I think that when tools are posted to the wiki, the original poster should sponsor them - and give some context in the forum. A culture of posting to the forum before posting a new tool would enable evaluation of stage of project, category and areas where documentation will be needed, and it would be really good I think to have tools posted be rooted in the real world by someone who has actually built and or used, or will use a tool rather than just cool ideas. Others thoughts?

Maintainer model (only a self selected few are authorized to make edits)

Pros: May be more productive for Tools that are currently being developed. Much clearer distinction who is driving the tool's development. Tool maintainers may prefer this method as opposed to letting everyone edit and trying to manage it.

Cons: If Tool maintainer abandons the Tool, we need a process for allowing folks to take over maintainership. This could be a community bottleneck.

As the Farm Hack community grows we may want to set up a verification process by which admins approve new tools given a minimum set of guidelines. At face value this idea seems at odds with the Bazaar style of Open Source development (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar) but we may be able to structure this moderation mechanism in a way that does not stifle collaboration.

Now that we have a working site. It's time to make sure we're all on the same page when it comes to rules before we launch. I'm proposing a set of rules that are VERY VERY relaxed. Even if you don't agree with me that Bazaar is better than Cathedral, I think this more relaxed model still holds water because we have so few users. In other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, in this case, don't confuse people with complicated rules.

I think we've all been struggling with the question of, "Where do we put this information?" If we have a new Tool we're building, then that's and easy answer, "The Tool section!" but if we are thinking about how to discuss Urban Agriculture vs. Urban Gardening (which has been taking place on an email thread) or we're kind of stumped. So, I'm going to propose a structure that I think both vastly simplifies the issues we're grappling with and also uses existing concepts/functionality that we're using on this new Farm Hack beta site.

The Public Labs community is in the middle of dropping the Creative Commons Share-alike license in favor of the CERN Open Hardware License 1.1" This is something we should consider. Jeffrey Warren sums up the reasons why we should care on the Public Labs site:

What is a "TOOL"? This topic is to explore how we define tools in Farm Hack. Some thoughts:

Tools are not just mechanical devices, but also technical approaches which may involve substituting biology for machinery or chemistry to accomplish a task or do work.