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permaculture - Re: [permaculture] Open Source Permaculture

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Subject: permaculture

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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Open Source Permaculture
  • Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2012 12:20:32 -0400

On 4/16/2012 11:21 AM, Chris Watkins wrote:
Thanks Lawrence,

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 23:37, Lawrence F. London, Jr.<
venaurafarm@bellsouth.net> wrote:

You mean, is it possible to obtain a typical database dump from the
permaculture.info MediaWiki?


That would be ideal, yes.


...

You could 1) contact Scott/P.I./Scott's wife who does all the web
development for their organization 2) ibiblio, to a) with Scott's
permission, get a database dump to add to Appropedia b) take over
administration of it with P.I./Scott's permission and resume development
at ibiblio with them as host. 3) move domain hosting to Appropedia's
domain host and seamlessly integrate it with Appropedia or put it back
online as a separate Wiki alongside Appropedia.

I prefer that it go back online with ibiblio as host and one or more
volunteer adminstrators. It has free hosting at ibiblio and can securely
reside there indefinitely. If registration of the domain has lapsed,
which I doubt, that is another matter.

At this point there seems to be very little happening with a serious
online permaculture database or wiki so if you can resurrect
permaculture.info or add its dataset to Appropedia that would be a good
thing, certainly better than the present situation with what was once a
substantial project. If you want me to help in the same capacity as
before, communicating with ibiblio and register.com, I will do so.


I'd love your help, thank you.


Here's a plan: _You_ contact Scott and obtain the necessary permission to access the permaculture.info filesystem, at root/admin level if necessary. Richard Morris did this before and may still be doing that and/or have admin access. Maybe you could pursuade him to become involved again. I had login and password for permaculture.info before so I could configure the domain and define the host. I also have contacts at ibiblio to ask for status, what's needed to make any changes, admin access, move hosting, etc. If you or Scott want me to do this I will need to know what you want to do, logins and passwords etc. and I will do as much as I can. As it is,ibiblio/UNC is the host and Scott/P.I. is the domain owner, administrative contact, has login and password.

In terms of our resources and capacity to help, we would be able to add it
to Appropedia, and by doing this we would foster and maintain it, protect
it from spam and vandalism (as we are currently doing - e.g. I recently

That would be a good thing. Could it remain at ibiblio or should it be moved? Scott should retain domain ownership but you could have admin access, all regardless of where it resides. I can't imagine him giving it away or selling it as there are issues with fulfilling the terms of the grant I mentioned, but maybe not.

spent about 3 days worth of work writing a dedicated spam filter for
Appropedia, and I check it daily for false positives), and ensure its
security and publish weekly site dumps (as we do
now<http://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia:Current_dump>).
That's for starters.

THAT'S IMPRESSIVE! Takes a lot of skill and perseverance, Chris.

As you can see with the Open Source Permaculture project, we are moving
forward with the permaculture wiki and plan to do it well. We have new
permaculture partners and we're putting in a major effort. Our total spend
on Appropedia since 2006 would be in the same ballpark as the $15,000 for
PIW - with that, we've got a platform that works, we've never had
substantial downtime, we have a volunteer team that works on it daily, new
tech features, even a Firefox extension "AppropediaFox, academic
partnerships, and plans for growth.

That is fantastic! Congratulations. When I think what we could have done with our $15,000.......got wasted coddling intransigent, uncooperative weenies with no vision and no sense of sharing.
Richard Archer, a list subscriber, was a major participant in this project.

If there's a team of dedicated people ready to do a similar amount of work
on PIW tech and content, then that could work as well - but they'd be

There is no formal team any more but there are a number of subscribers to the two lists I created for the project and others to follow, namely this one of yours. A new team could be formed who would be interested in contributing time and work, What would be needed are various levels of administrators or whatever they are called; those who can monitor page changes, user registration, access levels and contributions.
I will subscribe you to these two lists so you can read the archives and communicate with subscribers. I can make you co-owner too which might help as things develop. You's have access to all the folks who were involved before, some with impressive professional skills.

starting well behind in terms of site development, and important tools like
Semantic MediaWiki (a very useful set of features, which took hundreds of
hours of work to set up on Appropedia) would presumably be a long way off.

That's my pitch for making Appropedia the new home for this data set rather
than duplicating the effort. Pardon the hard sell - but I've only stated
what I observe to be true. If another attempt is made at starting a
separate permaculture.info site, we'll still be friendly, of course, though
it would seem to me like a lost opportunity for collaboration. But that's
just my opinion - I try not to be too attached to it :-).

I do not think that permaculture.info is going anywhere in its current state and under current management. That needs to change and we need to revive this valuable permaculture wiki.

I look forward to hearing what decision is made - especially if there's a
site dump we can add to Appropedia, and support for us to do so.

Plenty of work ahead getting anything done but we shall persevere.

I will add you to pcplantdb and pcdb lists as subscriber and admin; let me know if you don't need the latter.

More later, sooner if possible.


Thanks!

Any time. This is a pet project of mine.

LL




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