Food Solutions New England (FSNE) is a regional food systems learning-action network dedicated to advancing a sustainable New England food system. The FSNE network is organized around four interrelated activities:
A New England Food Vision, a bold vision that calls for our region to build the capacity to produce up to 70% of food that is produced in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner, that promotes health and is accessible by all New Englanders by 2060; New England state food planning initiatives; annual New England food summits and topical workshops; and related analysis, communication and visualization.
The UNH Sustainability Institute serves as the backbone organization for FSNE. Since its inception in 2006, FSNE has advanced its mission by linking a common agenda, shared measurement, continuous communication, and synergestic activities.
You bring up a great point that has been part of our design discussion from early on. I think that handling it well will be a crucial feature - as you mention there are ways to accomplish the relationships by manually linking to other tools and wikis, but it is tedious to set up. I imagine that in the shorter term we might be able to enable a menu to check and list related tool wiki's. One of the things I will be working on myself is developing groups of tools for "kits" both for various scales of grain production but also observatory "kits" for different types of environmental monitoring.
I think you might find the following document helpful - it came out of a hackathon last fall to develop a build out plan for the "open shop" concept. Part of that plan involves introducing the concept of a "problem statements" which would have relationships to tools and or wikis. That way we can relate groups of tools in a meaningful way to a single problem statement, or a single tool to relate to multiple problem statements. There is still a lot to work out as far as how to construct meaningful relationships between problem statements, but I think this is at the heart of figuring out collaborative open source development.