Seed Keepers

["Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>]

bob@4agoodauction.com wrote:

> It would be nice if there was a place seed availability listing was 
> kept. It would be great for central location for seed needs and 
> descriptions were kept. It would be helpful if a provenance of the seed 
> was included and the seed age for viability and purity relative to being 
> non GMO. It would also help if the zone the seed came from was noted. It 
> would be possible to password protect the listings that had private 
> email for approved list users. Maybe the larger seed traders would have 
> their own html page to talk about the seeds they have available. Just 
> some thoughts Bob c

Bob:

I am working on creating this very resource. It will be located here when 
available:
http://www.ibiblio.org/permaculture
You can see a temporary wiki there - this will be reinstalled with a 
permanent configuration asap.
There will be a website there, a wiki, a blog, forums (web, not emai) and 
access to this list and its archives.
Everything in one place, integrated as far as possible with crosslinking of 
information through the use of
http links and RSS feeds. With the wiki and the blog pages can be password 
protected, i.e. common access by a group.
This is a Permaculture wiki with subsets for a variety of related topics that 
would include among others,
gardening, homesteading, landscaping, site ecology, farming, market agriculture, seed and plant conservation and 
exchange, appropriate technology, tools and equipment used in agriculture, human powered devices, orcharding, soils, 
soil quality, soil amendments, and soil improvement.

This is the next project I will work on, having complete a lot of list maintenance and new list setup. I have to confer 
with the volunteer programmers who are installing the wiki for me. Then I can install the blog and webforum apps. Then 
it will be ready for us by us. Consider it, for all practical purposes, an accomplished fact. With the ideas you've 
described above you should enjoy using this system and hopefully will become a major contributor.

I guess you could say that this will be mu magnum opus as I will house everything I have developed on the web there in 
one form or another. Since this is multi-user interactive it could house major resources for this list and for seed 
keepers at large. I will set these resources up to require user registration before posting or changing any information
in the system. Non user are free to browse and download.

So, an entire tree of seed keeping information can be developed in this wiki 
with all sorts of crosslinking.
The sky's the limit. Mediawiki offers interesting crosslinking options; to 
that add http, email and rss,
even downloadable or streaming audio and video.

Here are some freeform ideas about this posted here and in another list some 
time ago:
<>

This a bit off the edge as far as being useful to farmers using GS/GIS (for such things as site inventory and data 
logging - farm, landscape, water features, forest, garden, open land) as it only suggests ways to use wikis and blogs 
and RSS feeds to organize and store crosslinked information entered by many people on many different topics using a 
variety of web apps:

Here is something I am setting up for the people in my seedkeepers list that 
could possibly be used by farmers
or groups of farmers or grassroots marketing coops:

... restock the pool from which they take sustenance
A cool way to do things would be to have list software that allows subscribers to embed an RSS feed link in all their 
posts. If all seedsaver lists used this software then a reader could just click on another users RSS feed and subscribe 
to everything that user posts to every forum, and blogs too. If well defined subject headers and their threads could
also have embedded RSS feeds then users could keep up with every post on 
topics such as Edamame and or posts by specific
users on Edamame by way of RSS'ing everything they wrote everywhere or 
alternately RSS the topic Edamame, across all
lists then subselect all posts on Edamame by specific user(s). Of could you 
can already do much of this with blogs but
they seem somewhat freeform and disorganized. So it would be necessary for 
the bloggers and the blog host to maintain
acurate subject header decriptions, likewise list users - when you change 
subject of discussion make sure you change the
subject header too (prepend Was: to the subject header). This also helps a lot with Google searches which will become 
increasingly important. The new Firefox3 web brower will have features that emphasize search functionality and options.
Actually RSS feed links, as well as website, blog, wiki, etc. URL's and email 
addresses can be embedded in your messages
to a list. Here's one for my blog: 
http://venaurafarm.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
I can provide an RSS feed to any datasource I am developing as long as the 
software I use (blog, wiki, etc.) allows that
option. I am still working on an integrated system comprised of wiki, blog, 
forums, website and this list.
I will create in this Permaculture Wiki subsections for Seed Keeping and 
other topics. Within seed keeping all of us can
develop out own pages containing information about the work we are doing. We 
can also develop areas in the blog
and crosslink between our respective wikipages and our blog entries and 
archives. In addition we can have our own (web)
forum to use for discussion between each of us and those we trade seeds with. 
So the whole 24/7 interactive system each
of us can develop individually looks like this:
1) our own wiki page containing our main information archives
2) our blog entries, good for announcements and requests
3) our own (web) forum for expansion of discussion on seed topics and 
exchange of seeds with others
RSS feeds, linking 1) through 3) can be created and from any points within 1) 
through 3).
The host website Permaculture will be the portal to the wiki, blog, forums 
and this list and contain
lists of external links and display of non-transient information.