Appropedia's Vision
When defining a Mission Statement, it's useful to describe a vision, which is a context for the Mission Statement
The Appropedia Vision is that all members of the international development community have the ability to find and connect with each other, and to collaborate in sharing the latest information, with multiple views on best practices, for sustainable development, poverty reduction and capacity building. They will have speedy access to each other and to this knowledge-base worldwide and in every desired language.
Specifically, this Vision includes:
- Copyleft availability and usage rights for all sustainable development knowledge in developing nations
- What are the best technologies for solving these challenges, by region and by culture
- What labour / capital trade-off options exist for various solutions
- In detail, how are these technologies deployed and what are the common pitfalls to avoid
- What are the best techniques for engaging and partnering culturally and regionally
- What are the best site assessment techniques for each project
- Where can supplies and services best be secured, by region?
- What are the best shipping / delivery options regionally?
- What experts are open to being contacted with questions?
And more!
Appropedia's Mission
What does Appropedia regard as its Mission (its role and challenges) within the vision above?
Appropedia's Mission is to provide an easy-to-use, highly-available, fast, stable, open, fairly managed and multilingual library for sharing all the information, and to promote the use and expansion of the wiki in order to best support the advancement of Appropedia's Core Goals of:
- Sustainable Development
- Poverty Reduction, and
- Capacity Building
Specifically, the Mission includes:
- Assuring the presence and availability of adequate hardware resources.
- Assuring timely firmware upgrades
- Providing adequate system admin resources to keep the site available and spam-free
- Assuring the development of clear and effective policies
- Active recruitment of contributors, editors, admins, engaged consumers and commentators.
- Ensuring up-to-date infrastructure (enhancements, templates, categories, and so on)
- Requests for permission to republish original content
- Pursuit of useful regional info, e.g. travel, supply chain, services, or links to same.
- Aggressively discouraging inappropriate material or use (e.g. copyright violations)
- Continual pursuit of features (wiki and non) to increase community effectiveness
- Maintaining privacy of information as appropriate
- Continual low key querying of community for improvement opportunity
- Continual low key querying for potentially missed community elements
- Promoting the Vision above (ads, articles, conferences, T-shirts, stickers, comments)
For purposes of clarification, the mission does not include:
- Driving internet accessibility to remote locations.
- Providing translation services
- Responsibility for delivering all content
- Purchasing rights for protected intellectual property
- Validating accuracy of content
See Appropedia_talk:Mission for discussion about this mission.