pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

Lawrence,

Mostly I'm very curious about where you are going with this PC
knowledge-base wiki thing.  So far everything you are talking about
seems exactly like my personal long term goals for HG.  I suspect that
we may be on different pages about where HG is headed both immediately
and long term.  When I did my visioning for Eden I came up with: 

  Eden is an attempt to collect and disseminate information in the
  form of a freely accessible electronic sourcebook to facilitate the
  emergence of a sustainable society.  Inspired by Ken Fern and the
  Plants for a Future project, Eden expands that vision into a larger
  and more accessible collection of wisdom about sustainability that
  includes PFAF, permaculture, natural building, simplified
  lifestyles, alternative energy, sustainable agriculture, and much
  more.

In the HG project we may only be talking about plants at the moment
but with an object centric design adding elements like articles,
essays, and other forms of media will be trivial to add and existing
systems of moderation, comments, search, etc. should work with only a
little tweaking.  And because we are tackling the [perceived]
deficiencies of wikis up front, HG should be much more attractive to
our contributors/authors than wikis.  I am convinced that HG will
eventually be more than I could ever do by myself with Eden so I am
abandoning development of Eden in favor of HG.

This gets said a lot but I think it would be better to join efforts
than to work on two different but similar projects.  By what you have
written in the last week I think we actually have the same larger
vision and perhaps it is merely an issue of not fully communicating
our visions.  I am very interested in what HG needs to add or become
to fully match your own vision of a PC knowledge-base?

If you are thinking that HG just isn't moving fast enough and you want
to start collecting images and other media now, absolutely great but
two cautions.  The obvious one is accessibility (format,
quality-vs-size, etc) although this can [mostly] be worked around with
translation/scaling filters.  The more subtle yet highly important one
is the question of copyright.  If you choose or your contributors
insist on a license that ends up being incompatible with HG we may
not be able to use the data.  The #1 reason I'm suggesting the
CC-BY-NC-SA for the HG data is that the PFAF data is available under
that license.  I urge you to use this license or whatever license HG
eventually decides on.


Picked my first tomato today,
Chad

-- 
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'