pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

John Howe writes:
 > > John H., have you been following Z3 any more closely than me?
 > 
 > Hey All,
 > 
 > Got got back from a weekend course on the Bullock's site on Orcas Island,
 > WA. What an awesome site! Learned a lot about grafting fruit trees to
 > native stocks ( apples to native cranapples, plums to hawthorns ) and
 > learned a bit more about Guilds from Toby Hemenway ( who just recently
 > moved to Portland, OR ).
 > 
 > Zope: I haven't been tracking Z3 development that closely, though I tend
 > to prefer more stable releases for production server reasons.
 > 
 > There was a whirlwind of activity on this list and say my name mentioned a
 > couple of times, specifically to defining ongoing roles.
 > 
 > I am currently working full time+, so my active bandwidth is limited at
 > times. However, I do run a production service and can offer sysadmin
 > guidance, software engineering/release feedback ( I have done very complex
 > Linux installers in the past ), Q/A, design review, performance analysis,
 > and provide software engineering support services such as bug tracking,
 > project tracking, Zope, LAMP, and CVS/Subversion if needed. I am very
 > interested in this project and would like to be part of the loop.
 > 
 > I see that there is effort to get the code to ibiblio a/o sourceforge. You
 > may also want to check out http://savannah.gnu.org/ is advert banners are
 > a bother. I was evaluating a PHP based Scrum PM software set, though it
 > doesn't seem to be production grade yet. There are a couple others I am
 > reviewing, though they require Tomcat backend and I need some free time to
 > get that set up.

Thanks for the intro.  If you think you will have time to participate
on this level I suggest you consider being part of the decision making
group.  I'm into it but the rest of the group needs to weigh in on it
as well.  Permaculture geeks are a rare breed, almost as rare as
computer programmer farmers ;-)

 > One thing from the Guild presentation I will share is that Guild mapping
 > comes from functional analysis of elements, and lots of natural
 > observation. Toby relanguaged this a bit, since functional analysis can be
 > a mouthful to something more elegant and accessible:
 > 
 > Needs -> Element -> Provides
 > 
 > Part of the Guild mapping comes from matching the "provides" of one
 > element to the "needs" of another. It would be interesting to add a type
 > of search feature into HG that one could search on "provides" or "needs"
 > as potential matches for Guild memberships.
 > 
 > For instance, a simple example:
 > 
 > Needs                  Element               Provides
 > 
 > Predator Protection    Cherry Tree Start     Fruit ( after maturing )
 > 
 > 
 >                        Wild Rock Rose        Predator Protection ( Deers )
 > 
 > The Bullock's observed that over time, the birds will seed out fruit trees
 > into Wild Rock Rose thickets, which allow fruit trees to mature without
 > being munched to death by deers. As the tree matures, the thicket can be
 > removed and replaced by dynamic accumalators such as
 > comfrey/lovage/horseradish, etc ( see also:
 > http://homepage.powerup.com.au/~1earth/guilds.html ).
 > 
 > The change of the guild characters over time is an interesting dynamic to
 > consider for HG ( the needs of a fledgling tree change over time once it's
 > branches are above human head level, beyond the reach of grazing deers )
 > and then require others needs ( such as pruning/grafting to maximize fruit
 > bearing ). Maybe something to keep on the radar as the project moves
 > forward.

Wow, really good stuff I hadn't thought of.  This would be a great way
to consider different combinations of relationships of elements.  I
definitely think Needs and Provides should be plant attributes.  I'm
not having any revelations as to how to handle these over time... we
need to think on that one for a while.  The other issue that I can
forsee is that we currently don't have much of this kind of info in
our datasets, except for part of Provides and the cultural
requirements part of Needs.  This is going to take considerable
authoring.  

 > Another lesson that was of interest is that certains plants change
 > behaviour as latitude changes. For instance, one plant is evergreen down
 > south ( relative to the Pacific NW ), however, changes to deciduous up
 > here.

Another thing to start turning around in your brain is how we should
hand geographical differences in general.  I've been thinking about
this for a couple of months and haven't had any stunning insights.
The only thing so far that seems reasonable is to start with a
non-specific locale description of the element and then both author
and display locale specific differences for users from that locale.  

 > I guess I am looking ahead in the project where HG can be used as a
 > what-if/what-can-I-match design tool in a sense as well as tracking
 > natural observations in relation to geo-climate-locality. ( And still
 > mulling over new inspirations from the course ).

Cool!

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