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Subject: Permaculture Database

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  • From: Rich Morris <mailinglists@pfaf.org>
  • To: pcdb <pcdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcdb] Summary Of Ideas and Things to Vote on
  • Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 13:58:47 +0000

Sean Maley wrote:
----- Original Message ----
From: negiliblek <negiliblek@yahoo.com>
Subject: [pcdb] Summary Of Ideas and Things to Vote on

I. Method of coming to final agreements: Republic, Democracy, or Consensus?

Sociocracy with a Quorum and minimum lead time to provide input (active abstainers count towards the quorum, as do participants; no response assumes a person didn't get the email and needs to be contacted for quorum). Non-voters in Consensus can get in the way. Democracy and Representation create top down authority.

It partially depends on the size of the community. At present we are small in number so consensus can work.

In political science they distinguish three roles of governments
*legislature - makes the rules
*judiciary - interpretes the rules
*executive - day to day running
See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers

In wikipedia, the legislature is basically everybody and more or less by consensus (of those who participate in a particular discussion). People like sysops with the power to ban users, delete articles etc form the executive, and some users are arbitrators, forming the legislature, which only happens when things go really wrong, if if a sysop is out of hand. They also have Jimbo the king, whos basically hands off 99% of the time, but can step in when consensus is failing.

(side note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_duties is an iteresting article as its been written as a design patte, with a pattern and applications sections.)

II. I propose, ask for a vote on the following:
A- MediaWiki
Objects? Since when is a Wiki a Class? Do you mean to say Wiki pages?

Support. Still think we should have more discussion on this though.

B-Content Management System

??? Wouldn't a CMS primarily apply to bioregion specific needs? Or do you mean that we will create tools for bioregions to add to a permie standardized CMS.


C- We elect a secretary who will keep track of our decisions and post them via a simple web page that isn't really a part of our main project.

What about independent projects then discuss what to make public, merge, or ignore? Each person with something to offer can track the decisions and post them for themselves. During conflict, we can come to consensus for an arbitrator/facilitator.

We must bear in mind that blocking behavior looses participation, which makes blocking a taboo. Suggest alternatives, point out conflicts, keep personal backup copies, create an alternative for discussion, create a conflict test scenario, or just get out of the way by saying you abstain. We each have a responsibility to each other to keep the project going, so must take great care to not put bad code into place that breaks other peoples code. The greater our participation, the more tools (and more useful tools) we will provide.

Problems will happen. Get used to seeing them as something positive without being phony about it. The largest points of failure will be design. Bad UI code or faulty analysis shouldn't take the whole system out. Faulty table designs in place for months lead to permanently lost data, not the inability to input data (quick bug fix) or an accidental dropped table (restore from backup). Beware of hierarchy in a relational world.

III.-I propose our initial scope is: energy web matrices, organisms characteristics, and environmental effects

I like the idea of a ''Permaculture patterns wiki'', the pattern concept is broad enough to cover most things we would want to put in and also brings a certain discipline to the structure of articles.

We could have specific patterns for plants, animals, tools, methods.

What about collecting and cataloging available data and tools? Rich has most of the plant data that you are requesting, plus you can find USDA and ITIS free for the taking. I can get you a zip code database with latitude and longitude, if you want. Although postal codes are available for several former Empire colonies, I haven't seen latitude and longitude as available for USA zip codes.

Licence is the key, PFAF data is now co-licences GFDL Creative Commons (by/sa). Plants is copyright free (with some exception for images). Wikipedia is GFDL (theres now a good lot of plant information there).
Dear
Thanks for your payment. You should automatically be taken to the download page. If that does not happen you can find it at
http://www.pfaf.org/database/D_paypal.html

If you wish the database to be sent on a CD-ROM please send me an
email and I'll put one in the post.

Rich


--
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