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.

It's now that you realise there's a whole body of information that is at a distance 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 specific, extremely local and burning questions. You could go so much faster if you had now the information you'll have in 5 years time!

You could of course tap onto a friendship network and that's fine if you have plenty of access to that, or even if you gain access to a network of friends, though if you want to go a bit faster it does have some limitations:

• Your (old) friends probably have the same information as you do, which means they also share your ignorance.
• Your (new) friends don't know everything you'll ask them, because their conditions are different (maybe they live in another country) and their knowledge is limited by their own experience.
• You don't know what you can ask them: do you know that they know what you need to know?
• You don't want to treat them as a 24x7 resource. At least if you want to keep them as friends.
• Finally, don't tell your friends, but maybe you're that type of person who can learn faster if they have lots of information they can look into at their 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 the information resources we're about to daydream about as a group (beers and all), so it's not either/or at all!

Now, 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?

Are there more questions? Phrased differently? With many more details?

How to move forward

• First, look at our needs and phrase them appropriately. Feel free to jump in right now, Marcin and others! What questions do you ask on the field? Feel free to give details, with "stories that help"!
• 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). We'll get to this step soon, I hope.
• At some point in time, we'll want to look beyond the imagined tool to the wider 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 (talk, type, chat)? 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. This will have to be iterative with the other steps, in the classic spiral pattern.
• 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? No limits to our thinking, please!
• Create a simple implementation of something that provides value straight away, and which is not too hard to implement. Here's where we need python gurus etc! Feel free to step in and introduce yourself! ;-)

At all times, look at what we can personally do. Even if the only thing we can do is tell our contacts about this.

Comments?

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

Thanks!