Appropedia Blog

Appropedia has grown rapidly in multiple dimensions since our early days, and especially in the past several months.   Both the volume and range of activity at Appropedia.org is up significantly.  We have content translation activity, content porting activity, partnership activity and site technology development activity all expanding in parallel. Twitter and Facebook communities have grown dramatically as well.

In addition to all the active participants, we have a lot of eager supporters that haven’t yet identified the best way to engage. We get notes like “I love what you’re doing!  What can I do to help?”  And for every explicit offer, we know there are many more unspoken.  To make better use of all this pent up energy and goodwill, we are beginning a new program for engaging volunteers, both new and veteran.

And so, without further ado, allow us to introduce <drum roll> Appropedia Initiatives!

The Appropedia Initiatives program is an open-ended series of specific activities that will benefit a lot from community engagement.  Each Initiative will be designed to attract a critical mass of contributions and enthusiasm, in order to build momentum on a particular topic or practice.  We know that our community of supportive people has a great variety of skills, and we envision a broad variety of Initiatives to engage as many people as we can.  Some Initiatives will be focused on the Appropedia.org site (either content or technology), and others will be more community oriented.  Essentially, Initiatives are ordinary Appropedia activities that are likely to have some broad interest. Like most things at Appropedia, users input and ideas will define the path for the Initiatives program.  To get things started we have about three Initiatives lined up, and a bunch of loose concepts semi-identified.

Our first Initiative is very timely.  We quietly began prototyping a “Travel Intern” program a few weeks ago, and there are several ways that the Appropedia community can help.  We will launch that Initiative very shortly and a few weeks later we will launch Number 2.  Each new Initiative will be highlighted on the Appropedia main page, and we will do community outreach in the form of blog posts and tweets to make sure that every gets a chance to see it.  Naturally, we welcome your help in passing the word, and identifying people, partners and resources appropriate for each Initiative.

The goal is for each Initiative to take on a life of its own and to continue for months beyond its initial moment in the spotlight.  To make sure that fledgling Initiatives have a good chance, we’re asking that each Initiative should have some semi-committed support in the form of a “Initiative steward” who will shepherd the activity for at least 3 months.  Through the magic of open collaboration and search-engine-optimization, an Initiative that gets off to a solid start will stand a good chance of gathering other support.  Check out the provisional guidelines for Appropedia Initiatives and see whether your favorite topic or project might be a good candidate for an Initiative.  If so, create a launch page and add your Initiative to the list!

Thank you all in advance for your help and support!

I often find myself bursting with an idea and wanting to blog, but hesitant to blog here, where it looks somewhat "official." I have my own blog (here), but I've wanted to have a space for the community to bat ideas around, if for some reason they want to do it as a blog rather than a wiki page.

So here it is, on LJ: Appropedia Community.

Check it out, and if you're interested in contributing, then join the community and get in touch!

We're working on ways to improve navigation in the wiki.

One of our challenges is that on any given topic we have many pages - howtos, project pages, designs, organization and collaboration, as well as subtopics, and more. Wikis have category pages, but they're normally only used by hardcore wiki geeks. How do we make them friendlier? And how do we point people to browse the categories?

Here's an early attempt. On the topic page for Permaculture is a notice that says:

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Browse this topic's subtopics, howtos, project pages, designs, organization pages and more at the Permaculture category.

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and on the category page is a longer notice:

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Permaculture is a form of whole systems design based on the sustainability of natural systems, seeking to reproduce that sustainability in our living environment.Read more about this topic at Permaculture. Browse this category's subtopics, howtos, project pages, designs, organization pages and more below.

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There's more to be done, and much work to do - especially portal pages, like our Appropriate technology portal.

What do you think?

Update: I want to apologize to everyone who's frustrated with our broken blog feed. We've been given pointers on how to fix it, but since we don't actually have a tech team (anyone like to help?)  I need to dig in and fix this myself, and... I haven't got it done yet. But it's there on the to-do list. Now onto more interesting things.

Permaculture: Plug "permaculture" and "wiki" into a search engine and you'll get a bunch of hits. Most of them will be pretty empty - inactive, spammed or dormant sites. So what about the dream of creating a freely accessible and usable permaculture manual for the world, for rich and poor alike? It lives.

