Chris,
Saw the tweet on improving the Self-Sufficiency page/part of Appropedia.
A couple of observations.
It seems there is lots of interest in self-sufficiency in and out of Appropedia, but self-sufficiency seems to be subordinate to other challenges (light for reading at night, sustainable farming, milling processes, and so on).
There is information within Appropedia that deals with self-sufficiency.
With these observations in mind, I think there needs to be a brief (a week, a month, two months?) asynchronous, moderated discussion about Appropedia and other projects that promote, support, and encourage self-sufficiency. The discussion should seek to discover how contributors and users want to use information (drawn out of existing projects and included separately here, left alone in existing projects, drawn out and linked to each other via a matrix of sorts).
My initial gut feeling is that this page should look at self-sufficiency from a very high level (macro) view that incorporates approaches to and in existing cultures, societal needs for and reasons for self-sufficiency, organizational and personal applications of self-sufficiency.
The macro view could then link to existing materials in and out of Appropedia as appropriate. Such a high level framework might also promote participation, contributions, gap identification, and then a usable interface.
The short, quick solution is to identify existing contributions that meet some level of self-sufficiency and create links to them from this page.
Let me know what you think.
I have very little time available, but I could do some work on this.
Preston