such as sensing and communications can be harnessed to allow participants from around the globe to contribute data, participate in the analysis, and to view the results.

Implementation

Bhuu's first initiative is a device that measures [[Meteorology|meteorological] conditions through a remote weather station. The weather data is transmitted to a central database, and is then made easily accessible through a Google Maps visualisation. The choice of meteorological data is as a „proof of concept“, as a commercially available weather station could be relatively easily adapted. After the first test phase it is planned to expand the range of sensors, for example to include air and water quality, and nuclear radiation measurement. Bhuu also intends to put appropriate hardware and software information on the internet, so that participants can add and adapt devices, algorithms or other elements.

programs, etc.

We put together the first elements in New Zealand and a prototype have now been developed and multiple refinements made by Douglas Rocha Ferraz in Brazil. We have recently sent equipment including weather stations across from NZ which is now successfully installed in Sao Paolo (3.1) and Douglas hopes to put the first realtime data on the internet soon (3.2 and below):

The the circle at the end of the DNA. I forgot to send you the information about the koru, which is „based on the shape of a new unfurling silver fern frond and symbolizing new life, growth, strength and peace.

environmental measurement project, but in my vision I see this as part of a broader infrastructure which would empower individuals and their communities to gather, share and use environmental data (1.2 BhuuTech overview). We have started

Academic work

Elworthy teaches as a professor at Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), the University of Szczecin (Poland), and as a Privatdozent at the Free University of Berlin (Germany).

Elworthy’s research approach was fundamentally shaped while at Cambridge through Douglass North’s supervisions on the New Institutional Economics. This was complemented by an introduction to alternative psychological models and their implications for political behaviour and international relations at Yale. These foundations were combined in his doctoral research on the evolutionary foundations of human behaviour and his later work on the interaction between governance structures and behaviour.

but also because weather is politically insensitive but still of interest to the general population.