# Living Video and the Akvo Video Strategy | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [78]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Text), 2011-05-03 (from the career record), http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/living-video-and-the-akvo-video-strategy-2467. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Communications practice for documenting development projects.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Akvo (2008): Water work at Akvo, the Dutch open-source water and sanitation foundation.
  - First hexayurt built (2003): The first Hexayurt prototype, built at Burning Man from cardboard panels. (suggested by machine)
  - The Physical Aspects of Distributed Infrastructure (2008): Design study for ultra-low-cost solar thermal homes off the grid: cooling from the ground and evaporation,... (suggested by machine)
  - Laziness, Impatience and Hubris (2011): Talk at c-base, Berlin: Larry Wall's three virtues of a programmer applied to building, by a hackitect. (suggested by machine)
  - One Network, One World: Designing for a 7+ Billion Person World (2013): Talk at the OHM2013 hacker camp: housing everyone at one planet's worth of consumption, and why... (suggested by machine)
  - Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism (2014): Talk at Electromagnetic Field 2014: the Hexayurt as engineering outside the market, for the three billion... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts.
  - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Hexayurt shelter design & project — tape, hexayurt, roof (33%); Tweets & captured social feeds (33%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Akvo (6 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 3 undated); Hexayurt Project (1 here; 70 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 4 undated); India (1 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.39 (1.00 is the top), number 172 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [332] Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Mark Charmer of AKVO and Chris... (2012): same career work: Akvo
  - [267] [The future of humanitarian innovation (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/267.md): same career work: Akvo
- On the same works, just before: [849] Through the Looking Glass (slides) (2010); [830] [Laziness, Impatience and Hubris: Vinay Gupta of the... (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/830.md); [364] [burning ice brussels seven minute tour (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/364.md)
- On the same works, just after: [751] [Vinay Gupta and Julie Danger on Camp Danger Semi Folding... (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/751.md); [360] [ZOOM0003 (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/360.md); [193] [Nearodesic Polyhedron Hexayurt Dome – Morgan Engel's Site (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/193.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Living Video and the Akvo Video Strategy | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution, document, 2011-05-03, http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/living-video-and-the-akvo-video-strategy-2467; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [78], https://guptaoption.com/texts/78.md.

## Passages
[passage 1](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/living-video-and-the-akvo-video-strategy-2467) These are two pieces of documentation I’ve done for organizations which wanted to use video to draw communities together into collective action. The first is the Akvo Video Strategy (pdf) and supporting technical doc which from two years ago, February 2009. These two documents together express a vision of how to use video to draw ordinary people into making videos to document projects and enhance their ability to work together to get things done! Akvo has been working hard on this approach since I did the original strategy, as you can see from this new Akvo film Mulindwa William and his water project in Africa. This film was shot by Luuk Diphoorn. I shot a film of Luuk Diphoorn, and taught Luuk how to shoot these simple films. Akvo also runs Watercube.TV, which has over 500 similar films of water and sanitation professionals from all over the world. The films reveal little flashes about the personality of the people involved, and the stories reveal their work, which brings support, resources and transparency to their projects. The format is so simple anybody can do it, which leads to participation in video not just by watching films, but by making them. I film Luuk and explain what I’m doing. Luuk films Mulindwa William, and explains what he’s doing. Next year Mulindwa William may film somebody else, and explain the technique and the practice, and this is how the craft of making small, simple videos spreads. Mark Charmer, who commissioned me to do the Akvo Video Strategy, made a landmark film in India which encompasses the best of this approach to video. You can watch it here, in context, at The Future of Poverty. It shows an Indian woman, Hansabai, showing off the well she got financed in her village. Watch it, and understand the future just a little bit better. There’s also the “how not to do video” film I shot for Akvo which, ironically, has become quite useful to a number of people! The second is a manifesto I did for the West Norwood Feast, a community market project in London. You can see the films I shot for that project at that link. The manifesto is called Living Video. I’m quite proud of this little manifesto, I think it really expresses why getting people to make their own videos is so important to getting communities organized around projects. The right approach to community film-making binds together communities of interest around a project, and turns them into communities of action. Living Video Making what’s happening visible to people who’d like to get involved Producing good video is both difficult and expensive, but the worst photograph is the one which was not taken, and the worst camera is the one you don’t have with you, or the courage to start. There are four rules for producing useful video easily. Stand still or get a tripod Film dialogue and interaction Don’t hide the camera (or the camera operator) Have fun and break these

[passage 2](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/living-video-and-the-akvo-video-strategy-2467) but the worst photograph is the one which was not taken, and the worst camera is the one you don’t have with you, or the courage to start. There are four rules for producing useful video easily. Stand still or get a tripod Film dialogue and interaction Don’t hide the camera (or the camera operator) Have fun and break these rules when necessary The visual style of television or film is as impossible to replicate as the glossy full-face pictures on the covers of fashion magazines. You are seeing the work of dozens of skilled professionals – or hundreds in the case of feature films. What is achievable is the “good holiday pictures” level of video; a video which shows somebody who is socially involved with a project roughly what is happening. A video which takes a person who is interested in the project and turns them into a person who is involved with the project. The final thing people do before deciding to get involved is watch the videos – it’s the largest investment of time a person can make short of showing up, so it is the point at which people make up their minds. Therefore to be effective, such a video should not sell, it should reveal. “This is what you will see if you come!” An honest, simple video which shows what is happening, is less than two minutes long, has good sound (just stand right beside people!), is well-lit (daylight! under the spotlight!) can achieve that moment of contact with the reality of something, unedited and unfiltered, which is the spark of engaging with people’s sense of the real, and therefore with their deepest sense of what they want. Some people make great films by imagining cool stuff and filming it beautifully. We make great films by doing cool stuff, and showing the basics of what we have done. The hard part is doing something worth seeing. Try not to edit, and keep the fact that a camera is in the scene socially visible. Talk over the top of your shot, try not to be invisible. Ask people to do things for the camera. Prompt with questions. Television is the illusion of reality, in which the mechanisms used to create and record the illusion must be invisible. Our films are just a little slice of reality, in which you are stood there with a camera, joking with your mates about making a video of this for the internet, because it’s great! I’ve shot a lot of this kind of video myself. From the beginning the Hexayurt Project has run on video, because a five minute clip of a hexayurt makes it real in a way that no set of pictures ever can, and we’ve found that people who go on to build hexayurts usually watched the full length hour long construction videos, the whole video, end to end, two or three times before actually going on to build one themselves. The power of video to

[passage 3](http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/living-video-and-the-akvo-video-strategy-2467) clip of a hexayurt makes it real in a way that no set of pictures ever can, and we’ve found that people who go on to build hexayurts usually watched the full length hour long construction videos, the whole video, end to end, two or three times before actually going on to build one themselves. The power of video to engage people in action is really underestimated, and I hope you’ll be inspired to use video in new ways for your own projects.

---
End of [78] Living Video and the Akvo Video Strategy | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [751](https://guptaoption.com/texts/751.md) Vinay Gupta and Julie Danger on Camp Danger Semi Folding... (2011); the most closely related, [332] Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Mark Charmer of AKVO and Chris... (2012) (no text here); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.