Reporting Requirements

Your report package should include:
•	Grant ID number  
•	Your complete progress report (see guidelines below)
•	News clippings or other relevant material (just the highlights)

Please follow this outline and address each of these issues in your progress report.

I.    Impact and Assessment
Reiteration of goals and objectives and progress toward those goals;
Response should include both qualitative and quantitative impacts.

Permaculture Information Web (PIW) Project Goal: To develop an interactive application allowing users to both input and obtain information about ecological relationships for purposes of Permaculture, and sustainable agriculture in general.  Attached is a timeline of PIW, and describes past, present, and future acheivements and objectives both quantitatively and qualitatively.  We are currently at Stage 2 of Phase I, and attracting significant user participation as we proceed.  Please refer to Phase I and II deliverables for the specific features PIW will include.

II.   Challenges 
•	Any significant challenges and how your organization dealt with them;

Communication and project management have been somewhat challenging because PIW team members are collaborating by long distance.  Our primary modes of communication are our listservs (core member listserv located at: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/piw, public participation listserv located at: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/piw).  Due to the time-lapsed nature of group e-communication, it can be difficult to uphold a continuous and progressing dialogue without repeating or forgetting topics already raised.  Our team has alleviated this difficulty by resorting to the telephone when necessary, and creating a Wiki page (located at: http://www.permaculture.info/wiki/index.php?n=Main.Features) of PIW feature ideas.  This Wiki is continuously updated by team members, and allows us to filter important ideas raised in listserv discussions so they are not forgotten.

As the project coordinator, it has been a personal learning process to effectively manage a long-distance collaborative effort.  Whereas when operating locally, interpersonal interaction habitually re-confirms each individual team members’ role and the collective team’s intentions, when operating long-distance, this must be acheived through frequent updates and syntheses of the project’s progress.  In order to facilitate long-distance project management,  I send out weekly or bi-weekly task lists for all team members, and solicit weekly or bi-weekly progress updates from all team members (weekly or bi-weekly depending on activity level).  I also frequently post project syntheses on the listserv, summarizing both acheivements since the previous synthesis and current issues being discussed.  The task lists and progress updates help team members stay focused, on track, and clear about their roles, and the syntheses give the team an overview of the project’s progress, while offering non-core team members a window into PIW’s current status.  The Wiki described above has also eased project management by specifically identifying the features we wish to include in PIW, and therefore generating a list of concrete deliverables.
  
•	Major staff and other institutional programmatic changes;

Richard Morris has transitioned from being a head programmer to playing more of a supervisory role, allowing Chad Knepp to be the sole head programmer and providing him and other team members with managerial support.  This transition has resulted in a more successful delegation of responsibility.  Lawrence London, Paula Westmoreland, and Robyn Williamson have chosen to contribute to the project on a volunteer basis, and remain actively involved.  Two new regularly-participating volunteers have joined PIW.  Bear Kaufmann, photographer, web designer, programmer, and artist, will be providing web design and other services to PIW.  John Howe, Systems Administrator, Automation and Systems Engineer, and specialist in Unix Systems will be assisting PIW with Systems Administration, Performance Analysis, and Quality Assurance.  And finally, the creation of our public participation listserv (located at: http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/piw) has generated a dedicated user audience who regularly discuss the project, provide feedback, and contribute ideas.

•	Any modification of strategies in light of changing issues.

Our strategy modifications have been tool-oriented.  Early in Stage 1 of Phase 1, we changed our programming platform from Zope 2 to the commonly used development toolset of an RDBMS (MySQL), web server (Apache), and Python CGI, due to complexity and overhead within the Zope platform.  Also, we have begun using the Wiki tool described above, instead of solely the listserv, to facilitate communication and project management.  

III.  Evaluation and Lessons Learned
•	Description of your evaluation process;

A few months ago, the expressed need for some core yet dynamic document to guide PIW’s process inspired team members to evaluate our collaborative process.  We recognized that although our project goals and individual roles were clear, the lack of such a document was hindering our progress and making repeated discussions necessary.  In other words, although our evaluation of PIW’s intentions and each team member’s individual contributions may have been highly positive, our evaluation of the effectiveness of our collaborative design process was less so.  Since we have begun using the Wiki, however, discussions and acheivements have been more coherent and reflective of our project plan.  Because the collaborative effort is long-distance and conducted on a largely volunteer basis, progress still occurs somewhat organically – ebbing and flowing.  However, it is now more focused, deliberate, and therefore efficient. 

•	What you have learned.

I speak for the entire group when I acknolwedge that we’ve learned a great deal throughout this design process!  Although we have each participated in collaborative software development, none of us has engaged in long-distance collaborative software development process until PIW.  We’ve learned to better communicate and manage the project (see above for details), which communication modes and tools are most suited to our process, how to collaborate and provide each other with feedback without breaching our specific roles and overstepping each other’s domains, how to cater our presentation of PIW to the audience at hand, and how to engage in participatory design with volunteers and potential users.  As the project coordinator, I’ve learned to keep members inspired and uphold team morale.  Of course, we have lessons yet to learn, including how to successfully integrate feedback and how to facilitate communication between knolwedge domains (i.e. between programmers, designers, administrators/managers, and content experts).

IV.  Funding and Finances
•	How you spent the grant from Tides;
 
•	If applicable, note the percentage of these funds used for direct and grassroots lobbying.
None.

•	List other key funders who provided additional financial support over the grant period.
Ibiblio, the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that hosts the largest Permaculture mailing lists (http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture), provides PIW not only with free hosting and server services, but has additionally offered Matching Funds equaling typical costs for these services ($12,000 or more per year).