So I'm the hexayurt guy -- http://hexayurt.com and http://appropedia.org/hexayurt

We've been at this FOSS housing thing for 20 years, aiming for upgradable shelters for climate refugees rather than middle class housing. I've known the wikihouse folks from before the beginning and (frankly) I've always found the to be predatory jerks. Wikihouse came out of a potential collaboration between that team and the hexayurt project. We spent quite a bit of time discussing doing an FOSS house together, then they cut me out of the deal and six months later launched wikihouse.

Never have I been more grateful that somebody ignored every bit of advice that I gave them. Nothing of our thinking is in this bloody thing. Fortunately.

The core problem with wikihouse is that *it is designed to get grant funding* not to be buildable. The architecture group behind it is a grant farming operation with a rumoured tendency to implementing ideas that are very close to (but not exact copies of) things which are around in the ecosystem. So they took a good look at the hexayurt, ignored everything about it which made it practical (uses standard 4x8s, uses widely available fasteners like deck screws or aluminium tape), and then shipped something which they knew was never going to be economic to build but hit the grant funding sweet spot: CNC machines, parametric design, and so on. That's why it looks this way.

Like any technology which is designed to live on grand funding practicality has never been the point. The point is that universities etc. can noodle around with it, learn from it, get some ideas tested, make a contribution, and then move on. Architecture has a constant need for things to design and things to do.

Architecture for Humanity used to have a web site which collected together hundreds of designs for emergency shelter and basically it was just a place for students to publish impractical designs because they had to be published somewhere.

No harm in it as long as nobody expects it to be buildable and fortunately that mistake was not made: theory stayed theory.

Hexayurt Project has never been incorporated, and never taken grant funding. Once or twice people have paid me as an engineer to work on specific projects, but I make a living as a tech CEO. Many thousands of builders for Burning Man, and a ton of genuine grass roots innovation on multiple fronts. It is, by any standards, a pretty good open source project with a lot of contributors and a lot of users.

What it isn't yet is a refugee shelter. To turn the "well proven at Burning Man" design into something that can be built at scale to cushion climate refugees and other displaced people is going to require a serious investment from somebody in testing in a range of environments, and refining the designs particularly when it comes to flooring and variants like spraying the shelters with shotcrete to make them permanent where needed.

https://www.appropedia.org/Hexayurt_project/Master_List_of_D...

Donor driven aid is a huge problem. Lack of testing regimes for new shelter technology is a huge problem.

There is a total revolution in open source architecture coming but nobody seems to know how best to get it started. Neither one of these projects is it.

Not yet. Roll on the day.