dorn

Great idea - for reference I attached a screen shot of what I think we are both talking about. Anyone out there want to tackle this, or come up with a way to accomplish this in another way?

For communicating and sharing design elements I have found sketchup really helpful. We have had sketchup introductions as part of some of the events and I agree it would be good to emphasize how helpful it is to get drawings done of the project. It is nice that these can also be so easily embeded. I started a 3d-warehouse library here with farm hack models and related components - but this could be greatly expanded and more clearly incorporated into the site too. http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/cldetails?mid=cc34dd5b3d6df3291e32d9fc07262782&ct=mdcc&prevstart=0

Funny you should mention this - I have been in touch with Alec Ellsworth who is organizing a student club already, and I think they will even have a budget. chriscallahanuvm ( http://farmhack.org/user/805) is working with Alec to get this kicked off. I will suggest that they put some info onto the UVM open shop. It sounds like it is prime time for an event on UVM campus!

You bring up a great point that has been part of our design discussion from early on. I think that handling it well will be a crucial feature - as you mention there are ways to accomplish the relationships by manually linking to other tools and wikis, but it is tedious to set up. I imagine that in the shorter term we might be able to enable a menu to check and list related tool wiki's. One of the things I will be working on myself is developing groups of tools for "kits" both for various scales of grain production but also observatory "kits" for different types of environmental monitoring. I think you might find the following document helpful - it came out of a hackathon last fall to develop a build out plan for the "open shop" concept. Part of that plan involves introducing the concept of a "problem statements" which would have relationships to tools and or wikis. That way we can relate groups of tools in a meaningful way to a single problem statement, or a single tool to relate to multiple problem statements. There is still a lot to work out as far as how to construct meaningful relationships between problem statements, but I think this is at the heart of figuring out collaborative open source development.

Thanks for the suggestion!- I will add it to the tool wiki template instructions.