Appropedia & Ekopedia exploding on the content front. April 3, 2010
Ref - Appropedia and Ekopedia are exploding on the content front (mailing list<open-sustainability-network.googlegroups.com>)
May I offer some feedback ref "use-ability"?
I was originally excited by the idea of Appropedia - I thought it might have useful info for people ad projects that I know in Africa. But I gave up looking. There was too much stuff there and no way I could work out what might be appropriate. I needed an Appropedia that was arranged in ways that would help me find what I (or my contacts) needed.
Maybe things have improved and my feedback is out of date - I don't know - I stopped looking.
I didn't want to know so many possible variations - I simply wanted to know which might be relevant, so I needed help with useful stuff to cut down the options. In a database like this I need help to answer the questions in my mind like:
- how useful is it really?
- what is relevant on a community level?
- what is relevant on a household level?
- what is useful locally that we could produce locally and sell locally?
- is this relevant where we are? (it's so disheartening to read of great stuff being made available "for Africa" only to find it is only for specific countries - and we are not included)
- what does it cost?
- if it's more that we've got is there any way to help pay for it? (loans, grants etc)
- how easy to install?
- what local skills would we need?
- if we don't have those skills already is there any way around that?
- what's it made of?
- how easy/hard is it to get hold of the initial components?
- how easy/hard is it to maintain