Permaculture Database

[jedd <jedd@progsoc.org>]

 This is an easy one.  Well, relatively.

> i'd like to hear more about how you think such a system would be
> used, by whom, and what it would be capable of? i might be thinking
> along different lines than you. it is an interesting possibility.

 Inspired, as I say, after doing my PDC, a few of us maintained
 contact for a while and discussed various pet projects we were
 looking at - mostly friends and family where we'd been asked for
 some suggestions (to take advantage of our sudden expertise ;)

 I wanted a system that would facilitate sharing those suggestions.

 So apart from the nerdy stuff (authentication and privacy etc) it
 would need to handle projects, each of which would include a place
 to dump images (a JS etch-a-sketch wasn't important), a forum slash
 mailing list to manage the discussions about same, perhaps a
 manually aggregated summary page (wiki) purely for the 'customer'
 to be able to see the distilled, net result of ideas presented
 in one place, a way of tagging the project partly for future
 reference (searching) but also to more easily categorise the
 information about the project (aspect, scale, climate) that could
 be summed up in v.short phrases or just single words.  Obviously
 you'd need more descriptive stuff to describe soil types, the
 requirements of the owner insofar as plant / fruit preferences,
 amount of disruption they'd be happy with, what they wanted to
 keep in the existing landscape, amount of time they'd have to
 do maintenance, etc.  Some of that stuff (maintenance effort)
 might be quantifiable, but for the most part I was happy to have
 the bulk of the descriptive data kept textual.  I didn't expect
 there'd be ever such a volume of projects that it'd be impossible
 to find one close to what you were working on at the time.

 J.