permaculture

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>]

Andrew McSwain wrote:

> . The power structures and information systems of our culture are not
> centralized on a regional basis, they are, after all, national, and it is
> for this reason that I believe we should still consider the idea of having a
> national conference even if only for gathering together to exchange
> techniques, ideas; form relationships; and the likes. I think the carbon
> that is burned arriving at the location is a necessary investment toward the
> elimation of it's use.
<...>
> In the mean time I think that it's even better still to take this group and
> create a wiki or something.. some sort of collaborative database that takes
> all of the rediscovered regional folk-knowledge and ingenious techniques and
> compiles them in one place that anyone in the world can easily access and
> draw from.
>
>  If someone hasn't already done it, we should do it within the month.
> Websites are cheap to run and wiki's don't consume a lot of bandwidth. This
> could be up in a month easily.
>
> Does anyone here have experience with wikis and social networking
> technologies?

This is a concept that I have been working to popularize for years. You 
have exactly described my ideas and reasons for creating an interactive 
online resource to host a permaculture knowledgebase and a comprehensive 
permaculture information system with a diversity of resources that meets 
the needs of this growing and global community.

This says it all:
"some sort of collaborative database that takes all of the rediscovered 
regional folk-knowledge and ingenious techniques and compiles them in 
one place that anyone in the world can easily access and draw from"

The system is already in place. All we need to do is use it. It needs a 
lot of work by editors and administrators to prune, refine and 
reorganize the data structure of this wiki.

http://www.permaculture.info
hosted by ibiblio
domain owned by the Permaculture Institute (Scott Pittman's organization)

The software is MediaWiki, same as is used by the Wikipedia.
There are lots of tools, plugins, patches, security features available 
for this software. It is fun to use and very satisfying. This is way 
better (but very different) than the equivalent in a blog. It is also 
very easy to add a blog and forums (which many like) to this Wiki, at 
its home location, the primary choices being Wordpress for the blog and 
BBPress for the forums, all of which can be thoroughly integrated into 
the wiki. Perhaps it needs a new name. I like Permaculture Knowledgebase 
and Encyclopedia, befitting the domain, permaculture.info.

As for me, I have some administrative and editorial experience to 
contribute to this project, am familiar with Mediawiki and can install 
Wordpress and BBPress.

In what ways are you interested in working on this project?

LL