Sustainapedia

Sustainapedia was the working name for an aggressive collaborative sustainability site. This name was chosen by a group of people with a similar vision and much ambition. The central idea was a green wiki, to enable knowledge sharing for sustainable technologies and sustainable solutions.

The initiative was led by Ryan Legg (On2Leggs), and Jim Harris of Cleantech[1]. The team agreed to join forces with Appropedia, where most members continue to be involved. Ryan Legg and Jim Harris are no longer active.

Vision continues at Appropedia[edit | edit source]

At the time that the Sustainapedia idea was launched, the team was unaware of Appropedia, which was already realizing a very similar vision. The Appropedia and the Sustainapedia teams soon became aware of each other, and quickly agreed to collaborate.

As work continued on Appropedia, and problems were encountered with the Sustainapedia.org domain name, the Sustainapedia name fell out of use, but the vision carried on through Appropedia.

Past plans and discussions[edit | edit source]

Naming[edit | edit source]

The initial working name for the effort was Sustainapedia, but some potential complexity arose related to the Sustainapedia domain name (see below).

Due to the merger with Appropedia, the name Appropedia was proposed as the working name. This was not proposed initially since Appropedia's direction was not initially so closely aligned with the Sustainapedia vision, and so it made sense to distinguish between the Appropedia effort and the Sustainapedia "new direction". The alignment has grown between the two such that it is hard to distinguish them, and so it became practical to use Appropedia as the working name.

Domain name ownership[edit | edit source]

The "sustainapedia.org" domain name is held by Wikia.^[1] Wikia has been a participant in the Sustainapedia / OpenSustain conversation since the early days, and they bought the name as a part of those discussions. Most of the folks not at Wikia believed that the initiative must be owned and managed by a non-profit, for many reasons (including the belief that many academic groups can't or won't partner with a for-profit entity). Wikia was unwilling to transfer control of the sustainapedia.org domain name to the Sustainapedia team.

Advantages of partnering with Wikia[edit | edit source]

Notwithstanding the non-profit control / ownership questions, a strong and close relationship with Wikia was considered highly desirable in some ways. It is the business of Wikia to develop and grow collaborative activity on the web. They participate with a large number of wiki-literate volunteers, and they also have several resources on paid staff that are, to some degree, dedicated to making collaboration work. Much benefit would arise from any relationship with Wikia. In addition, certain advantages would arise from hosting the site at Wikia. Some of advantages would also accrue to Wikia, and they are encouraging the hosting relationship at this point. They have invested some time and resources toward a prototype version of the site. See http://www.sustainapedia.org for a sample of the professional quality skin that they are able to put forth simply as a demonstration.

However, the argument to stay entirely within a non-profit framework won the day.

Hosting concerns[edit | edit source]

Before the specific question of hosting could be resolved, a number of issues would have to be addressed.

• Who bears the risk of equipment and other costs as traffic accelerates?
• What would the advertising policy be? And who would be the beneficiary?
• What would be the policy regarding migration to another hosting facility in the future if that proved necessary?
• How tightly or loosely coupled would other Wikia wikis be?
• Domain questions
• Search engine optimization questions
• Software options and configuration questions
• Firewall questions, content distribution, various policies
• Etc, etc, etc.

Preliminary discussions of some of these topics are encouraging, but quite a bit of additional work is still required. Watch this page (either manually, or using the "Watch" tab above) for further updates on these matters.

See also[edit | edit source]

• OpenSustain-Appropedia Launch Document, a draft version of ideas that some of the Appropedia admins were testing.
• OpenSustain-Appropedia Launch Plan, a straw-man plan for rapidly expanding the site.
• OpenSustain Pillars and Values, a preliminary attempt at framing the guiding principles.
• OpenSustain Mission and Vision, a page for capturing what we envision can be accomplished by the initiative

Notes[edit | edit source]