permaculture

[Chris Watkins <chriswaterguy@appropedia.org>]

I see that permaculture.info as some activity again, and the spammers seem
to have been pushed back - this is great.

I work with Appropedia.org, knowledge sharing for sustainability. (Note I
"work" rather than "get paid" but it's my passion and I'm sure many of you
understand what I mean). This is a very active sustainability and
development wiki, covering all topics in green technology, green living,
design, agriculture, appropriate
tech<http://www.appropedia.org/Appropriate_technology>,
covering topical info, best practice, projects, how-tos... you name it. It's
the biggest such site, and is growing, with student classes in North America
and individuals around the world creating useful content and sharing their
distilled knowledge and their wisdom.

I have a few hours before I'm offline for a few weeks, so I'll be direct and
throw this out there:


To make a real difference in the fate of humankind and our environment, we
need to be having not even 100 times the current impact of Appropedia, but
1000 times. There's so much fluff and hot air in the media, when what is
needed is to create more and more of substance, and get that in front of the
public.

I believe this is achievable, but not by working separately.

All of us together will help build something that stands out, above the sea
of greenwash, green commercialism, hot air (looking at you, Copenhagen
conference) and misinformation, and provide the knowledge that the world
needs.

Appropedia has around 3-4000 visitors per day. But looking at the importance
of the work we're all doing here, a site like this should have the traffic
and the prominence of a major newspaper and have hundreds of thousands of
visitors per day, at least. And we can do this.

So my suggestion is to merge our permaculture efforts, put it on the one
site with all of our related info. We could keep the
permaculture.info"branding" and use navigation bars for the
permaculture pages - we'd have to
talk through the details (permaculture is such a broad term after all) but
doing something like this would bring a lot more synergy, and many more eyes
to this open knowledge resource on permaculture.

The alternative is to continue our fragmented work, each spending time
maintaining a separate wiki (instead of developing content), and losing
visibility due to being spread across several different domain names.
Meanwhile commercial sites with influence get celebrity and political
endorsements and gain the public's attention.

I know which I want. Let's multiply our impact. Can we do it...?

Pardon my directness - I look forward to your comments! (Apologies if I
can't answer till ~Jan 6.)
-- 
Chris Watkins

Appropedia.org - Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.

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