Posted: Thu May 29, 08 9:54 am Post subject: PFAF website - problems ?
I heard this morning that the Plants For A Future website is 'falling over', possibly due to funding running out.
It was suggested that a good thing to do while the site was still up and running would be to pay to download the database.
Anyone else heard owt about this ?
What d'you reckon about the d/base ?
I use the site, though not on a hugely frequent basis these days.
Others who are more into survival-type foraging might find it more of a loss.
Joined: 28 Oct 2004 Posts: 25795 Location: Jumping on the bandwagon of opportunism
Posted: Thu May 29, 08 10:01 am Post subject:
I've noticed it's not been working for a day or so, although you can still view the pages cached in google. I've got Ken Fern's "Plants for a Future" book that's very good although the site is very, very handy.
Anyone know about their funding issues, Tahir do you know anything?
I've got a paid for copy of the dB, haven't spoken to Rich for a while, last time I spoke to him he said he was trying to transfer everything to Wikipedia. Will email him, it's far too useful a website to die, I'm more than happy to help if it's a funding issue but I think he's just found it a hard slog.
This just highlights the fact that I really should do something with that blinking DB of mine. Just too busy, a bit strapped too, need to build a house....
Funny enough I'd been thinking about this last week and thought the best way to approach it was to have a wikified "PlantDB" that allowed species and cultivar entries.
I think as a commercial project it'd be around £25k. Orangepippin, what'd you think?
At that kind of figure I'd be happy to kick start funding/fund raising if there were others here that'd help. I'm guessing we'd need to create an ownership structure of some kind to ensure that it didn't belong to a single person.
I saw the PFAF data structures some time ago courtesy of Tahir, so I could help with deciphering them. However I am less clear on what PFAF does because it is a while since I have looked at it. It sounds like we need some kind of outline of what the PFAF MkII should do - especially the collaborative wiki stuff. You can definitely count me "in" if I can help in anyway.
I've been trying to access it over the last few days for some research I've been doing & wondered why it had been offline intermittently. It's a very valuable resource & I'm frequently pointing people towards it, if it dissapears it will indeed be a massive loss.
Please keep us posted, if there's anything that can be done to help keep it online I'd like to contribute.
Last edited by hedgehogpie on Thu May 29, 08 10:51 am; edited 1 time in total
Not for profit, but to do it properly it's going to need to be done as a proper commercial enterprise (development & maintenance) to keep it running properly.
vegplot
Joined: 19 Apr 2007 Posts: 21301 Location: Bethesda, Gwynedd