Kia ora koutou
Note: The following is a stream-of-consciousness brainstorm, shared
with the purpose of starting a discussion. Feel free to ignore it ;)
Patrick's email about the LifeTrac got me thinking about how we manage
the relationship between the Appro wiki and the wikiwebs of other
projects whose content comes within the Appro brief. Sure, we can just
link to their from Appro index pages, but there are obvious resilience
benefits to having multiple copies of a website, hosted on multiple
servers, in multiple physical locations. I can only think of one
argument against mirroring the entire Open Source Ecology (OSE) wiki
on Appro, which is the risk of inadvertently "forking" their projects.
Let me explain what I mean (I'm using OSE as an example, there are
other wiki which would be relevant content on Appro).
Let's say there's a hack that allows us to copy the whole OSE wiki to
Appro without having to laboriously cut'n'paste every page (which
should be possible). Now, every time a change is made on the OSE
version, someone needs to import that change to the Appro version, and
vice versa. If that doesn't happen regularly, there's a chance that
the contents of the two versions will drift apart, and the Appro
version will become a "fork" of the OSE version. This could create
version hell for someone looking for the latest version of an OSE
project, particularly as they add more designs to the Global Village
Constructor Kit, and their wiki grows to sustain the development work
on them.
Theoretically, I can think of a number of ways to keep the two
versions matching:
a) have changes to one version auto-synched on the other
b) make the Appro version a static mirror of the OSE version, which
gets updated every time a change is made to the OSE version
The problem with a) is that OSE would have to agree to their wiki
being edited by another site's users. Or users would have to have an
OSE account to edit the page from Appro, which means effectively the
same thing as b). One solution could be a system like OpenID or
BrowserID, which allows users to associate their accounts on multiple
services (in this case Appro and OSE) with one set of login
credentials.
The problem with b) is that it breaks the wiki-ness of the Appro pages
that are mirrors of another wiki. One solution could be that while the
main wiki page is static (the edit tab is disabled, or just replaced
with a link to edit the OSE version of the page), the discussion page
is still able to be edited by Appro users, with a note at the top
explaining who hosts the main page, and gives them a link to sign up
with that site if they want to edit it.
Thoughts?
Strypey
BTW Just curious about why the Appropedia Foundation aren't hosting
their own email list(s), or hosting them on an activist server like
RiseUp.net, or CoActivate.org? I'm not convinced that GoogleGroups
fits the definition of "appropriate technology" ;)
--
Danyl Strype
Community Developer
Disintermedia.net.nz/strype
"Geeks are those who partake in our culture."
- .ISOcrates
"Uncomfortable alliances are not just necessary; they reflect and
speak to the tremendous possibility of our political moment."
- Harmony Goldberg and Joshua Kahn Russell
http://www.nationofchange.org/new-radical-alliances-new-era-1337004193
"Both Marxists and Chicago-school libertarian economists can agree
that free software is the best model."
- Keith C Curtis
http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=407
--
For the public archive and subscription options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/appropedia-community?hl=en
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
appropedia-commu...@googlegroups.com
BTW Just curious about why the Appropedia Foundation aren't hosting
their own email list(s), or hosting them on an activist server like
RiseUp.net, or CoActivate.org? I'm not convinced that GoogleGroups
fits the definition of "appropriate technology" ;)
Love this line of thinking/doing!
He Waka Eke Noa
We are all in this boat together
~Maori Wisdom
Is it possible to add Chelsea Anan to this group (she is the education director at HSU CCAT)?
Perfect! Thank you, Chris; very much so appreciate your work(ings)!
Tena koutou
While we are talking about who is on this list, are Sophie and Evan
from Open Source Permaculture getting these emails?
If not, is there
another list or group specifically addressing the new permaculture
section of Appro?
OpenCore from the implosion of the The Open Planning Project/
Actually I had a Hangout recently with Ethan Jucovy, who saved CoA and
OpenPlans, and has been the lead developer and CoA webmaster ever
since. He has been working on various background improvements,
including a total rewrite of the core codebase, which will make it
more stable, improve performance, and make it easier to fix bugs, and
add new tools for end-users.
We'd love to host Appropedia lists on CoA, either as part of the
Aotearoa Permaculture Network project (just renamed), or as their own
project.
Thanks for the reference to BetterMeans. You don't happen to know what
language it's programmed in? We have been looking for a user-friendly
bug fix/ feature request tracker for CoActivate recently. We prefer to
use things programmed in Python (like the OpenCore engine of CoA), so
Ethan and our other devs can tinker with them if need be.
RiseUp ares good for groups who are within RiseUps definition of
"political", only need one or two email lists, and don't have the
resources to run any servers of their own. I haven't used their hosted
version of Crabgrass (we.riseup.net) for a while. Must check it out
again.