It has been a long road trying to write an introduction for this site. It is a very ambitious project designed to be a cooperative effort for a fairly large amount of people, but it has basically only had this sole contributor so far. A big part of the effort has been to create an outline, shell, map, index, whatever you would like to call it of the issues the site aims to take up. As one can see the main idea is to list resources and ideas on the subjects of health and food. Of course gathering informational resources should not be understood as something purely clinical and passive, rather it is part of a dynamic process of turning information into useful productive activities and where such production is prioritized with the needs of the community. However the needs of the community are not some static doctrine either,and the ebb and flow of changing conditions and actors,is also a part off what we a trying to account for in this mapping of a community. So while much of the indexing here is expressed in a somewhat linear fashion, lists of sites and experts that belonging to a certain category of things, there is at the same time a simultaneous effort to place these static data points within a dynamic context of a dynamic community network, of feedback loops, different forms of evaluation and discussion, creativity and tip toeing ones way through all the delicate balances of structures, hierarchic versus cooperative engagements, and of course the most vexing question of all getting a community to believe it can accomplish meaningful change from within is also a part off what we a trying to account for in this mapping of a community
In general this site tries to keep conclusions of the current economic and informational systems to a minimum, and thus there are no claims that locally produced informational and economic systems must happen to save the world or something of equal drama. Rather the goal is to map the issues that are relevant to exploring what communities could contribute to at least improving any trouble we might be in, and then allow for experimentation and discussion from the community lead us to answers for any potential problems Some issues might be in the land of abstraction and theory as opposed to practical application, and for those the term narratives is used. Narratives also need exploration and discussion from the broader community, but are ready for discussion in a more immediate sense than do issues that require hands on experimentation. One example might be the problem of on line identities on discussion forums where so called computer bots are generated,but are often unidentifiable from actual persons. Yet at the local level it would appear, in theory at least, that this problem of bots, or even illegitimate identities in general, might be overcome more easily
In terms of the presentation of the information there are two ideas or themes that need to be presented early on . The first is the ability to move from the most general idea, or the shortest summary or description of an idea or category, to more specific and/or longer descriptions or summaries. The second idea is basically captured in the idea of the spread sheet where we have an element, or object, such as a type of plant like kale for instance, in a vertical column and then various types of environmental contexts or states of development of the given plant in the the horizontal rows. This is of course not a breakthrough idea of any sort, but there are some adjacent ideas lurking nearby. The main theme is that spreadsheets themselves can be seen as having a type of location the map that is trying to be expressed or illuminated. Generally speaking what we are calling narratives are likely at the top of the hierarchy and then spreadsheets would be one of the tools or maps just below at least some narratives, and then broader explanations of the subjects alluded to in the spreadsheets could be thought of as below that. A further and more exploratory idea is that spreadsheets could contain some type of hyperlinks or drop-down menus within both the 'boxes' where the columns and rows converge and in the columns and rows themselves. For instance if you were to click on your kale link, it might bring up a screen of all the sub types of kale with information on those sub types across the horizontal columns. If one were to click in a box the screen could expand to only show a variety options on how the information relevant to the box, though those details are being skipped for brevity's sake. The theme if you will here is kind of an accordion effect where spread sheets in particular can serve as a type of map tat expands and contracts as a type of an electronic equivalent of an accordion of sorts.
Spread sheets unfortunately only lend themselves to a fairly limited amount of subjects so we need some additional tools or ways of viewing the big picture or map if you will. Before looking at other tools it is likely advisable to consider the ideas of flows. A wide variety of flow charts exist and their utility here will be clear. But at the same time lets look at some of the classical look at the ideas of flow and evolution or change over time within systems. Ideas such as Hegelian dialectic are beyond the scope of what is being addressed but the ideas of feedback, assessing trends, polling and surveys, demographics, and perhaps verfiability and third party verfiabilty. These are either tools that are often equated with data that feeds meta data analysis of large scale systems such as communities, so again they are near the upper part of the proposed hierarchy. Other ideas that represent this meta level of analysis are resources, both physical, intellectual and social, analytical tools, such as; critical thinking, abstraction, creativity, and metrics and social tools, such as; effective communication skills, the problems of disruptive behavior, overcoming of barriers of social groups, and positive, or just plain enjoyable, social interaction. Metrics can include things line ORAC values in food products, which are an anti oxidant value, the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested), or the multiplier effect, which is a measurement of how money recirculates within a community depending on whether the business is owned locally or not. There are many common everyday metrics of course and the ones mentioned here are less well known and may serve as examples of how communities could use relatively new forms and information gathering in order to better integrate how information travels throughout the community.
