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13 years 6 months

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Forum comment

Hi Tim, I am so glad that you posted. I think your post is already a valuable contribution. You have just illustrated where we are with the Farm Hack site - you are on the leading edge of helping to develop the standard for documentation and templates. It was on my "to-do" list to try and post a sample template for community review this week, but I think that a good guideline might be that each entry eventually reach a stage where anyone, anywhere would be able to reproduce and operate the tool using the tool wiki and forum. Some standard components will be a bill of materials, cut lists where appropriate, materials sourcing, and as many technical drawings/CAD/sketchup type files as possible, and then use of sequential photos/videos for the "how to" use and build sections which would follow an instructables like format. I am facing some of the same organization questions as I start to post several projects from my farm- some of which have many sub-components to them. I would recommend that you try to post separate entries for each section of your design - say one for the movable tunnel as a whole, then one for the wheel assembly and another for the hoop bender. The more descriptive you can be in the titles of the tools and entries the better. The movable tunnel as a "meta tool" could then link to the sub-components that you have developed. I think this would enable others to start new threads for other approaches which could also be linked to the original mobile tunnel entry. I hope others jump in on this conversation too - I think it is important. There is a general discussion going on in the forum discussing how the community wants to handle the approval process, structure, sorting, searches etc. I would encourage you to jump in to the dialog there as well! http://www.farmhack.org/forums/do-we-want-tool-approval-process
Forum comment

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.
Forum comment

I think just as there are stages of development for tools, we have stages of development for the forum/wiki/site. I agree that as we get a longer list of tools we will likely want to search by function and application, but I think as we are establishing standards for tool documentation that it would be helpful that the first few tools people see are well documented with a lot of activity around them. As we have more to choose from, we will be able to highlight them in the blogs for this purpose, and depend on a more advanced menu/search function later. So I would see sorting/listing by stage and documentation level as an early stage approach as we are building and then moving to something more advanced?
Forum comment

I think that it is important to have someone to sponsor an initial tool posting, hopefully someone who has experience either using, or building it. I think this would lead to better documentation and exploration and improvement. Otherwise we can just have posts that we find around the internet that are cool looking but without the social connection - I think the forum is perfect for that kind of post. If this discussion for advocating for a new tool is done in the forum, then we can avoid discussions afterwards about why something was posted or having to remove from the wiki incomplete inappropriate, or commercial products that are not documented.