Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Research database?

[Lion Kuntz (lionkuntz]

Anthea Guinness wrote:
> We have been doing a lot of research on cohousing communities,
> organic gardening, permaculture, hybrid housing, etc., towards
> developing one or more coho communities. Has anyone got a simple
> solution for organizing that kind of research on computer? Ideally,
> we need to be able to pull together scattered references to a variety
> of topics we've got notes on. Any suggestions would be much
> appreciated! Anthea

I created something of that nature over six years. The current online
website would fill one and a half CD-ROMs, but that's without
animations and background data. Those supplimentary data would fill
about 80 CD-ROMs.

A real critical problem is outside links. The halflife of links is
about 6 months (50% are dead in 60 months, 50% of the survivors are
gone by the next six months, etc...). You would think the government
and university sites would keep pages longest, but they are notorious
for moving stuff and updating websites and trashing pages. Don't count
on anybody outside to keep your information for you.


In my personal life I have utilized the Supreme Court's decision that
it is legal under copyrights to make a personal copy stored on drive
for later reading. Online I either have to rewrite the data, or else
depend on unknown strangers to preserve key information that I am
pointing to but not rewriting. A compromise was to make use of the
doctrine of "Fair Use" to reproduce excerpts of data for educational
and scientific use.

For subjects like "Permaculture" there is a library of books published
which treat the subject in depth, and for a geographically compact
community, a private subscription library would be preferable to
recreating the information electronically.

Even there you run into information overload issues. On my webpages I
have categorized collections of books, sometimes no more than the book
cover and publisher/author/price information, and I point to 800 books
on Amazon.com for reviews or even to read selected chapeters online
with Amazon's "Look Inside" feature.

With the short halflife, there are cases where my excerpts of data are
the only remaining copies of part of the data found by google search
engine out of 80 billion webpages or so.

For technically detailed inquiries it is not unusual for one or more of
my webpages to be in the top ten results on google, and top one for
exotic keywords.

As an example, the keyword "ecocity" gets me 10th and 11th places, with
a link to another 98 pages for that keyword out of 167,000 competitor
pages. "Microfarming" comes up 4th place but there are only 1,290
competitors.

Unfortunately, I don't maintain the old pages and the dead links far
outnumber the valid ones. I used to use a dozen different webhosts over
time, and consolidated everything on one website. Even links to some of
my own pages never got updated as the URLs changed again and again and
things were re-ordered and renamed.

I'm only one person and have no staff to help maintain.

The material grew organically as I followed my bliss and changed my
topic of focus. It started out only on microfarming relevent to
financial self-sufficiency, sustainability, diversified to face changes
in markets, laws and tastes, and something which could be sustained
without much machinery.

Then it went to housing security, a major change in focus. "Palaces for
the People" is the main event. Interestingly google lists 673 links for
the generic term "Palaces for the People" but if I add the qualifier
ecosyn.us then I get 712 results. Go figure, I would have thought the
ecosyn.us would be a subset of the "Palaces for the People" results.

That had a following and drew about half a million visitors before I
moved to a webhost without stats. I still get the hits, but I can't
tell where they are coming from or what pages they are going to.

Politics was an interlude, and more than half the weblinks pointing to
the website are aimed at political pages.

Then I added some on H2-PV energy security and self-sufficiency
content, but that has never been developed very far.

There are about 3,000 hours, maybe 6,000 hours of development. I kind
of lost track and some blurs into non-related activity.

Lately I added some lessons pages on architecture and Global Warming
issues. One lesson link posted to a high traffic forum can generate a
thousand hits of lookyloos. Too bad I never figured out a way to make a
nickle off all of this, let alone a nickle per visitor.

My "plan" when I started all this was possibly similar to yours. Do the
research prior to setting up a community. I had planned an educational
community based around teaching microfarming which would be hands-on
instruction. The community would be similar to co-housing in most
respects, although i wasn't thinking in those defined terminology.

When I got walloped by a major health crisis I was taking a brief
interruption to sketch out an urban lifestyle based on ecocity concepts
to correspond to an online seminar on ecocity. The initial effort was
rushed to meet deadlines to be ready while the seminar was ongoing.

Since I was incapacitated anyway, it was natural to turn to elaborating
on that subject as I wasn't going to get to do the Institute in this
lifetime. That's what brought me here. I made inquiry about people's
reactions about living in large multifamily, multi-use buildings. I
received some useful information out of that.

It all relates to "co-housing", but not contemporary forms of
co-housing -- it's future co-housing for people who think
comprehensively. Either there will be people like that, or there
probably won't be people at all, but I'm outta here long before either
choice gets settled.

What can I say I learned out of all this?

Google can be your friend. Keep one eye on teaching google how to find
your pages as you make them. Then, when the project gets so vast that
you lose your place you can let google tell you that page is if you can
remember a few things about the page.

Make several sections that have front doors that address specific
audiences, that categorize things the way that might be good for
somebody coming cold to the pages.

Plan on maybe someday offering the collection as a hyperdisk on CD or
DVD. When it gets bigger than a book there is a market for it and you
can sell by mail-order online. I should have thought about that long
ago. It's a lot of work and you ought to get paid back for it later.
The Microfarming institute was supposed to have an online information
center and electronics publishing branch as a revenue center.

As you proceed, document everything. Fill up CDs with photographs so
that you have a lavish collection of content to choose from. Make
records of progress. Eventually there will be people wanting to do what
you did and the cheapest way to learn sometimes is to pay for the
teaching. (Corollary: The most expensive way to learn is often by being
a cheapskate and rediscovering the wheel from scratch.)

Everything from companion planting to herb identification potentially
has a payoff as an electronic publication later. Get good at the
photography and don't spare the 14 cent CD blanks. They say a picture
is worth 1000 words, but I've seen too many books with crappy pictures
that didn't help identify a plant in the real world later. I've seen
the same and worse on the net.

You really didn't identify who "We have been doing a lot of research"
is. Hopefully you are not a cybercommunity, but real neighbors, because
you just can't do it right scattered all around. Good luck in getting
your co-housing going so that you are co-located. Sometimes
sneaker-net, hand-walking a disk or video is the fastest way to pass
information around.

Yeah, good luck.

Sincerely, Lion Kuntz
Sonoma County, USA


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