How communities bring in, and organize information from so called outside sources has it's own distinct set of concerns. One of course is copyright, which tends to be pretty controversial. For instance their are many documentaries that come in DVD's that cannot be shown at a local gathering where people are charged to attend the event. The law should be well understood and conformed to, but also a discussion of both the fundamental principles and fundamental practicalities should also be a priority. For example, the mission of most educational documentaries is to inform individuals, so it would be logical for those who watch the DVD to try to inform other individuals of what is in the DVD. Yet it is here that we find a kind of strange contradiction since anyone who attempts to communicate or share the information in the DVD generally needs to do it precisely or face a possible liable charge for misquoting. Yet quote it verbatim, or directly share the DVD in the wrong setting and you may be guilty of copyright violation. Another challenge for a community is how to index the information available. One aspect of this is to provide categories, but that is taken up in a bit. In the meantime, many podcasts have no summaries, or incomplete summaries, attached to them, and this site has already taken up that effort on several podcast sites. Another problem is that some sites have hundreds of podcasts, but they are not listed in a comprehensive list on one page to avoid the incessant scrolling down and clicking on tens of pages to access older podcasts.A final consideration is of course how to prioritize the information under a given category such as seed saving. The strategy here has been to take the recommendations of trusted experts, but of course there are different experts for different folks so this is a difficult problem and will need to be 'worked out' for each community Again this site has already created single pages to access all podcasts at one viewing. Many other possibilities exist on how communities on how communities seek out informational sources as well as, how they incorporate and index those sources to suit their needs.
An additional issue in the acquiring of information and even storing it, is the increasing concerns of censorship, or deplatforming of some informational sources. There is no attempt to render an opinion on whether the re-prioritizing and removing sites is justified or not, rather just a suggestion of a safeguard strategy to address the possibility that some online search engines will not make it easy to find certain types of information. that even information any given community were to put up online has the potential to be removed. Hopefully this is not seen as paranoid since a community based indexing system would seem to offer a nice third alternative to having either large telecom monopolies or governments being in charge of making these decisions. Alternative search engines do exist, and with the assistance of community networks, such as is being described here, the so called free market may eventually provide enough alternative to avoiding the potential pitfall of monopolies deciding these questions alone. A third point here is both the decline of civility in online discussion, perhaps due to a type of anonymity that occurs, and the problem of bots or paid for profiles to spread a vested viewpoint on certain discussions. It seems possible that community discussion forum could potentially overcome some of these problems, especially if communities prioritize the need for at least some civility and practicing techniques to uphold that value. Platforms and systems do exist that can assist communities in these efforts though they are relatively obscure. It is likely the case that some of this work will take additional time and effort and communities will have to weigh the merits of how much time and effort is a good idea to deal wit h these issues.
Trying to categorize these issues in a kind of librarian approach is a difficult undertaking due to both the expanse and interconnected nature of the information and also due to the different sensibilities people have for this kind of thing. So it may be that different communities will need different systems even within their own efforts. One hope is that there can at least be some 'modularity' within various systems that can be plugged here and there. Hopefully people will remember the hope here is a cooperative effort and to the degree possible completed works will be made in a share friendly fashion.The previously spread sheet idea may be of some help in addressing this problem. For example we have many different modalities of how information is presented, such as, books, online articles, DVD, You Tube video, forums, podcasts etc. We also have the fact pretty much all categories have multiple aspects to them. Water for instance has several aspects to say the least it has various molecular forms, watering systems in gardens and farms, strategies for keeping it in the right balance in the soil, filtering systems, and the details of the waters sold in the marketplace, to mention a few. Thus the suggestion here is again that a kind of hybrid spreadsheet may be one strategy to serve as kind of gateway to finding the specific information you are looking for