This collaborative work on a permaculture resource is happening on Appropedia, these days. This is by far the most active site for permaculture topics, as far as I can tell, and I've spend some hours scouring the internet. So I've started a page to invite collaboration: Permaculture wiki. Check it out, and since it's a wiki your perspectives are welcomed.

Btw, tech people: if you're a WordPress wizard and want to help, let us know. And we're also looking for someone who can pretty up the skin on the wiki...

From Curiosity and Creativity in Children (OpenEducation.net blog):

Professor Steven Dutch takes very strong exception to the assumption that curiosity is innate... In his eyes children are not innately curious. Instead, they are tinkerers with generally short attention spans.

...“curiosity and creativity collide headlong with another trait deeply rooted in biology, the desire to minimize effort and expenditure of energy.”

This rings true for me, but note that in his direct quote, he's not saying curiosity doesn't exist, just that it's overstated, and opposed by other forces. (Read a book or eat an ice-cream? Watch a documentary, or a cartoon?) And this is a highly relevant question for open educators, in terms of how we engage people.

When I refer to open education, I include projects such as Appropedia and Wikipedia, in the broad sense of offering education to all of society.

So how has Wikipedia engaged people and garnered such an enormous community of contributors? Here's one thought: Although most of us might lack general curiosity, almost all of us have areas of curiosity. And in Wikipedia, they almost certainly have an article on your area of curiosity (and possibly a whole category structure) where you can learn more, and also share what you know.*

There is curiosity there. Those of us building community for collaborative projects just have to find it, and tap into it.

*I was going to add "and if there isn't an article, you can create one!" but that's not so easy on Wikipedia any more. Appropedia is still very open, because it's newer and has different aims, different criteria, and a different approach to community.

Image credit: Tom@HK, available under CC-BY

People around the world are working on appropriate technology. Most of them don't know each other - aren't aware of others with knowledge that might inform their own work. Connecting these people and this knowledge is what we had in mind when we started this Appropriate Technology Wiki almost 3 years ago.

"Appropriate Technology Wiki" is one way of describing Appropedia - it could also be called a sustainability wiki, an international development wiki, public health wiki, a wiki for thrivability, for abundance, or many other things. But appropriate technology sums up so much: the right solution for the context, relying on ingenuity,  efficiency and awareness of the environment, rather than throwing resources at a problem.

By this definition, are you working on appropriate technology? Do you want to see a comprehensive resource, a guide to solutions? Join us: Use Appropedia, contribute to it, and make sure appropriate technologists around the world know about it. And leave a comment to let us know how it's helping you.

If you can add to or improve these instructions, or want to see the most up to date version, go to Search bookmarklets on the Appropedia wiki.

Highlight text on a web page, click a button on your bookmarks toolbar, and perform a search for that term on Appropedia. Sound handy? Here's how you make the button (I'm using Firefox, but I think it will work similarly on other browsers):

1. Copy the following code to your clipboard (i.e. highlight and press ctrl c):

   javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection();%20if(!q){void(q=prompt('Appropedia%20keywords:',''))};%20if(q)location.href='http://www.appropedia.org/Special:Search?search='+escape(q)})()

2. Right click on an empty space on your bookmark. (If there is no empty space, there should be a ">>" symbol at the right end of the bar. Rightclick this.)
3. Choose "New Bookmark" and enter a name such as "Appropedia". (I use "Ap" so it uses less space.)
4. Paste the code from clipboard (ctrl v) into the "Location" field.
5. Click the "Add" button. This will create the button - if you wish, you can drag and drop to a different place on the toolbar.

I'd rather just give a links to drag and drop, but creating javascript links in Wordpress or in MediaWiki is beyond me. If you know how, please help us out, so we could add this to the front page of the wiki, and put them in blog posts.

