permaculture

[Chris Watkins <chriswaterguy@appropedia.org>]

Thanks Lawrence - great to hear about Pietro and his work.

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 10:33, Lawrence F. London, Jr. <
venaurafarm@bellsouth.net> wrote:

>
> Forum subscribers:
>
> I am forwarding to the list email I received today from Pietro Galgani
> expressing interest in the work a number of us have been involved with over
> the years in creating an interactive online permaculture knowledgebase. His
> own work can be seen at http://ie.tudelft.nl,
> The Industrial Ecology Wiki.
>

Ah, I wasn't aware of that. Pietro, you may be interested in the work of
Prof Joshua Pearce <http://www.appropedia.org/User:J.M.Pearce> at Queens
University in Ontario, who has a research interest in Industrial Ecology and
has his students develop wiki pages on Appropedia on various topics around
sustainability.

Is anyone in this list still interested in developing a permaculture
> knowledgebase or database? Options immediately at hand for our use include
> either http://permaculture.info
> The Permaculture Information Web (a MediaWiki) or permaculture plant-animal
> relationships & guilds database run by The Permaculture Institute
> and managed by Rich Morris, webmaster of PFAF,
> and/or http://ibiblio.org/permaculture where I have an installation of
> MediaWiki + Semantic Mediawiki and Wordpress.
>
> I would like to get these projects going, i.e. revived and moving forward.
> At the same time I think it would behoove us to have a look at all of or a
> goodly sampling of similar projects currently in development so we can 1)
> use them to best advantage 2) link them together (somehow this is where the
> Semantic Web comes into play).
> Interesting site we might want to consider participating in include:
>
> Pietro's Industrial Ecology Wiki
> http://ie.tudelft.nl
> Permaculture Information Web
> http://permaculture.info
> Appropedia (Chris Watkins)
> http://appropedia.org
>

Actually there have been many, many wikis on sustainability topics,
including green buildings, renewable energy, permaculture and the like, but
few of them get much momentum. I don't see the need for the duplication, as
long as we are working on the same vision - for one thing, it's a lot of
unnecessary work setting up a new site rather than improving an existing
one.

We've been getting help with getting semantic & parser extensions tuned and
tweaked for Appropedia. Some implementations of Semantic Wiki don't succeed
in getting users to contribute, so we're focusing on clear and functional
uses.

As a temporary hack, we've currently got this tool for tracking inputs,
output and usage in each element of a permaculture system:
Template:Permaculture <http://www.appropedia.org/Template:Permaculture>. You
can see it in use on the right hand side of Chicken
basics<http://www.appropedia.org/Chicken_basics>.
I hope to see that upgraded to an easy-to-use semantic template soon.

The first people using the new tool are a permaculture class that will be
creating resource pages on the wiki, as their class assignments. This is the
most recent addition to our service
learning<http://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia:Service_learning#Service_learning_programs_to_date>projects.

Also of interest - we have two "travel interns" in Latin America at the
moment, visiting applications of permaculture among other things - Initial
blog posts <http://blogs.appropedia.org/tag/travel-interns/>.

So, there's a lot happening. What we need more of at Appropedia are people
who want to help take these areas forward, and help with tech development.

Is that of interest to you, Lawrence, Pietro and other friends here?

Chris


> Others in development:
> - Paul Wheaton mentioned creating a wiki; status of this project?
> Eventually, my projects at ibiblio using MediaWiki, Semantic MediaWiki,
> Wordpress; I hope to add BBPress and SMF Forums also.
> http://ibiblio.org/permaculture
> http://ibiblio.org/marketfarming
>
> Please suggest more high priority sites to add to this list.
>
> ...:LL
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject:        semantic wiki on permaculture?
> Date:   Thu, 16 Sep 2010 23:49:50 +0200
> From:   Pietro Galgani <peppox@hotmail.com>
> To:     <venaurafarm@bellsouth.net>
>
> Hi
> I stumbled upon a forum thread on permies.com about a plant database for
> permacultural designer, and I found it very interesting, as I've been
> thinking about exactly the same thing for the last 4-5 months.
> I'm studying in the Netherlands in a MSc in Industrial Ecology. It's a
> science which was born less than 20 yrs ago that studies sustainability
> form a complex system perspective. In the past year I've learned (among
> other things) about permacultural design and about the Semantic web, and I
> couldn't help but connecting the two things together. with my class we did a
> project where we created a wiki-db using mediawiki, semantic mediawiki and
> the semantic forms extension, you can check it out at ie.tudelft.nl. It's
> a very simple db and it's even unfinished, but (apparently) it was presented
> at some proper conference and academics were quite impressed. This is not to
> say how good it was (it was not), but that I really think that the potential
> applications of semantic technologies are beyond our imagination.
> Today i was reading the permaculture manual by mollison and i couldn't
> help thinking: what if everyone's observations,design,guilds could be
> collected in one place that just keeps growing? It could make things so
> crazily easier for any organic farmer with an internet connection!
> But really the potential is even bigger. PC makes a lot of sense
> sustainability-wise, but it's hard to put in practice because it's so
> knowlege intensive. The technology to speed up the information flow is
> there, the expertise too, it could really become as simple as googling a
>  recipe. (ok not quite but still much simpler)-you would still need to get
> your hands dirty and spend time outside, but all the information
> gathering would be just instant.
> I think that the big part of the challenge is to find enough motivated
> people to kickstart a project like the one that was being discussed, but I
> also think that they are around.
> What is going on with those ideas you started discussing in the forum?
> Hope to hear from you soon
>
> Pietro
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-- 
Chris Watkins

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