Shared vision: Open Source Permaculture
April 9th, 2012 at 11:08 am April 9th, 2012 at 11:08 am by Chriswaterguy
We've been speaking with Sophie Novack and Evan Schoepke from the Open Source Permaculture project, and we're glad to announce that we'll be working together building the permaculture wiki on Appropedia, and that we're supporting their fundraising effort.
They state:
We believe that sustainability is for everyone. That's why we're creating Open Source Permaculture, a free online resource for anyone who wants to create a more sustainable world.
This resonates with us. We've been talking about open source permaculture for some time, and putting the idea out there in the permaculture community. Our "Permaculture wiki" page describes the state of things, noting various attempts which have sadly fallen over and others which have a more limited scope, and inviting others to join us. An open source permaculture wiki page (hosted by our friends the Open Source Ecology wiki0 looks at what we need in a website to really serve this vision.
We've made progress. We're now using an important tool for structured data, Semantic MediaWiki, which we can apply to a permaculture ecology to help map the relationships between inputs, outputs, plants, animals, principles and resources. We've cultivated the wiki platform, to enable open source permaculture to grow
But a key part of the ecosystem has been missing, until now: Passionate individuals who know permaculture, who are prepared to study and work on developing materials to explain and teach permaculture. That's what the Open Source Permaculture project is about and we're happy to point you to their fundraising effort. This is a vision that deserves funding, and deserves a vote of support. Please check it out, and ask yourself how much this kind of abundant future means to you.
The details of our collaboration are being worked out - it will be based on using Appropedia as the permaculture wiki, and I'm sure we'll be working together in other ways in this work to create an abundant and sustainable world.
By the way, for those unclear about what permaculture is exactly, here's a video from a community in San Francisco:
The vision of Open Source Permaculture is to open up this knowledge and these practices and make this a widespread reality - from progressive cities like San Francisco, economically struggling cities like Detroit (where permaculture is taking off), to cities across Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the Americas.
Does this inspire you? What role do you see for yourself in this?
devin said,
April 17, 2012 at 7:09 am
Thank the Lord you all are working together. When my friend sent me a link to the Open Source Permaculture indiegogo campaign and I didn't see appropedia mentioned I NEARLY flipped out and wrote horribly disparaging things on the Permaculture Media Blog. Instead by comments there were only mildly obnoxious.
So happy this collaboration is taking place.
Chriswaterguy said,
April 18, 2012 at 6:49 am
I get frustrated when I see people not collaborating. But then, people need to work on what inspires them. And we also have a responsibility to communicate - so often, people don't understand what Appropedia is about, and we need to be ready to explain it clearly.
Glad you were only mildly obnoxious
. Hope you'll be inspired to work with us on this!
Alex said,
May 7, 2012 at 3:29 am
This sounds great. It would be good to have a link to the permaculture category under the 'area's' list on the main appropedia page as its really hard to find on the Appropeida site at the moment.
Chriswaterguy said,
May 12, 2012 at 5:53 pm
Thanks Alex.
Good suggestion. I think I'd like to see more info about permaculture before linking it from the sidebar, though. Perhaps when the Open Source Permaculture project starts developing those pages, we can link it and do more promotion.
We do have a permaculture category, linked from the top of the Permaculture page, so it shouldn't be too hard to find things... I'd like to hear, though, is that clear for people who don't edit wikis?
Danyl Strype said,
May 17, 2012 at 11:12 pm
Kia ora
I'm also glad to see the various people who share a passion for pooling permaculture information online starting to find each other. To me, free and open licensing is the key to the success of this networked effort. As long as a permie website of any kind is CC-licensed, its contents can be copied and built on by others. I wrote a proposal on this to present to the Australasian Permaculture Convergence in March, although I hadn't discovered many of these proposals so it's now a little dated:
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/permaculture/a-growing-commons
Everyone can help by talking to all the permaculturists you know about free and open licensing, CreativeCommons, GNU GPL etc, and helping them understand why information freedom is important, and how it embodies the permaculture ethics and principles. If you're looking for ideas, I wrote a paper about this for the Free Culture research conference in 2012:
http://www.coactivate.org/people/strypey/paper-for-freeculture2010
This year I'll be working on a redesign for permaculture.org.nz, as part of the governing council for Permaculture in NZ. I look forward to collaborating!
Nau te raurau, naku te raurau, ka ora ai te tangata.
With your work, and mine, the living will thrive.
Naku noa
Danyl Strype
Chriswaterguy said,
May 18, 2012 at 12:35 am
Danyl,
Fantastic to hear from you - I wasn't aware of your work, and it's such an encouragement to hear from a like-minded soul.
I'm checking out your links - and I look forward to working with you. I expect we'll be doing a launch of the work in a few weeks time - we'll definitely be in touch!
Re CC-licensed websites, I'd add that it needs to be a compatible CC license. The CC-by-sa license (without any restrictions on commercial use or derivatives) gives complete freedom to reuse, as long as it's shared under the same conditions. This is the license used by Wikipedia, Appropedia and many others. But if there's an nc or nd in the license (Non-Commercial or No Derivatives) it's not compatible with the CC-by-sa license that we use. So my simple recommendation is: use CC-by-sa. (A more complex recommendation is that CC-by is suitable in some cases... but don't worry too much about that.)
Thanks Danyl!
Chris