Permaculture Database

[Bear Kaufmann <bear@ursine-design.com>]

On Apr 4, 2007, at 11:03 AM, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:

... But having two projects  

working side by side to the same goal or not benefiting from what's  

come before, does seem wasteful.

_That_ completely reflects my thoughts about one project evolving out of two.

I wrote earlier:

1) Are we going to embark on a new project?

That is what's happening. With good input from a number of people.

Excellent.

...People need to feel that  

it is _their_ project and that their participation

and input is desired and valued. This was rarely, if ever, done in  

the previous project and is probably why it ground to

a halt, unfinished.

Agreed. Though accouncements of the development work  going on were  

occasionally made to the PC lists.

I don't think the project reached a state were it was ready to draw  

on the full knowledge of a large number of users. Plus there was  

another list used to draw some information from potential users.

I don't agree with this. Noone showed any interest in involving the permaculture community

in ongoing development. Project updates and the other user list were just not enough.

What I was referring to is direct input of information on plants, not the development process.

There was initially interest in developing use-cases and a more thorough understanding of how users would interact with the system, and what they would need. There were some starts of that on that in the wiki and a few other documents.

It seems there are people on this list with more experience doing that. It might be a good idea to draw on input from the lists via a survey form to understand what they might find useful or want in a project like this. This might tie in well with the permaculture digital library project (Heidi Pettitt). These could be developed into use cases/stories and guide development. This should preferably happen in the early stages before a specific route is decided.

That may be a point to consider for this project: finding a way to  

maximize user input at an early stage of development.

You are probably aware of the large number of well informed, experienced,

knowledgeable practitioners, professionals, web developers and authors

in the pc list who would be interested in being involved in the development process,

read: ideas, information, support, promotion, encouraging the others to be involved

and above all be willing to use and submit input to the database when it is is online.

These are people "who know how to subscribe and unsubscribe" themselves. As for Paul's

comment about wanting "quality input" to make it worth the time spent developing the system

most of the aforementioned folks as well as many others we rarely or occasionally hear from

know as much or more that most of us do about permaculture and related subjects.

Relegating the whole body of pclist subscribers to being a bunch of ill-informed, inept peons

who might taint our database just won't fly (that was somewhat the attitude toward them

in the former pcplantdb project). I, who started that pc list in 1993, continue to be

amazed at the quality of the subscriber base and never cease to be amazed at ongoing dialog,

news, announcements and general input. These, and their friends, professional contacts,

students and colleagues and  are the people who will use the database and they

need to be involved from the start. Data input needs to come from somewhere and it surely won't

come just from us. The knowledgebase needs to be gleaned from those who use it and they need to

feel that it is something they can claim as their own. We provide the system, criteria for data

submission, quality control and mechanism for ongoing maintenance and they provide the information,

tailored to their own bioregional needs...

Agreed. But if we're developing a system that is more complex then a out of the box wiki/CMS system (like PIW/pcplantdb, which Chad wrote from scratch), it takes time to develop before user data can be entered into the system.

Cheers,

Bear