A few additional challenges involve how to list resources from other sites and sources as opposed to creating original material at the local level. Certainly at the beginning of the process it is a lot more convenient to cite other resources in an organized manner. This strategy generally provides cover from any sort of copyright infringement problems as long as the site is imply listed under certain categories etc. However as was mentioned earlier there is generally a need to make at least some information it's own. Sometimes this is necessary because the information needs to be rearranged in some manner, or perhaps it may be in danger of being removed from the net. Generally the two main regulatory issues on the net are copyright infringement and proper sourcing of any specific facts or evidence, though there is an additional question who is considered to be responsible for the site where the information is being posted. At the time of this posting the rules for violating these regulation are just requiring that the information in question be taken down from the site without risk of actual prosecution or fines, but there is some indication that could be changing. In conclusion to all of this there is a question of the need for a community to conform to larger regulatory authorities and the 'correctness' of that authority, and secondarily the question of whether a community can use alternative ways of storing information in a locally accessible manner that is not under the purview of some authorities but still respects the general principles of respecting copyright and proper citations fro truth claims
In general this site tries to keep conclusions of the current economic and informational systems to a minimum, and thus there are no claims that locally produced informational and economic systems must happen to save the world or something of equal drama. Rather the goal is to map the issues that are relevant to exploring what communities could contribute to at least improving any trouble we might be in, and then allow for experimentation and discussion from the community lead us to answers for any potential problems Some issues might be in the land of abstraction and theory as opposed to practical application, and for those the term narratives is used. Narratives also need exploration and discussion from the broader community, but are ready for discussion in a more immediate sense than do issues that require hands on experimentation. One example might be the problem of on line identities on discussion forums where so called computer bots are generated,but are often unidentifiable from actual persons. Yet at the local level it would appear, in theory at least, that this problem of bots, or even illegitimate identities in general, might be overcome more easily
In terms of the presentation of the information there are two ideas or themes that need to be presented early on . The first is the ability to move from the most general idea, or the shortest summary or description of an idea or category, to more specific and/or longer descriptions or summaries. The second idea is basically captured in the idea of the spread sheet where we have an element, or object, such as a type of plant like kale for instance, in a vertical column and then various types of environmental contexts or states of development of the given plant in the the horizontal rows. This is of course not a breakthrough idea of any sort, but there are some adjacent ideas lurking nearby. The main theme is that spreadsheets themselves can be seen as having a type of location the map that is trying to be expressed or illuminated. Generally speaking what we are calling narratives are likely at the top of the hierarchy and then spreadsheets would be one of the tools or maps just below at least some narratives, and then broader explanations of the subjects alluded to in the spreadsheets could be thought of as below that. A further and more exploratory idea is that spreadsheets could contain some type of hyperlinks or drop-down menus within both the 'boxes' where the columns and rows converge and in the columns and rows themselves. For instance if you were to click on your kale link, it might bring up a screen of all the sub types of kale with information on those sub types across the horizontal columns. If one were to click in a box the screen could expand to only show a variety options on how the information relevant to the box, though those details are being skipped for brevity's sake. The theme if you will here is kind of an accordion effect where spread sheets in particular can serve as a type of map tat expands and contracts as a type of an electronic equivalent of an accordion of sorts.
Spread sheets unfortunately only lend themselves to a fairly limited amount of subjects so we need some additional tools or ways of viewing the big picture or map if you will. Before looking at other tools it is likely advisable to consider the ideas of flows. A wide variety of flow charts exist and their utility here will be clear. But at the same time lets look at some of the classical look at the ideas of flow and evolution or change over time within systems. Ideas such as Hegelian dialectic are beyond the scope of what is being addressed but the ideas of feedback, assessing trends, polling and surveys, demographics, and perhaps verfiability and third party verfiabilty. These are either tools that are often equated with data that feeds meta data analysis of large scale systems such as communities, so again they are near the upper part of the proposed hierarchy. Other ideas that represent this meta level of analysis are resources, both physical, intellectual and social, analytical tools, such as; critical thinking, abstraction, creativity, and metrics and social tools, such as; effective communication skills, the problems of disruptive behavior, overcoming of barriers of social groups, and positive, or just plain enjoyable, social interaction. Metrics can include things line ORAC values in food products, which are an anti oxidant value, the EROEI (energy returned on energy invested), or the multiplier effect, which is a measurement of how money recirculates within a community depending on whether the business is owned locally or not. There are many common everyday metrics of course and the ones mentioned here are less well known and may serve as examples of how communities could use relatively new forms and information gathering in order to better integrate how information travels throughout the community.
