Appropedia Blog

Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the organizations that are working to reduce poverty and help us live both richly and sustainably had the resources to share their best ideas and practices? Of course! (Okay, maybe that was too easy. )

(Port of Callao, Peru by Jim O'Hagan, via Mediawiki Commons)

But we know that most of these organizations are already overcommitted and that thoroughly documenting a project is a big job. Meanwhile, there are lots of folks that want to help make the world a better place, and are quite willing to travel as part of the effort.  But very often the willing traveler is no more knowledgeable than local workers, and so it is hard to justify traveling in-country to lend a hand.

Aha moment.

Juxtaposing these tensions provides a nice little epiphany. Traveling interns can make excellent documenters.  Documenting great projects at Appropedia helps all parties.  The traveling intern learns a ton.  The host project gets some deserved recognition and awareness.  The broader community gets to see well-written, in-depth information that will, ultimately, get categorized, linked and translated for greatest usefulness.

To this end, Appropedia has begun prototyping our Travel Internship program.  Appropedia's first travel intern, Isabell (Liz) Kimbrough, is already in-country in Peru. She has already coordinated with some partners, but still has room in her itinerary to visit (and document) other projects in Peru (June), Ecuador (July), Colombia (July)  and Panama (August).  And so, we hereby launch the Travel Intern Initiative to invite everyone to help make Isabell's trip better.  We also want to prepare for broader participation in (and promotion of) our Travel Intern program later this year, so that you can head for the dock, and get your documentation thing on.

Please take a look at these pages to learn more about the program, and find ways you can help it have the most impact:

• See Isabell's itinerary to learn where she's going, or add a potential project or partner for her or a future Travel Intern.
• Would you (or a friend)  like to be a Travel Intern? Practice writing articles and show your stuff! And check out the application process.
• How can we make the Travel Intern program better?  Leave a note on this page, or a leave a comment on this blog post!
• Visit the Travel Intern Initiative launch page for more details.

Please help us spread the word about this program.  Use Twitter, Facebook or your blog to share it with potential interns or partners.  If you're as excited as we are about this program, and have an hour a week to help out, consider a stint stewarding this Initiative!

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!

It's funny how a contentious question for one person seems like a no-brainer for another. It doesn't tell you who's right or wrong (it's rarely black and white) but it can reveal the different assumptions we operate by.

When Paul Currion asked Do you think it's time for a humanitarian wiki? my own thought was "What do you think we've been doing?"

Appropedia has been a humanitarian wiki since 2006, covering mainly the technical aspects of development and relief work (particularly appropriate technology). Increasingly this collaboratively built knowledge base has been covering the essential social and cultural questions as well - culture and community, and principles of development.

So the real question is "Do you think it's time to support this work?" Relief workers with your personal checklists and guidelines that are your tools of the trade - what's stopping you from sharing these, and helping others be more effective aid workers? How about asking your organization to adopt an open license policy, even a policy of actively sharing their knowledge resources through Appropedia?

Your mission is to save lives and relieve suffering. Effective knowledge sharing, using an acknowledged, accessible platform,  is an essential part of that.

Do you think it's time?

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...

David Stairs of the Design Altruism Project argues that many collaborations aren't actually collaborative. In a sobering post, he notes that people want to set up a project to be the hub for collaboration in their field... often without checking who's doing the same thing, or even using the same name. We've observed similar behavior.

Partly it's about wanting to be at the center of things - and that's natural. And partly it's about not realizing just how much work is involved in making an online community. I'm not sure what the solution is. One possibility is the Wikipedia experience: perhaps what happened with Wikipedia is that it was a single project which gained a good reputation, gave a good experience to many contributors, was a clear concept to grasp (a free encyclopedia), and a broad enough scope to be of interest to many, many people.

This hasn't happened to the same degree in architecture, design or sustainability, though we've made good progress on Appropedia - especially as we've come from a number of different projects and chosen to collaborate rather than compete.

Another key element in collaboration is a recognition of our limits. As Wes Janz noted (quoted in the same blog post)

"…And, you know, it’s all good, an orphanage in Sri Lanka, house inspections in Mississippi post-Katrina, a community center in Kenya… But I just got sick of it and had this idea that you should change the name of DWB to Designers With Borders. As in, maybe there should be some boundaries, some active awarenesses that we are unqualified, or unfit, or unable to work borderlessly."

Not that we need to be changing names - just recognizing our limits. I can't recall who said it, but it is our weaknesses that make us great, not our strengths, for our weaknesses lead us to work with others and create something greater than ourselves.

Pardon this meditation on failure. There are many encouraging successes to dwell on, support, and learn from, and we'll continue to do that. A cautious recognition of where things go badly pear-shaped is one side of the coin of success, and we do well to keep both in mind.

Greenlivingpedia is an active green wiki - one of the few. Covering the whole range of green issues, with a particular focus on sustainable buildings and the needs of the modern, green-minded urbanite, Greenlivingpedia is a nicely laid-out site with a good collection of information.

