Some notes on purpose and structure adapted from some initial emails between Lonny and Yamaplos. Yama please feel free to edit or wikify more.

A Third Area

Hi I'm having a blast. This might be what I have been looking for for the last 15 years or so. Maybe I had to wait for wikis to develop... I will be very busy this month, but participating here might very easily become a main project of mine. What has become of the Whole Earth people? I would have expected they would be all over. Anyway, there is something very powerful in their "contributed by the community catalog" concept, I guess a wiki for that age. I believe we need to pursue that model in some way, I mean, allow a space for people to review a book / idea / concept as to their own experience with it. Only problem is that it requires some passion (opinions), which necesarily are not third-party. Maybe a third area? i.e., Topics, Projects, Resource Reviews. ?

oh well, we'll have time to deal with that at some moment

Thank you for starting this

--Yamaplos

The Four Areas

Hi Yama,

I am so excited to have you involved.

I am definitely into the third area that you are discussing. My plans so far are to have four areas (hopefully namespaces):

Category Namespace
Textbook style entries, mostly from experts. Also serve as categories for the original research, projects and how-to's in the Article namespace.
Article Namespace
Original research, project writeups, how-to's (I would rather this be called Project Namespace, but with no need to preface pages with "project:").
User Namespace
Personal/organizational pages for networking
Working Namespace
Common working pages for relevant grants, events, calls for assistance, offerings of assistance, resource reviews, local and global where-to-find-supplies pages, etc.

I see the Category and Article Namespace working together as follows, for example the users can:

  1. Look up greywater
  2. Read about greywater concepts
  3. View case-studies, how-to's and common errors to avoid for various greywater projects
  4. Edit and add their own greywater experiences, projects, how-to's and common errors to avoid

or skip to any of these steps.

Thank you for prompting me to organize some of my thoughts in this email, I look very forward to talking with you again, -Lonny

Background, raison d'etre and reviews

Thanks for your response. This is a bit of a sin, us following on this by email. I feel this should be a wiki kind of thing... :-) (this especially for others to add - please feel free to post/forward/wikify) Great Idea... here it is

I find your structure quite engaging. A major limitation of wikis has the need for a third-person expert approach. While this gives respectability and allows some of academia to treat us seriously, it closes the way for intuition, opinion, and seat-of-the-pants empiric observation, sometimes once-in-a-lifetime things that might be all that is left of a particular technique (think the Foxfire books - r u familiar with those? powerful AT stuff). bottom line, I support having a space for that sort of thing, which is clearly labeled as such, and allow for case studies.

Now, about Whole Earth, I feel old. My, a whole generation would either drool or cringe at the name... Steve Jobs described it this way: "When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions." They were revolutionary in many ways, and what they did might be the first wiki ever. They painted themselves into a corner several times, like when another revolutionary concept, WELL (well.com) didn't evolve outside of paid participation, effectively closing themselves off the rest of the world, or when Point Foundation (the umbrella organization behind it all) got into alternative lifestyles, and the Whole Earth Magazine hasn't had its web page updated since 2005. Archive.org still has a lot of good stuff from them.

So If you don't know the WEC, get one - some libraries still have it. It was one of my first eBay buys when I got to the USA. It had a place of prominence in my reads during my back-to-the-earth days, between 1982 and 1999

Why see the WEC? because they've gone this way before, and made more mistakes trying to play the AT card than we want to. It's sort of learning from the (failed) masters how to do it (maybe) right.

One concept they had, very powerful, is these short reviews of a book, product or resource, where they seek opinion. It is definitely NOT the 3-rd person approach of standard wikidom, but that is what I would like us to have - separate from the main, serious/expert Articles area. They also have short quotes of the books, and pictures of the cover or of the tool being reviewed. Quoting appears to be disparaged in wikidom because it might cross copyright, yet standard copyright as a norm allows "short quotes used in reviews".

My Famous 3rd Area, now part of the Working area?

Reviews of books, products or resources. for what I have in mind, see http://www.wholeearthmag.com/faq.html the "Tips from the editor" and the "book and product review" paragraphs

All in all, I will become more involved in this, for two reasons, due to my discovering today that WEC is quite dead.

  1. WEC is dead, viva Appropedia
  2. the WEC did fill a need (even though its passing can also be a warning) - there is a niche to fill in the ecosystem now that it is gone.

The local supplies pages was something like what the Well was supposed to be. As mentioned, they didn't open up once the internet went free.

'nuf for now. I might put up a look-see sample of what I mean in one of my websites, I'll tell you about it

--Yamaplos

Wiki Earth Catalog

No I was not familiar with the Foxfire books, and I was certainly not familiar with the death of the WEC. I noticed that it had been a while since they put out a new issue, but I just assumed that it was on the way. This is very sad news... but I appreciate your insight and optimism that the wiki format is fitting for the resurrection of the WEC concept.

I am very interested in reading about the WEC’s mistakes playing the AT card. For instance what do you think of the name of this site: appropedia? I have always been uneasy about the term “Appropriate Technology”, but as a coined term it serves an important service, seeming unfilled by most other alternative terms.

I would also be interested in hearing more about some of the WELL’s mistakes. I remember being turned off by the need for a paid subscription years ago, but I know that the WELL community was also quite strong and creative.

The "Tips from the editor" and the "book and product review" found at http://www.wholeearthmag.com/faq.html are very good. I wonder if there is someone to contact about using some of their language.

There are now some very young examples of supply pages at Humboldt CA Supplies and Global Supplies.

All in all, I will become more involved in this, for two reasons, due to my discovering  today that WEC is quite dead. 
1. WEC is dead, viva Appropedia 
2. the WEC did fill a need (even though its passing can also be a warning) - there is a niche to fill in the ecosystem now that it is gone. 

Excellent! --Lonny

Creating an article...

Hi,

First a self-introduction. I'm newly registered here, though I've been watching it for some time. My main focus is appropriate technology stuff at Wikipedia, but Appropedia is a great complement to Wikipedia. Especially if it were to cover broader issues of development and sustainability - any objection to other material? E.g. My masters thesis was on water & sanitation management in Indonesia - more about cultural & institutional issues than about Ap Tech, but I'd love to have somewhere to post it for people to make use of it.

I'm a little confused by the structure here, compared to what I'm used to at Wikipedia. Especially the use of article-type material in Category pages. Might be a good idea, but I need to spend some time here figuring stuff out.

Anyway, I've started a draft of an article on low-cost computers on my homepage: User:Singkong2005. Should I just create the article? (Or create it as a category?) See you around. --Singkong2005 05:19, 26 June 2006 (PDT)

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