Homepage: Welcome to the Permaculture Information Web, a growing resource of information created by and for the people who use it.  

Mission: The Permaculture Information Web seeks to offer information regarding the relationships between flora, and accordingly assist with the process of Permaculture design.

Vision: Permaculture is a form of sustainable agriculture that employs nature as its model, seeking to design landscapes which mimic natural ecosystems.  It is modular and applicable to any bioregion, therefore bearing immense potential for satisfying basic human needs without compromising those of the Earth.  However, because it is relationship-oriented and highly specific to local conditions, it can be difficult to practice.  Instead of discretely selecting individual plants, relationships between flora must be woven together carefully, in consideration of a plant’s relationships to other plants, to the overall ecosystem, and to the people whose needs it may satisfy.  Although numerous databases offer information about individual flora, none offer information about the relationships between flora, along with Permaculture-centric characteristics such as inputs, outputs, and multiple functions – critical to the practice of Permaculture design, our understanding of ecological processes, and ultimately, our capacity for systems thinking.  Accordingly, the Permaculture Information Web will provide an online database of relationships between flora, assisting interested parties with the process of Permaculture design.  

People practicing Permaculture worldwide are discovering relevant and useful information about plant relationships, but because Permaculture as a field is somewhat un-institutionalized, no central repository for collecting and presenting such information exists.  PIW seeks to help fill this void, providing a mechanism that interested parties may both glean information from and contribute information to.  In this way, PIW will support the emerging field of Permaculture, by harvesting valuable information from the Permaculture community and rendering it freely accessible.  

The PIW will not only present information about webs of life, but will do in a web-like manner, encouraging users to think systemically.  PIW’s user-interface will be highly deliberate, and essential to the manner in which its informational content is understood and applied.  The PIW team acknowledges that in order for users to appreciate complex networks of living organisms, the information must be presented and interacted with as such.  Put simply, the message will match the medium, and the medium will facilitate the understanding of the message.  Ecological webs will further be mimicked in the application’s backend components.  (Only include this last sentence if it actually applies – at least we could link to references of Ecosystem Information Engineering…)

The Permaculture Information Web is by and for the members of the Permaculture Community.  The PIW team is creating and maintaining the infrastructure in which to embed relevant information, but the information itself will be contributed by interested parties at the grassroots level.  Ideally, PIW will act as a dynamic organism, co-evolving with the needs and preferences of the Permaculture community, and growing with the information imparted by its members.  The PIW team hopes you will both feed from and nourish this fertile resource…