Together with the Omnicorp Detroit Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange in Detroit, WinterRoot is excited to announce our first ever kickstarter project! A community technology project to explore and catalog wild plants growing in Detroit’s open spaces. Full Description follows, or link to Kickstarter and consider backing our project! We have some great rewards planned for backers, so check it out!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Wildflowers of Detroit ??
One pervasive vision of Detroit is it’s ruins - the monolithic hulks of an industrial era gone by, documented in striking photographs and tales of urban exploration. What has gone missing in this narrative is the other side of the coin. In the open spaces left behind, a monumental resurgence of wild-ness is occurring: plots filled with wildflowers and wildlife. After knowing Detroit’s secret gardens and hidden blooms, we feel this is a story that needs to be told - appreciating this resource is crucial, otherwise it may merely be swept away. Wildflowers of Detroit is a community technology project for cataloging wild plants growing in Detroit, an effort which can enable people’s appreciation of Detroit’s reawakened ecology. Our technologies collaborative WinterRoot is teaming up with Detroit’s Omnicorp Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange to bring this vision into being.
An iPhone App?
And even more, we hope! We aim to create iPhone, Android, MMS, and email interfaces (all free) for posting geo-tagged photos of wildflowers, and logging their location and salient details for future study and appreciation. When you spot a great specimen or view of one of Detroit’s varied wild plants, you’ll be able to whip out your mobile device, snap a picture, and instantly upload to our website along with automatic longitude and latitude coordinates, adding your find to an interactive map. Sometimes it’s called “citizen science”, we call it community ecology - residents participating in the study of their own area. There is great value to be found in a community understanding it’s own natural process. An incredible phenomenon is afoot in Detroit, lets come together and begin its study!
Want to see it in action??
We already have an alpha version online demonstrating a proof of concept, but we need your help for the full build out. In order for this project to reach it’s full potential, we need to integrate all mobile devices, provide an interactive map showing the locations of the flowers, solve some technical details like caching of photos in areas of bad 3G reception for later upload, allow comments on each photo for identification and discussion, improve the site layout, integrate with social media, acquire substantial hosting, and get going on some advanced features like searching by species or habitat or providing a good interface for crowdsourced identifications. It’s a big list, and it just keeps getting bigger, but we think that this project can help us transform our impressions of grand old Detroit’s wild spaces. After backing this project, hop over to http://www.wildflowersofdetroit.org/ and start getting involved!!
If overfunded…
We plan to construct a small community herbarium in Detroit, creating a physical record of what grew where and when. Linking this with the website and database will create a dynamic and growing resource for children, students, and researchers interested in the incredible urban flora of Detroit. The ultimate tool for understanding the history and fate of the spaces these organisms occupy. We are still working out the details of where and how this will manifest, so check back here or our facebook page for updates!
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/winterroot/wildflowers-of-detroi
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Just Installed the eXist XML database server. I’m interested to mess around with this as it supports xQuery/xPath thus allowing for some pretty advanced querying of variously structured data - something that is lacking in databases like the Amazon simple storage service, and also the M-gateway project from what I could tell. My goal is to attempt a drop in replacement for the mapped MySQL tables we use for MoPCMS, since being able to directly query documents with changing structure is of critical use but is difficult to support in a standard relational database. xQuery can really change all this.
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WinterRoot LLC is very excited to announce, after nearly a year of work, the initial release of ‘Wild Edibles’ - our master foraging app created in collaboration with foraging expert ‘Wildman’ Steve Brill. The full version of the app contains 165 major edibles plus 52 minor plants, all of the identification and poisonous lookalike information you need to forage safely, and a recipe for every plant in the guide. It’s an exhaustive field guide synthesizing a lifetime of bringing foraging to the layman, with an easy to use interactive interface for portability and search-ability on your handheld device. iOS 4.2 is currently supported at the links below, with an iOS 3.2 compatible version awaiting approval from the app store and android version currently under development.
