Open-Source Goes Hammer and Nail

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But according to Frohardt, the refugees themselves often don't want the agency's housing solution. "When the refugees were returned to Kosovo after the war, the U.N. peacekeepers distributed kits of blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The people said, just give us the money you're going to spend on the plastic, we know where to find the materials to rebuild our homes. But agencies and often military bodies involved have a very mechanistic way of looking at things. They want to control everything."

AfH, like Frohardt, is influenced by Fred Cuny, the disaster-relief specialist who disappeared in Chechnya in 1995 but always advocated a more localized approach to relief efforts. AfH's building projects are tailored to the specific requirements of the community in question, and always incorporate local labor and materials. It's a bottom-up model of humanitarian aid that leverages the power of the community—both local communities in need and the global community of designers—and aims to spur local economies.

Helping Hands

In Bam, for example, the organization helped fund Los Angeles-based Relief International's effort to build 800 homes using a steel, quake-proof substructure covered in traditional building materials. By using local labor, each house cost $1,200—just $350 more than a winterized U.N. tent, according to AfH. And with their new construction skills, the residents went on to build a school. For Sinclair, the money flowing into the local economy and the residents' new skills are as important as the new roof over their heads. "The question is, can we create an economic model that will help improve the living standards of 5 billion people?" he says.

Even with its growing network of architects (there are now 152 self-organized "chapters," with 3,400 members around the world working on local projects) and partners such as engineering company Ove Arup, architects Polshek & Partners, and various relief organizations, AfH can't meet that challenge on its own. Which is one reason Sinclair launched the OAN (which is entirely separate from AfH). As an open-source effort, OAN can scale more quickly than any company or organization and has a better chance of meeting the challenge.

Sinclair unveiled the OAN at the TED Conference because the network grew directly out of his 2006 TED Prize, a unique award that provides $100,000 and, more important, help from TED's powerful network of attendees and sponsors to fulfill the winner's wish. Soon after Sinclair described his desire to create an open-source repository of architectural ideas, Sun Microsystems (SUNW) donated two 3-terabyte servers and its engineering services, AMD (AMD) offered to host the servers (and is also now funding the $250,000 Open Architecture Prize, a competition to design a computer lab that can be adapted for developing communities), and the small San Francisco-based Hot Studio volunteered to design the Web site.

Licensed to Build

Working with OAN to create one of the most critical—and radical—features of the site, Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that has developed alternatives to standard copyright law, adapted its intellectual-property licenses to build structures that allow designers to stipulate usage rights.

In total, Creative Commons drafted eight licenses for the network, including a Developing Nations license that lets an architect retain ownership of a design in the developed world but also allows the design to be freely used or adapted elsewhere, a "public-domain" license that frees a work from copyright entirely, and a more restrictive license that allows a design to be studied—think of it as an architectural case study—but prohibits changes or commercial use. The range of licenses should satisfy the concerns of all architects, even those reluctant to give away their hard work.