You can do the same thing with other wikis, e.g. this is the code for the French language Ekopedia:

javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection();%20if(!q){void(q=prompt('Ekopedia%20keywords:',''))};%20if(q)location.href='http://fr.ekopedia.org/Special:Search?search='+escape(q)})()

And this is for Wikipedia:

javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection();%20if(!q){void(q=prompt('Wikipedia%20keywords:',''))};%20if(q)location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search='+escape(q)})()

Making your own bookmarklet

Or do you want another wiki or website? Easy - the following method has worked for any MediaWiki site I've tried. (It should work for most other sites as well, though you may have to adjust it a little.) Let's take [Greenlivingpedia:|Greenlivingpedia] as an example. Just go to the site and search for something that you isn't a page title in the wiki, such as qwerty. Then look at the url:

http://www.greenlivingpedia.org/Special:Search?search=qwerty&go=Go

Just delete the search term (qwerty), and anything after it, giving you:

http://www.greenlivingpedia.org/Special:Search?search=

Now, in the original code for Appropedia, at the beginning of the post, replace the appropedia.org search term in the code ("http://www.appropedia.org/Special:Search?search=") which is inside single quote marks, with the new site's search url. Leave the single quote marks there, so you replace 'http://www.appropedia.org/Special:Search?search=' with 'http://www.greenlivingpedia.org/Special:Search?search=' - then just replace the "prompt" term in the code with something appropriate (e.g. just change Appropedia to Greenlivingpedia, so 'Appropedia%20keywords:' becomes 'Greenlivingpedia%20keywords:' ).

So, putting the changes in italics, you now have:

javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection();%20if(!q){void(q=prompt('Greenlivingpedia%20keywords:',''))};%20if(q)location.href='http://www.greenlivingpedia.org/Special:Search?search='+escape(q)})()

Hat tip: Geek to Live: Ten Must-Have Bookmarklets, by Gina Trapani, Oct 5 2005. This gave the code for the Wikipedia lookup bookmarklet.

I've been thinking about the way we use original content - content produced elsewhere, and copied to Appropedia. Organizations like Practical Action release their excellent content under an open license, and we use it while giving attribution, but how do we present it? We as a community (including me) haven't been really clear in our own minds, and that results in the confusing and not-always-inviting messages on the pages of original material:

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This is a project from Humboldt State University's Campus Center for Appropriate Technology. Please see other CCAT projects here on Appropedia or check out the CCAT homepage.

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and

and:

The original content of this page, Water diversion (original), was taken, with permission for publication under the GNU-FDL, from “Beyond Dams”, authored by Elizabeth Brink of International Rivers Network (IRN) and Serena McClain and Steve Rothert of American Rivers (AR), and published by IRN and AR)

Now, we really want to invite people to edit this material, and Neil Noble from Practical Action tells me they would love to see contributions to their material as well. So how we make things more inviting?

For one thing, these notices need to specify either that the page is not open to editing (and point to an editable page) or they need to clearly invite edits. Putting the note at the bottom rather than the top will also make it less daunting.

But do we keep the original content somewhere in an unchanged state? I was leaning away from this, personally, but I've changed my mind. I'd like to propose the idea of flagged revisions and/or approved pages, e.g. "This page is approved by XYZ" (where XYZ is Practical Action, or Akvo, or an academic body from a particular university...) These original pages might be a good starting point or forerunner of those approved articles.

One thing we would never want to do though, is hide away the open edit pages. I would imagine that the open pages would be the "landing pages" and they might have a link on the top right, say, to an "approved" article. This priority is important, as Appropedia relies on the power of open content.

This is not the blog of the whole Appropedia community. Not yet.

We believe in openness, and the wiki is in the hands of the community -but opening up a regular blog for anyone in the community to blog, without wiki-style checks and balances, is a recipe for fluff and inaccuracy.

So this is the blog of the Appropedia Foundation, and we use it to support the community and the wiki. There are plans for frequent guest appearances, highlights from the wiki, and stories about the imact the wiki is having in the world.

But we must become less, so the community can become greater. Something like Enric Senabre's Wlog, a wiki based blog, would be a great way for us to blog as a community. I'm imagining it functioning something like Wikinews, with some kind of mechanism for drafting, improving and approving from within the community before publishing.

Just need to figure out how it works, and make the time to implement it.

15 days till OSNCamp.