Appropedia:Vision and mission: Difference between revisions

All this "About" investigation was prompted by a desire to develop something along the lines of a "mission statement" (we might choose to call it something else) for Appropedia in order to help guide contributors a little bit more with respect to the content. What I'm looking for is something along the lines of:

Appropedia seeks to facilitate successful and practical hands-on application of appropriate technology and processes in field or academic venues by all interested parties. We welcome content documenting field and academic projects world wide, including the technologies and processes (e.g. assessment efforts) used, plus the results and any potential pitfalls to avoid.

We've identified the following categories for contributions:

After which we have our existing categorization discussion, which I would like to follow with a note saying "If you've got some interesting content that doesn't seem to fit those categories, drop us a note by clicking on the discussion tab above."

The importance of a mission statement (whether so labeled or not) is to give all the assorted bricklayers an awareness of the cathedral we are building together. I certainly welcome comments about "mission statement", and will also toss that into the About page (and potentially the one sentence version might make it into the main page?) shortly. --Curtbeckmann 16:12, 30 September 2006 (PDT)

Well spotted (I wasn't aware of the two different "About" pages) and good work. --Singkong2005 ^talk 17:03, 30 September 2006 (PDT)

Related to this, I was just poking over at Village Earth's ATwiki (http://wiki.villageearth.org/Main_Page) and I really like their main page. It's colorful (or colourful :-)) and informative, and they have something that I would consider a mission statement. I would like to borrow from that, but modifying main page seems like needs consensus. --Curtbeckmann 18:05, 30 September 2006 (PDT)

I think you can safely be bold to some extent. If you think it looks good, give it a try - it can always be reverted. Something radical that you're unsure about could be discussed first.

I agree there's some good features on the Village Earth wiki that we can adapt for use here. --Singkong2005 ^talk 18:51, 30 September 2006 (PDT)

Funny that you mention the formatting from Village Earth ATwiki. I had just finished looking at their page, as well as couple others, when I wrote the following summary:

20:09, 26 September 2006 (hist) (diff) Main Page (fixed grammar; added link to voting; replaced Topic editors getting started with Organization Page Creators Getting Started; added Recent Praise (we need some nice formatting for this main page)) Start making changes, and we will all jump in I'm sure. Maybe we should play with a content copied test duplicate... Main Page tests, until we like it. Either way let's make it look nicer. If you see any other wiki sites you like please post links at Talk:Main_Page_tests.

I am all for a mission statement. Let's start a seperate page for this discussion, Appropedia:Mission. I am also all for a call to action. I think that we should not try to get contributors to fit into any category. Instead, we should just try to get them to post relevant content, and we will help sort it out. --Lonny 02:31, 1 October 2006 (PDT)