How communities bring in, and organize information from so called outside sources has it's own distinct set of concerns. One of course is copyright, which tends to be pretty controversial. For instance their are many documentaries that come in DVD's that cannot be shown at a local gathering where people are charged to attend the event. The law should be well understood and conformed to, but also a discussion of both the fundamental principles and fundamental practicalities should also be a priority. For example, the mission of most educational documentaries is to inform individuals, so it would be logical for those who watch the DVD to try to inform other individuals of what is in the DVD. Yet it is here that we find a kind of strange contradiction since anyone who attempts to communicate or share the information in the DVD generally needs to do it precisely or face a possible liable charge for misquoting. Yet quote it verbatim, or directly share the DVD in the wrong setting and you may be guilty of copyright violation. Another challenge for a community is how to index the information available. One aspect of this is to provide categories, but that is taken up in a bit. In the meantime, many podcasts have no summaries, or incomplete summaries, attached to them, and this site has already taken up that effort on several podcast sites. Another problem is that some sites have hundreds of podcasts, but they are not listed in a comprehensive list on one page to avoid the incessant scrolling down and clicking on tens of pages to access older podcasts.A final consideration is of course how to prioritize the information under a given category such as seed saving. The strategy here has been to take the recommendations of trusted experts, but of course there are different experts for different folks so this is a difficult problem and will need to be 'worked out' for each community Again this site has already created single pages to access all podcasts at one viewing. Many other possibilities exist on how communities on how communities seek out informational sources as well as, how they incorporate and index those sources to suit their needs.
An additional issue in the acquiring of information and even storing it, is the increasing concerns of censorship, or deplatforming of some informational sources. There is no attempt to render an opinion on whether the re-prioritizing and removing sites is justified or not, rather just a suggestion of a safeguard strategy to address the possibility that some online search engines will not make it easy to find certain types of information. that even information any given community were to put up online has the potential to be removed. Hopefully this is not seen as paranoid since a community based indexing system would seem to offer a nice third alternative to having either large telecom monopolies or governments being in charge of making these decisions. Alternative search engines do exist, and with the assistance of community networks, such as is being described here, the so called free market may eventually provide enough alternative to avoiding the potential pitfall of monopolies deciding these questions alone. A third point here is both the decline of civility in online discussion, perhaps due to a type of anonymity that occurs, and the problem of bots or paid for profiles to spread a vested viewpoint on certain discussions. It seems possible that community discussion forum could potentially overcome some of these problems, especially if communities prioritize the need for at least some civility and practicing techniques to uphold that value. Platforms and systems do exist that can assist communities in these efforts though they are relatively obscure. It is likely the case that some of this work will take additional time and effort and communities will have to weigh the merits of how much time and effort is a good idea to deal wit h these issues.
Trying to categorize these issues in a kind of librarian approach is a difficult undertaking due to both the expanse and interconnected nature of the information and also due to the different sensibilities people have for this kind of thing. So it may be that different communities will need different systems even within their own efforts. One hope is that there can at least be some 'modularity' within various systems that can be plugged here and there. Hopefully people will remember the hope here is a cooperative effort and to the degree possible completed works will be made in a share friendly fashion.The previously spread sheet idea may be of some help in addressing this problem. For example we have many different modalities of how information is presented, such as, books, online articles, DVD, You Tube video, forums, podcasts etc. We also have the fact pretty much all categories have multiple aspects to them. Water for instance has several aspects to say the least it has various molecular forms, watering systems in gardens and farms, strategies for keeping it in the right balance in the soil, filtering systems, and the details of the waters sold in the marketplace, to mention a few. Thus the suggestion here is again that a kind of hybrid spreadsheet may be one strategy to serve as kind of gateway to finding the specific information you are looking for
A few additional challenges involve how to list resources from other sites and sources as opposed to creating original material at the local level. Certainly at the beginning of the process it is a lot more convenient to cite other resources in an organized manner. This strategy generally provides cover from any sort of copyright infringement problems as long as the site is imply listed under certain categories etc. However as was mentioned earlier there is generally a need to make at least some information it's own. Sometimes this is necessary because the information needs to be rearranged in some manner, or perhaps it may be in danger of being removed from the net. Generally the two main regulatory issues on the net are copyright infringement and proper sourcing of any specific facts or evidence, though there is an additional question who is considered to be responsible for the site where the information is being posted. At the time of this posting the rules for violating these regulation are just requiring that the information in question be taken down from the site without risk of actual prosecution or fines, but there is some indication that could be changing. In conclusion to all of this there is a question of the need for a community to conform to larger regulatory authorities and the 'correctness' of that authority, and secondarily the question of whether a community can use alternative ways of storing information in a locally accessible manner that is not under the purview of some authorities but still respects the general principles of respecting copyright and proper citations fro truth claims