What's remarkable is that it's largely the work of one passionate person,* Peter Campbell, Melbournite and (when elections come around) a candidate for the Australian Greens party. I've met Peter in Sydney a couple of times, and found him to be an honest, direct, no-nonsense, with no patience for greenwashing and the dumbing down of the green message for the sake of profit. In contrast, Peter is building something solid, and it''s good to see what an impressive resource can be put together by one motivated individual.

It's surprising to see, though, that more contributors haven't joined up. We know what that's like - many praise wikis, but far fewer actually contribute - so the efforts of one person can really stand out.

From the time we first made contact, over two years ago, we've extended the offer to collaborate on one site, but Peter prefers to keep a different focus. I can appreciate the value of market segmentation, at the same time as we'd love to work more closely with Peter. So we collaborate where we can, and our conversations continue.

As wiki software improves, new kinds of collaboration will become possible. In the meantime Peter's persistence shows what can be achieved with patient work in green open knowledge.

*To see who has been contributing to a wiki recently, see the Recent changes page or equivalent, usually linked on the left. Each page also has its own history tab - available above the page title.

This is part of the green wiki series.

Health headlines. Promises of cures for cancers (sometimes even a cure for "cancer", which makes little sense as cancer refers to many diseases). Diets. Fitness. Weight loss. Heart health. The latest discovery by scientists, often using similar language to the opposite claim made not so long ago in the media.

New stories every day. A deluge of data, often unreliable data, that distracts us from the much harder search for actual knowledge.

This is the nature of the mass media - careful analysis isn't as captivating as the appearance of new breakthroughs every day, and isn't cost-effective from a media perspective. But as we become more media savvy, we question the media, and hopefully we turn to more reliable sources.

Here's a very promising source of intelligent news about health: Behind the Headlines. It takes health headlines and discusses the evidence that does or does not exist for the headline. Fantastic.

Aside from being more informative about the individual cases, this also introduces critical thinking into the reporting and consumption of health news. The reader is presented with a framework through which each story is analyzed. Rather than a simple "Scientists have discovered that...", a claim made must hold up to examination. Being told what to believe by someone in a white coat is replaced by sound argument and research. This is good.

Health professionals and those interested in the subject, please check it out and let us know what your assessment

Getting behind the noise on a wiki

Fellew wikiholics, how do we best apply this kind of critical analysis in a wiki? In our case, we deal with knowledge about global public health, international development, and sustainability, which are also contentious areas - this looks similar enough. It's just a matter of applying it in the wiki world. Some of the principles have been worked out on Wikipedia - others will have to evolve on Appropedia to suit the different goals and guidelines, including more room for analysis. It seems to me that a community of informed, thinking people, a guideline for page structure and some editing tools will be the starting point for this evolution.

"Behind the Headlines" is provided by the NHS Knowledge Service in Britain. Many thanks to the British taxpayer - if it fulfills its promises, this is money very well spent.

We recently looked at the Green Powered Wiki - and we'd still like to make contact with the team behind that effort, and know if they're still interested in co-creating a knowledge base for renewable energy.

But let's look at a green wiki which is still online - Playgreen, a wiki on green living.

Some observations:

• Topics covered are similar to the Appropedia wiki - both have howtos and organizational profiles but Playgreen is more focused on green living, without the emphasis on sharing designs and project write-ups.
• It hasn't been active recently - just 2 or 3 edits per month. Spam is an issue.
• Playgreen uses a true open license, without noncommercial restrictions - specifically the Creative Commons Share Alike  CC-BY-SA license, which Appropedia also uses. It's good to know that we can share content with complete ease.
• Okay, not quite complete ease - the wiki uses a different markup (way of representing formatting) which I've never seen before. I get a bit impatient with having to several different kinds of markup on all the sites I post to. On the plus side, it's relatively easy to figure out.
• The skin is quite slick - better than our MediaWiki skin (development of which is on the backburner until we can get help from a CSS wizard).
• I can't find history page for each wiki page, so I can't revert the spam I found tonight. I also can't find a statistics page.
• There seems to be no site map or category structure.
• I've sent a message via the contact form at least twice in the past couple of years, suggesting we explore collaboration. Either they're not interested, the form is broken, or (maybe the most likely) it's one of hundreds of messages they haven't answered yet because they have day jobs. We know all about that.

So, it's an interesting effort, but it's stalled. There are clearly still people who visit the site and contribute, but there's a lack of critical mass to fill the need for quality green living info.

But the great thing about Playgreen is the use of a proper open license. That means that even if the site doesn't take off, these contributions of green wisdom can live on and grow in different forms - the "no such thing as waste" principle applied to the labors of green wiki contributors.

By the way - check out our green living info. It's a very different layout to Playgreen, and perhaps not as well packaged, but there's a growing collection, and I hope it's usable - please give feedback!

This is part of the green wiki series.

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

The Green Powered Wiki at wiki.greenpowered.org, now defunct, was a wiki focused on renewable energy,  written up in Treehugger in 2005.

The shame is that we don't know what happened to the drivers and contributors in the project. If you know, please leave us a note in the comments, or contact us another way. A wiki needs a large community to really work, and we'd love to keep creating synergy.

This is part of the green wiki series.