Ideas pertaining to a collaberative online knowledge-base

[George Mochrie]

Is there anyone from the policy group here?

I was very impressed with Helen OKeefe's presentation yesterday, specifically the proposal to establish an information resource. This is something that several groups have mentioned and that seems essential to facilitate effective action and avoid duplication of effort. It's an idea that has been discussed in group 2 (it's mentioned in our summary), and at Planet Sutherland we've talked about it too.

I think a wiki would be a good platform for a knowledge-base, something like Wikipedia but for sustainable food. Different groups could contribute directly to the knowledge-base in the same way that Wikipedia crowd-sources it's information from volunteers, but the group running the wiki would still be able to maintain control over published content. The free-form nature of a wiki makes it suitable for all kinds of information. It seems a good fit.

Tiki Wiki would seem like a possibility, it provides a whole host of extra features that you may or may not find useful. MediaWiki would be another good choice, it's the one Wikipedia uses. There are a whole host of other alternatives. If you like I'd be happy to set up a demo site for you guys to play with. Of course you may have thought about this already, and/or decided to go a different route.

When we we discussed this at Planet Sutherland we were looking at an environmentally focussed resource, food-related information would be a subset of the whole. It was largely my wonderings in relation to a knowledge-base that prompted me to ask this question.

[Ellie Dingwall]

This has been a big area of discussion for Group 7 (Bigging Up Small Farms) too. We're currently putting together a survey to put out to the delegates to get a feel for what interest is out there. It would seem redundant for each group to create it's own 'knowledge hub' so this is definitely something which should be discussed 'inter-group' as it were.

[helenstrong]

It's also been discussed in Group 6 (Develop a Highland-wide Community Food Growing Network). We've been mainly thinking about the idea of a map pinpointing local community growing initiatives with links to their success stories. It would be great to be able to pool this information.

[Martin]

There's already this https://www.agricology.co.uk/, and I suspect there must be other sources around.