Permaculture Database

[jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>]

On Saturday 31 March 2007 4:04 pm, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
> Concurrently.

 Okay .. by whom, then?  If it's the same set of people, what's in
 it for them (and why are we on two mailing lists).

 If it's not .. how do the two groups feel about it, and would there
 be an intent to merge the systems in the future?

> What we have been talking aboutlately - a permaculture fauna/flora
> relationships database; a system revealing relationships between plants and
> plants, plants and animals and animals and animals. Or justleave out
> animals for time being is this is a better way to get started.

 Leaving animals (and other items, such as you cite, soil, water
 features, earthworks, climate, tools and equipment, methodologies
 and so on) out of the mix at this point would be like leaving all
 those things out of a permaculture landscape design process -- you'd
 just be creating problems for yourself later, and you'd be building
 a greatly degraded system.

 You might not physically introduce animals into your physical system
 for a couple of years, but you'd definitely cater for their presence
 in the environment - you'd leave spaces, you'd put those spaces in
 the right spot, you'd engineer trees and earthworks in accordance
 with where and how you ultimately wanted everything to be.

> I see what you mean and am trying to make suggestion that are achievable
> software-wise, within the limits of my knowledge of such (I am learning a
> good bit reading you all).

 Fairy nuff.  From what I've seen so far, nothing unachievable has
 been touted -- if anything, people are pulling back from grand plans
 to something sub-optimal, either in the name of making it less
 complex or to meet pre-existing ideas of what's achievable.

 I suspect the latter doesn't do anyone any favours -- plant databases
 already exist, and building another incomplete one isn't going to
 be very appealing to programmers, or useful to Pc designers.

 Let's think *really* big and only scale it back once we know for
 sure that we can't do something.  Aiming low means you meet your
 expectations .. but that's a Pyrrhic victory.

> As I see it you're not necessarily splitting your information up and
> parcelling it out to other web apps but adding on useful apps with features
> that we will need and that are not provided by the RDB.

 Ahh, I think I see the problem there.  The distinction with the DB
 versus extant techs such as CMS / Wiki / etc ... ?

 I see the system that we're talking about starting to talk about
 designing as incorporating all the functionality that we need, and
 if that pulls in existing components, all well and good.  I'm not,
 though, drawing a distinction between what we build and what we
 take off the free shelf at this point.

> I do think that one of our most difficult jobs will be to
> get people to use and contribute to the database. Comments?

 Entirely agree.

 On the upside, if it is constructed in such a way as to engender a
 great deal of faith in the quality of the data it contains and the
 ways that you can extract that data, then I think it will attract the
 kinds of people (and their data) that we want to attract.

 OTOH there's a few people in here, I gather, who would be happy
 to have a system that logs their own observations.  For my own part
 I just want to take that up one level to allow multiple sets of
 observations to exist so I can share them with other people (the
 worth of the data increases for both parties).

 Jedd.