permaculture

[Chris Watkins <chriswaterguy@appropedia.org>]

Thanks Lawrence,

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 23:37, Lawrence F. London, Jr. <
venaurafarm@bellsouth.net> wrote:

> You mean, is it possible to obtain a typical database dump from the
> permaculture.info MediaWiki?
>

That would be ideal, yes.


> ...

You could 1) contact Scott/P.I./Scott's wife who does all the web
> development for their organization 2) ibiblio, to a) with Scott's
> permission, get a database dump to add to Appropedia b) take over
> administration of it with P.I./Scott's permission and resume development
> at ibiblio with them as host. 3) move domain hosting to Appropedia's
> domain host and seamlessly integrate it with Appropedia or put it back
> online as a separate Wiki alongside Appropedia.
>
> I prefer that it go back online with ibiblio as host and one or more
> volunteer adminstrators. It has free hosting at ibiblio and can securely
> reside there indefinitely. If registration of the domain has lapsed,
> which I doubt, that is another matter.
>
> At this point there seems to be very little  happening with a serious
> online permaculture database or wiki so if you can resurrect
> permaculture.info or add its dataset to Appropedia that would be a good
> thing, certainly better than the present situation with what was once a
> substantial project. If you want me to help in the same capacity as
> before, communicating with ibiblio and register.com, I will do so.
>

I'd love your help, thank you.

In terms of our resources and capacity to help, we would be able to add it
to Appropedia, and by doing this we would foster and maintain it, protect
it from spam and vandalism (as we are currently doing - e.g. I recently
spent about 3 days worth of work writing a dedicated spam filter for
Appropedia, and I check it daily for false positives), and ensure its
security and publish weekly site dumps (as we do
now<http://www.appropedia.org/Appropedia:Current_dump>).
That's for starters.

As you can see with the Open Source Permaculture project, we are moving
forward with the permaculture wiki and plan to do it well. We have new
permaculture partners and we're putting in a major effort. Our total spend
on Appropedia since 2006 would be in the same ballpark as the $15,000 for
PIW - with that, we've got a platform that works, we've never had
substantial downtime, we have a volunteer team that works on it daily, new
tech features, even a Firefox extension "AppropediaFox, academic
partnerships, and plans for growth.

If there's a team of dedicated people ready to do a similar amount of work
on PIW tech and content, then that could work as well - but they'd be
starting well behind in terms of site development, and important tools like
Semantic MediaWiki (a very useful set of features, which took hundreds of
hours of work to set up on Appropedia) would presumably be a long way off.

That's my pitch for making Appropedia the new home for this data set rather
than duplicating the effort. Pardon the hard sell - but I've only stated
what I observe to be true. If another attempt is made at starting a
separate permaculture.info site, we'll still be friendly, of course, though
it would seem to me like a lost opportunity for collaboration. But that's
just my opinion - I try not to be too attached to it :-).

I look forward to hearing what decision is made - especially if there's a
site dump we can add to Appropedia, and support for us to do so.

Thanks!
-- 
Chris Watkins

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