permaculture

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

On 4/16/2012 11:21 AM, Chris Watkins wrote:
> 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.

Here's a plan: _You_ contact Scott and obtain the necessary permission 
to access the permaculture.info filesystem, at root/admin level if 
necessary. Richard Morris did this before and may still be doing that 
and/or have admin access. Maybe you could pursuade him to become 
involved again. I had login and password for permaculture.info before so 
I could configure the domain and define the host. I also have contacts 
at ibiblio to ask for status, what's needed to make any changes, admin 
access, move hosting, etc. If you or Scott want me to do this I will 
need to know what you want to do, logins and passwords etc. and I will 
do as much as I can. As it is,ibiblio/UNC is the host and Scott/P.I. is 
the domain owner, administrative contact, has login and password.

> 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

That would be a good thing. Could it remain at ibiblio or should it be 
moved? Scott should retain domain ownership but you could have admin 
access, all regardless of where it resides. I can't imagine him giving 
it away or selling it as there are issues with fulfilling the terms of 
the grant I mentioned, but maybe not.

> 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.

THAT'S IMPRESSIVE! Takes a lot of skill and perseverance, Chris.
> 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.

That is fantastic! Congratulations. When I think what we could have done 
with our $15,000.......got wasted coddling intransigent, uncooperative 
weenies with no vision and no sense of sharing.
Richard Archer, a list subscriber, was a major participant in this project.

> 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

There is no formal team any more but there are a number of subscribers 
to the two lists I created for the project and others to follow, namely 
this one of yours. A new team could be formed who would be interested in 
contributing time and work, What would be needed are various levels of 
administrators or whatever they are called; those who can monitor page 
changes, user registration, access levels and contributions.
I will subscribe you to these two lists so you can read the archives and 
communicate with subscribers. I can make you co-owner too which might 
help as things develop. You's have access to all the folks who were 
involved before, some with impressive professional skills.

> 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 do not think that permaculture.info is going anywhere in its current 
state and under current management. That needs to change and we need to 
revive this valuable permaculture wiki.

> 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.

Plenty of work ahead getting anything done but we shall persevere.

I will add you to pcplantdb and pcdb lists as subscriber and admin; let 
me know if you don't need the latter.

More later, sooner if possible.

> Thanks!

Any time. This is a pet project of mine.

LL