SolaRoofCoop | Start Up Plan

Hello Dave Dobbins and friends - happy New Year all. With God's grace we can have the greatest of expectation to experience an awesome year in 2011. This is the beginning of the second decade of the second century of the second millennium. I am really excited to release (see attachment) a global Sola Roof Business Plan on 01.01.11 (my American friends will reverse that) and I have faith that this an auspicious timing. Great things are happening with Sola Roof.

Perhaps some of you can cooperate with Sola Roof to help build the sustainable future that is within our reach. Nothing is more doable then Bubble Tech and you will be hard pressed to find such a simple technology that can produce such far reaching potentials to shift the paradigm. Sola Roof is inspired by nature and we propose a tool, a simple technology, to enable our built environment to work in harmony with Nature - in fact to be infused with the living power of creation. The Architect, Ken Yeang has encouraged me to refer to this as Ecomimicry Architecture and I hope we can all collaborate to learn about, teach and to be practitioners of Ecomimicry Architecture. Success with this mission requires a global collaboration, therefore please consider how you can take action to support my initiative to build an Open Source community that will adopt and promote Sola Roof as shared know-how that protects and improves the knowledge base for all to access and use: FREE for the non-commercial users and for the commercial users we ask them to meet the challenge of 1% (or more) to Pay It Forward humanitarian projects.

To make our Sola Roof technology more accessible to more people I am starting up Sola Roof DIY and the key new initiative is to establish a manufacturing COOP that will provide DIY members (DI Yers) a direct wholesale manufacturer supply - producing a standardized backyard greenhouse DIY Kit for households everywhere to use for DIY Food projects - "grow your own food". This approach has a great synergy with our Open Source community since it gives ownership of key component supply activity to our members who become COOP Members. This collective action is what is needed to bridge the gap that individuals and families are feeling as they live as passive consumers. Manufacturers might profit most from dependent, non-skilled populations that are ever more urbanized, but communities become fragile and open to all kinds of exploitation.

Sola Roof DIY is about self-reliant families and resilient communities that know how to help themselves and each other and have skills to live "independently" - but that really means that they have sustainable living skills - they know how to work with nature and use technology that amplifies natural abundance that can be sustained within closed cycle Controlled Environments. All of our essential life support needs can be generated and constantly regenerated by our built environment if we know how to build with the Ecomimicry Architecture paradigm.

The really difficult part of all of this is to get across to people how easy DIY Food - "grow your own food" - actually can be once someone begins to take action. Therefore our goal is encourage and educate and get people to engage with joining the Sola Roof community through an online Community Portal. I am starting work on this with my bother Jim. We have long hosted a Wiki website and a Yahoo Forum but such features will be integrated in a new community website that will use the Wiki as a reference knowledge base and build around this a more accessible and friendly online community. This will be an example of a "transformative social network" and will link Sola Roof members from global to local and support success with backyard projects.

I am really excited about the Sola Roof DIY plan, which will get a big boost by starting up the Sola Roof Coop in Quebec. I will establish the Alpha Site in or near Montreal this month and then 10 Beta Sites to showcase the DIY Kit that will be put into production in Montreal in cooperation with Sapa, Montreal, who will be the first extruder to ship our aluminum flat-pack structure kit. With success in this first location we can work with Sapa America to establish other business units of the COOP across Canada/USA. We build the DIY Kit project in January and then the 10 other sites in Quebec by early spring. Each one of these Beta Sites will be established by an Enterprise Members of the COOP, who will sell and support the installation/operation of "ordinary" COOP member's (customers) backyard projects. This is a big opportunity to create a distributed network of entrepreneurs that we call "SE Net" - the Social Enterprise Network. These are sustainable "green growth" jobs based on new skills for self-reliant living that will take root in communities everywhere. There is no limit to the scaling up of this organization. It is designed for exponential growth since each of the COOP Members can teach an new member and anyone can step up to be an Enterprise Member. Also, Enterprise Members can establish associated Enterprise Members and all are certified and affiliated with the COOP organization. This open participation process allows our organization to expand organically and exponentially.

I am now working on the business plan for SE Net and the COOP which will be "piloted" in Quebec but which is intended to "go viral" and become a global community of DI Yers who become COOP Members and the SE Net that offer needed technical support. Sola Roof will be a catalyst to localization (even to the backyard) of food, water and energy while also showing how homes and communities can use Ecomimicry Architecture to transition to an new, sustainable lifestyle called Eco Living.

I would like to rally many groups to action during this year - with the goal that by 11.11.11 we will have a global DIY Food day in cooperation with 350.ORG and bring awareness, engagement and action on one of the most effective ways to reverse Global Warming and avoid dangerous Climate Change (or Climate Chaos as some are saying), that is: by looking after our own backyard/home and learning to be self-reliant - or should I say partaking of the natural abundance that the legacy that we as responsible stewards of the planet should leave for our children. 11.11.11 is a goal date to show what is possible at a number of sites (minimum 350) and resonates with concern that People and Planet are reaching the "11th hour", last-chance to get things back on the right track. We can use the film, the 11th Hour during this year. Another idea that could inspire action is (as this is also remembrance day) to connect our "front-lines" effort to save the world with all the sacrifice that all those heros have made to secure our freedom, and ask, will we all now fight a good fight for people and planet to be restored and renewed? We can also connect with the coming year 2012 being prophesied as year of crisis and planetary collapse or or a turning point to move things rapidly forward with radical changes that will build a very different future - a prosperous and sustainable future for all.