Josh Knowles

Background Born and lived in Austin, TX until coming to ITP in 2005. Served on the board of directors for the Inter-Cooperative Council (ICC) cooprating housing non-profit for two years. ICC operated at the time eight houses with 166 residents and a $1,000,000+ yearly budget. Served for three years, as well, as a director at the Austin Museum of Digital Art (AMODA) an arts non-profit that started up around 2001. Lived for three years in the House of Commons co-op, a vegan, eco-activist, clothing-option house of 26 people (mostly undergraduate students) where I participated in weekly meetings and contributed to the house by cooking weekly (for the entire house) and various other chores. That's my background that's related to this class, at any rate.

What matters to me? I'm out-of-touch. While living at the co-op, I had more direct access to people who pushed these ideas, but I've fallen away from that, sadly. And because we were young, many of our ideas may not have been fully thought-out, anyway. So what does it mean to "live sustainably" today?

Much of my background is with cooperative businesses, having sat on the board of one and participated in others. (Lots of co-ops in Austin.) I really appreciate this business model and it fits in with some of my other believes re the Network that open source / open business practices that allow the users to contribute ultimately lead to stronger communities, better products, and more intelligent people. Since a large part of the problem of being eco-effective is knowing what exactly to use and do, being able to access the community mind and knowledge-base seems vitally important.

What annoys me most about this? It's really, really hard to know what's good and what's not. And, of course, it's difficult to change my own behavior, especially when issues of time, money, and attention resources come into play. Even more difficult to change other people's minds...