[Strawbale] Olivers' Fun with Maps

[Max Vittrup Jensen]

Dear all,

First; thank you Rob Tom, for adding a smile to my face while reading 
your mails :-)  ( Despite your number perversion!)

I feel like adding to this discussion, that the past days Oliver and I 
have had a fair bit of email exchanges about the tech/admin issues of 
the map he has created.
I'm very grateful of his initiative, however it can still use some 
tweaking, none the least in deciding what and purpose of the map. A 
serious issue is the matter of location. I supplied a brief description 
and village/town location of each SB house in Czech Republic, however 
his system was set up to pinpoint the precise location, and he prefer 
between 80-100 words and direct contact.
My response was this: "Have you ever experienced having a father and 3 
kids knock on your door at 9 in the evening, asking to see the house? 
And by the way pitch their tent in the front yard? I've experienced that 
+worse. (By the way, we had visitors interested in moving here that 
night; they never did).
We have around 2-300 visitor a year. It's hard to work when people would 
like a tour, yet alone have a private family life. And who says you want 
to be friendly every day?"

Our aim is to have our center as demonstration home, and as such we 
don't mind the location issue, however such issue is the exact reason 
for some people not to join the map: If you look at Denmark there's 
currently only 4-5 SB homes on the map, which represents about 1/100th 
of reality.
Another issue is that it makes the map rely on home-owner agreement, and 
not as Herbert suggested: Someone (like me or Herbert) takes the 
initiative and adds it on for our country. I find that my action does 
not intrude too much on the privacy of the homeowner, as the location is 
put centrally at the town square, which may be 5 km from the house. The 
point to me is that it shows SB buildings exists in this country.

In addition I tried to highlight what I find a troublesome issue here in 
Czech: I attempted to outline the approach of using the Sb for each 
house, as fact is that majority of the Sb houses here (about 15), have 
had a facination for SB, but a fear of dealing with the building 
permits, and as such has made (in my opinion) poor use of the SB: 
Typically approach has been to make 2 non-burnable conventional walls 
and SB between them. In better cases the homes only have a wooden 
framework with reeds and plaster; rarely simply a limited layer of earth 
plaster on SB's (One case has up to 25 cm of earth plaster! Makes you 
wonder why an adobe wall (16cm) wasn't constructed instead!).

Oliver just wrote this: "If you are critical of the houses and they 
don't represent good SB examples that people can learn from, then I'd 
rather not have them on the map." ...Hmm: This could leave the Czech map 
quite empty(!), and I'll be the first to criticize elements of our own 
house as well...who'll be the judge? An architect or a natural builder? 
(Classically there's a mile between them; I'm aware that is not the case 
for many of you architects reading this list!).

In other words: Olivers map initiative is great! Please supply input for 
how to utilize it, so he can be guided by consensus...
The suggestion of different color pins could sort out the issue of 
location/owner submission.

Peace and Love,
Max