Catching up with Curt from Appropedia, which is very cool. After working closely for 2 years on knowledge sharing for sustainability, we finally meet.


*I told you it was confusing.

The Appropedia Blogs are now active - so most of my development, sustainability and appropriate technology related  blogging will be there from now on.

There's still some tweaking to do, though - putting in the open license notices, and making the layout of links more like the Appropedia wiki.  Then to make the Appropedia wiki's skin more like the blog.

In Denver - and i have a ticket to see Obama speak at the big event tomorrow!  

I didn't realize I was going to be here for the Democratic National Convention until last week. This is a trip for connecting with people in sustainability and development, about Appropedia, and I've been meeting great people so far.  

Having been in the office of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) at 2 a.m., and now on a Sunday afternoon, I can confirm that these geeks work hard. I now understand the introductions to some of the people here when I first visited - "This is X, he doesn't sleep."

It's been an intense trip - finally meeting the really great people I've been working with for the last couple of years, and a bunch of other interesting folks besides. Vinay Gupta, the Hexayurt guy, the closest person I've met to a mad scientist. Andrew Lamb from EWB-UK, and colleague in the Appropedia Foundation, had great ideas about working with organizations, and showed me some of the sights of London (very cool). The other day I finally met Lonny & Cat, also from Appropedia - great to meet in person, and it felt very natural to be with these kindred spirits. We were in a crowd of appropriate technology buffs, at the International Development Design Summit.

And MIT - it's wonderfully geeky. If I'd been at MIT, I would have been teasing other people for being geeks - in the most good-natured, reverential way. I could definitely spend a lot more time in Boston, and hope I get the chance in the next year or two.

Appropedia made it to semi-finalist in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. (Yay, recognition! Sob, no cash prize.) From our entry:

Difficulties in tracking down existing solutions to appropriate technology problems has led to engineers and fieldworkers wasting time, energy, and resources solving the same problems over and over again. A single shared infrastructure is needed so that the existing disjoint community of appropriate technologists can more easily and openly collaborate on their projects.

...and that's exactly what we're doing, in appropriate technology and many related areas.

Engineers Without Borders UK are interested in how to contribute to the Appropedia wiki, and the process of making content free‎. Which of course leads to questions about when someone's content is their bread and butter. A section of that page, "But I earn a living from my content!", addresses this question, but needs much more thought.

I'm at the Humanitarian Centre at Cambridge University - a "hub organisation that 'thinks local and acts global', sharing complementary resources and skills to achieve more than the sum of its parts." This basically means that these world-changing organizations share office and meeting space, and get to do lots of incidental meeting with like-minded people. Great idea - every city should have at least one. Every small NGO (and big NGO for that matter) should be part of one.

Very pleased to learn that the International Development Design Summit (IDDS) in Boston, running this month, will be using Appropedia for documenting their projects.

This will be a great time to experiment with ways of using wiki pages for documenting designs. My leaning is towards relying on the unstructured format of the wiki, documenting the designs in a fairly flexible way. But added to that, I see us using an infobox to help track certain features of the design, such as the heritage of the design - who has made it, how it has been used by others, and which other designs have been inspired by it.

Being interviewed with Mark Charmer (@charmermark) I learnt a lot about Akvo & that I didn't know until the interview started. He expressed very well the issue of organizations each having their own silos of knowledge, and the potential that arises from opening them up.

Akvo is a NGO focused on water, working in the Netherlands, and they are developing Akvopedia. Akvo and Appropedia are discussing how we can best work together. It's unfortunate that the names are so similar - it gets confusing - but the main thing is to work out the best way to share content, to collaborate rather than duplicate our efforts.

Watch the video at Global Swadeshi Dialogs - Mark Charmer of AKVO and Chris Watkins of Appropedia - you can leave comments there or here. If I seem a bit quiet, it's partly the 36 hours' travel from Australia, arriving in the Netherlands the day before the interview.

Or download the rather large MP4 video file (250 mb). An audio-only file isn't available yet (we're just all very busy).

Received an email from the founder of a fairly prominent UK organization, devoted to practical action for sustainability. The query was whether Appropedia was a suitable place to work collaboratively  on a book, which would later be published.

While we'd love to have this content, there are some reasons it may not be an acceptable solution for them. At the very least, contributors need to know what they are committing to when pasting on a wiki, and using a free license.

Rather than just explain this in an email, I thought it was a good question to answer on the wiki: See Original content FAQ.

Note that I'm starting to wonder if our old policy of using the "Original:" namespace is a good idea after all, as it requires a set of gatekeepers for what content is worthy to be placed in this namespace. And yet... an original document by a respected appropriate technology organization, for example, may deserve to be readily available. Or perhaps a link to a "diff," showing the text of the original, with all the changes that have been made since the original document was first placed on the wiki - that will confuse the eye of the average non-wikiholic however.

Tricky issues. Feedback welcome!

On Appropedia pages, I often create a separate "Interwiki links" section. I see these links as different to other external links, as you may be leaving this wiki, but you remain within the wiki ecosystem.

Recently I've been thinking how useful it would be to have a good search engine that covers the whole wikisphere. I know some attempts have been made, but there are no active, comprehensive efforts I'm aware of. Qwika is a great concept but is very out of date - they don't respond to requests to add wikis, and their Wikipedia cache is at least 16 months old. Other efforts exist, but I don't know of any that cover more than a handful of the major wikis.

My plan is to make a Google custom search engine for wiki sites, keeping the index of sites as open as possible - though it will need to be protected or semi-protected, so that it doesn't suddenly start searching porn and dodgy pharmaceutical sites .

• I'll start with the wikis in Wikimedia's interwiki map, and Appropedia's equivalent.
  
• Next step is to start separating out the gaming and fan sites from the more serious wikis, so there can be different search engines according to the type of content. I don't want hits from Wookiepedia or Halopedia when I'm working on an Appropedia article.
  
• Then see if there's some way to get a list of the urls of all the wikis on WikiIndex.
  

Is anyone else working on something similar?