Information For Food Swadeshi

• HABITAT: CEB Press - Sawmill - Living Machines - Modular Housing Units
  
• AGROECOLOGY: LifeTrac Multi Purpose Tractor - MicroTrac - Power Cube - Agricultural Spader - Agricultural Microcombine - Hammer Mill - Well Drilling Rig - Organoponic Raised Bed Gardening - Orchard and Nursery - Modular Greenhouse Units - Bakery - Dairy - Energy Food Bars - Freeze Dried Fruit Powders
  
• ENERGY: Pyrolysis Oil - Babington Burner - Solar Combined Heat Power System - Steam Engine Construction Set - Solar Turbine - Electric Motors/Generators - Inverters & Grid Intertie - Batteries
  
• FLEXIBLE INDUSTRY: Lathe - Torch Table - Multimachine & Flex Fab - Plastic Extrusion & Molding - Metal Casting and Extrusion
  
• TRANSPORT: Open Source Car
  
• MATERIALS: Bioplastics

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Why this

Let's say you're interested in food swadeshi: growing food for self-sustenance, community or local profit. You read books and webpages and maybe go to one or two courses or meetings or whatever. Now you're on some piece of land and look around.

And you realise there's a whole body of information that is away from where you are. It's in the minds of many food growers all over the world, in databases and webpages, but somehow it's not too easy to get the exact answers to your questions.

You could tap onto a friendship network and that's fine if you have access to that, though it has some limitations:

• Your friends probably have the same information as you do, which means they also share your ignorance.
• Your friends don't know everything you'll ask them, because their conditions are different and their knowledge is limited.
• You don't know what you can ask them.
• You don't want to treat them as a 24x7 resource if you want to keep them as friends.
• Finally, don't tell your friends, but maybe you can learn faster if you have lots of information you can look into at your own pace. Just like many people learn to do stuff on their own, be it maths or juggling or whatever, if they have the books and some time on their own.

It's also true that you can use information resources as a group, so let's get on with this idea!

What we think we need

This is an evolving idea, and here's what we think we need:

1. Ready access to CONCEPTS: anything from permacultural ethics to design criteria. This is easy but could be integrated.
2. Ready access to DESIGNS: keyhole raised beds, etc. These would be text descriptions, videos and the whole thing. If it's in other languages, a link to translation tools would be a nice add-on.
3. Ready access to INFORMATION: what are the features of plants? which particular and explicit varieties are well-adapted to particular regions. This requires local and bioregional information.
4. A way to do SUBSTITUTIONS: Say a particular design uses a specific plant, which is not available to us. What other plants could we use? This could be extended if we look for FEATURES: imagine "google tree shade tropical edible-by-goats".
5. SOURCING - do you mean seeds, Marcin?

How to move forward

• First, look at our needs and phrase them appropriately. Feel free to jump in.
• Second, do the kind of work some software developers do, moving through those "needs" imagining things in slow-motion. What questions we'd ask. What results we'd expect from the system. What we do next. How we contribute (with questions or information).
• At some point in time, look beyond the tool to the ecosystem. Where's some information already (wikipedia, webpages, people's heads). What can they provide and use. What are their interests and motivations. What do they find difficult or easy to do. Are there helpers around (permaculture students who would be interested in cooperatively growing a tool which would help them if they feed it)? Probably lots of other factors.
• Go wild with ideas. Think about clever hacks, maybe something that sits on top of wikipedia and google maps? A helpful clever software agent that helps us because it knows both more and less than we do?
• Create a simple implementation of something that provides value straight away, and which is not too hard to implement.

At all times, look at what we can personally do.

Comments?

Please write here or to imagina dot canarias at gmail dot com.

Thanks!