GreenStart's mission is to foster a resilient energy and food system for New Hampshire by providing technical education and practical agricultural examples. An educational non-profit organization established in 2006, GreenStart sees food and fuel security as the end-product of a vibrant, sustainable agriculture system in New Hampshire.
New Hampshire has 40% of its land area in agricultural soils, yet farms only 10% and imports 95% of its food and fuel. New Hampshire has no significant petroleum resources. To feed and fuel itself from sustainable natural resources, New Hampshire must improve its soils while also improving production.
To achieve this end, GreenStart facilitates projects that
1) increase soil carbon “banking”
2) decrease energy inputs
3) increase both food and fuel outputs (positive energy and carbon balance)
4) promote “tight” cycling of nutrients
5) provide opensource access to appropriate knowledge, seeds and equipment
I think that this starts to overlap with the tool sorting/searching function discussion. I think it is important to have really low barriers to posting, and agree that it would be valuable to have a space where people can post and tag tools they find even with very thin documentation - sometimes that is all it takes to spark an idea, and we SHOULD promote that as much as possible. I also think that we need to not lose projects that are active and underway in the the middle.
For example, I think that the Root washer, FIDO, and oat huller are all tools that have users actively involved in farm hack and are projects with activity behind them. I think that these should maybe be in a different category and highlighted. Perhaps we list "tool browsing library" for casual listings and "tool documentation kits", or "tool projects" or something along those lines to indicate that there is member activity moving from concept to some type of action by the community?
There could be no barrier or permissions for posting to the browsing library, but if there are on-going projects then there might be a sponsor for moving the project - which would have the benefits mentioned above. I would suggest not adding any permissions requirements at all at first, but at some point I think the tool wiki should be editable by subscribers to the tool? This should not be not very complicated to manage, but just add one step to commit a little more to the project.