I wonder if the pedal power flywheel technology might be helpful for powering through bumps and irregularities in the row and even out the effort? http://www.pedal-power.com/ I imagine that some of the ergonomics might work well too?
This post is track the kick off a tool page that will be able to use the wiki/forum structure of FarmHack to post the digitized version of a four volume set of a farm encyclopedia titled "encyclopedia of practical farming" It was completed in 1928 and is very comprehensive, but obviously would benefit from a complete review and update. The tool wiki will work for the table of contents but if each article were a separate wiki - they would not have the associated forums attached, so we may want to add the option to have forums attached to non-tool wiki substructure.
We've talked about this idea in the community before and I think it's time I implemented it. When tools need volunteers they absolutely need a way to broadcast it. Putting a notice on the wiki page works if someone comes across your tool page's wiki wiki but we really need a distinct way to BROADCAST a call to action. This could be important even for things like event organizing or in the Farm Hack Talk forum for things that might not even have tool pages yet (creating a tool page might be a call to action). Here's what I think might be a good way to tackle this:
From the Farm Hack Website planning that's been happening, Dorn Cox came up with a design for a new type of page on the website, an organization. Here's my estimate on time/cost of hiring someone to develop it.
Hi folks, I'm CTO of the nonprofit Open Learning Exchange, we're doing a pilot of our School BeLL technology in 20 schools in Ghana this year and we're hoping to put together some resources for schools on building school gardens. Does anyone know of any open source curriculum for school gardens or any garden designs that would work well in Ghana? Would anyone be interested in helping to develop that curriculum if we can't find any good existing materials?
-R.J. Steinert
Lets figure out one or two email notification subscription plans that work really well for most users as opposed to what we have, email notification subscriptions that work ok for some users.
There are endless ways to configure email notifications and everyone seems to have their own personal preference. Developing a system that fits everyone needs will be both expensive and probably confusing for the end user. Lets brainstorm a couple of subscription types and then possibly survey our users to find out what they might like.
Attached are images of a simplified and mobile device friendly version of a Tool page. It still needs better branding (ie. a farmhack logo in the top bar) but it gives you an idea of how much cleaner we could make the Tools section. I would like to see this developed as an HTML5 app that get content and submits content to the Drupal back end but it not dependent on the Drupal back end.
Looking over the ADABio forums (DIY Farmer folk from France http://forum.adabio-autoconstruction.org/) I got to thinking about our forum structure. The structure is very focused on what Farm Hack does: develop tools, host events, and the General category which acts as a place to route people into tools or events. There has been discussion of other forum structures and such but it's been hard to conceptualize how to structure content before it exists.
I think that given the general interest farm fabrication skills I have seen at several of the FarmHack events that this community could benefit by having access to the excellent work already accomplished and documented in the guide de l'auto-construction published in book form by ADBio-Autoconstruction. If folks are interested, please add your comments to this forum and we can reach out to the ADBio-Autoconstruction folks to see if it would be possible.