• Knowledge is the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject.
• