Permaculture Database

[christophe mckeon gonzalez de leon <chromatophore@gmail.com>]

hi,

> A useful tool would create linkages to existing high quality internet
> information outside the platform as well as reference non-digital
> published materials.

http://www.wiserearth.com has that kind of functionality built in,
they call it a resource so as to accomodate things besides
just websites.

http://www.wiserearth.org/resource/view/be2f0b6c2b0bd51c11e8e35ee57ee0ca

if you mean create them automatically, there may be some
scope for that. maybe sites like wiserearth have
a public API that could be dredged for some initial DB populating.
it may even be worth seeing what could be gotten out of google as
you suggested below. but i think that user created resources
might be the most valuable/relevant.

have you seen http:/www.twine.com

if (the big if) a central permahub type site were
to be widely adopted, then just a simple resource
entity with a description, links, reviews, and rating
could become quite useful. but for it to become so, it
would really need many users. i am thinking of something
a bit more lightweight than what wiserearth has, their
resources pages are a bit busy.

> Could you have a site that serves as a browser interface, that lets you
> record impressions about the pages you visit, and logs information about
> those sites so that the next person who dons the Pc browser can benefit
> from the previous experience?

yeah you could have a proxy server do that but getting anybody
to use it systematically would be well nigh impossible. there
are also privacy issues, what if they forget they are on it, and go to
edibleperennialgoatlingerie.com, is that logged?

> I suspect to require the ideas/concepts to
> actually be housed within the platform would be a deal-killer.

i don't think this has to be an either/or proposition.
plenty could be stored on site, and plenty could
be stored off in the form of links/ratings etc.
if only half of the site ever gets used in the end
then so be it. i think though that if all we want is
a kind of social bookmarker, then other sites
are already doing the job.

i think you are thinking of a much more sophisticated
system, but to me the first question is how do you get
your data. how do you get it out of the user?

> As you surf you hit flags, and push stars

i don't think you could get anybody to actually do this
as they are surfing, surfing is complicated irritating enough
as is, and people tend to try to find the shortest route possible
to the information they need. they *might* rate stuff after the fact
if they are particularly impressed or disappointed and/or
perhaps with some nudging.

> and indicate moments of inspiration, categorizing and ranking, all being
> logged, and linked to your user profile (that indicates your ecoregion
> and self-identified purposes).  Creating a collective 'favorites' that
> guides the next user...

tying in the user's geolocation and other user specific data,
to which links (resources) they have followed through the system,
and/or  to how they have rated them, is a good idea, and could
work even with the simple resource entity i described above. there could be
some kind of sidebar, say, that showed a list of resources of potential 
interest
to specific users based on their commonalities with other users and the 
ratings
given. if a user clicked through a resource link, that could be stored, and
then after some elapsed time (say 48 hours) the user could be gently
reminded to rate the resource if they haven't done so already.

it could also be possible for a resource to be saved as a favorite,
in which case we can infer that the user is interested w/o forcing
them to rate it, i.e. the DB gets useful info as a side effect of the user
just using the website to help themselves. that last point is a fairly permie
one i think and is generally a good guideline to go by in the design of
the site, IMO.

> - much high value info to permie-like people is not self-identified as
> permie.

that to me is the killer question; is permaculture so many things
at once that a central website is not even worth building? dunno,
but plenty of people are putting plenty of permaculture specific info
up on wiserearth. would they do the same on a more narrowly
defined platform? maybe sites like wiserearth are too generalized
and there is a niche?

cheers,
_c