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
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.