pcplantdb

[Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>]

Stephanie Gerson wrote:

> hi all,
>
> Not sure if this is the right time to raise this, and it might get lost in the
> shuffle.  If so (becauase you are too busy doing the wonderful work you've
> been doing!) - no worries, I'll raise it again.
>
> So we were denied funding from the Lindbergh Foundation (*very* competitive, I
> didn't expect to get funding but tried anyhow).  But they had some very useful
> feedback for us that I wanted to share with you, and ask you advice on for
> future grant proposals:
>
> -Literature: they have a literature category, and ours was apparently weak. 
> What informational resources (books, websites, or otherwsie) could serve as a
> Bibliography for our project?  Ideas welcome!
PFAF website. Wikipedia as example of colaborative editing.
Many websites of permaculture people. Lots of permaculture books.
One journal publication. Could probably dig up a lot of references
to other IT tools/concepts which we are intending to include.

> -Basic Need: they didn't see PIW as satisfying any basic needs - most of the
> world's population lives in dense urban areas and have little time to
> experiment with intense urban agriculture.  How do we respond to this?

Strong govemental shifts towards sustainable agriculture
show that the whole farming sector is going through big changes.
This means that there is a real needed for a large colection
of experiences of best pratice in sustainable ag.

Seems like Lindberge is very narrow minded.

> -Mechanism for Peer Reviewal: would this simply be user feedback?  Or do we
> want to involve designers of other Biology/Ecology-related databases, or
> Biology/Ecology experts?  

Yes our user feedback is one of the central themes
of the whole project. You could view it as a system to
enable peer review.

> I'd Love to hear what you think.  And when the time is ripe, perhaps I'll ask
> these questions on the PIW list.

I could expand on all these at length.

I'm guessing with the right wording we could resubmit. However, 
Lindberge seems very stuck in the academic view point, where we are much 
more focussed on the needs of our "comunity of interest" i.e. 
permaculturalists. I'd probably look somewhere else.
> more proposals in the works...
> *Stephanie

Nice one for feeding this back.

Rich