Wild Edibles Full: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wild-edibles-full/id431504588?mt=8&ls=1#
Wild Edibles Lite (free!) :
Other Versions and Apps by WinterRoot: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/winterroot-llc/id427385326
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AMP is a still incubating project for Java Eclipse which I’ve been construction simple agent based models in. By far the easiest platform for doing so, AMP generalizes a lot of the transition rules and value setting that normally are the grunt work of constructing models, and allows a researcher to quickly spin up a simple (or complex) model. Java is by nature resource intensive, so this is probably not the best platform for very complex climate models or other types of very large scale systems. However, for delving into unexpected outcomes of simple processes and rule sets, AMP is a very useful. It’s also interesting as a developed example of model driven architecture, programming systems where the code itself is generated at compile time. In this type of system, the programmer is responsible for creating appropriate architectures and specifying them using graphical representation, but not writing source code. One of the goals in MDA is full portability. Unfortunately I’ve had some trouble with the code generation in AMP, so I’m not fully convinced. However this is a useful toolkit which I have been using to explore some simple ideas about energy cycling and pathway discovery. Hopefully I’ll be posting more on that later, or perhaps some of the models themselves.
]]>Link Here: http://www.fromthegut.org/matt/etm4/
I’m looking for one of the beautiful ‘map’ drawings we had to put with this post, stay tuned.
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As part of a trade for work on the website for EdibleWOW managazine ( http://www.ediblecommunities.com/wow ) I was given credit for a quarter page ad in their print magazine. I’ve never considered advertising for WinterRoot before, but I thought this was an intriguing opportunity to share my ideas about technology. A notion of a ‘holisitic’ approach to technology has always been of interest to me, but only in recent years has my theory of how this might function begun to build out. This graphic present some ideas pushing in that direction, and presents the additional elements I am slowly adding to WinterRoot’s capabilities. I am actively seeking and exploring projects that bring together Information Systems, Alternative Energy, and Permaculture as long term goals - there will be a lot of additional information here on these pursuits as things progress.
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Perhaps one of WinterRoot’s least ‘fun’ projects, but an excellent experience in real world implementation. Detroit area media company NTVB needed a large suite of custom subscription management tools to support a new effort in their business. We leveraged object oriented programming strategies to support a wide variety of business logic, business information flows, and ever expanding needs of this new startup effort. Responsibilities have included the creation and training of a development team, design of complex testing strategies for application logic, distillation of company needs, and implementation of tailored tools. WinterRoot Technology Services, a sub-project of WinterRoot, has supported the growth of this business to 200,000+ customers in little over a year and maintains on ongoing retainer with NTVB. The application’s extensive tools are built on top of Kohana and our open source MoPCMS libraries.
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The first public version of the open source CMS I work on as part of Made of People is almost ready to be released. Our goals of supplying object oriented data architecture to the average user/developer on standard platforms is nearing a first round of maturity, and we are very pleased with the results. I will be updating this post in a short time more details, including the git hub for download and future development plan. The open source kit is dividing into a javascript ajax framework and a php/kohana based MVC framework for dealing with data. One design goal has been to make these 2 areas of work interoperable with other implementations.
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The United Nations Project on Extrajudicial Executions needed to improve their media dissemination and dynamic content capabilities through their website, as it is the main point of contact from their international efforts to reporters and lawyers working in the field. We expanded their capabilities with our MoPCMS framework and an in depth analysis of their data architecture needs. What has resulted is a much smoother and more cleanly organized site, making documents, reports, and images more fully accessible to interested parties.
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As part of the completion of my undergraduate degree in 2001, I elected to engage my own ideas about Media Theory and Semiotics on the World Wide Web. The product of this work was my manuscript Idea Spaces. Advised by Richard Candidas Smith and subtlety but deeply influenced by John Holland’s work in Complex Adaptive Systems, my basic premise is that understanding in a subjective network is characterized by the degree of exploration of a parameter space. In this sense, the WWW sensualizes an a classic human experience: the exploration of ’spaces’ of ideas. Evaluations of authority take place within spaces, while stepping outside of the boundaries of a space can completely change the meaning of conclusions. This is the meaning of context. The paper closes by suggesting that productive experiences are those in which boundaries can be repeatedly expanded and new explorations can be made. This is contrasted with consumptive experiences, where a highly structured space is supplied to a navigator without unexpected connections to spaces that challenge it’s authority.
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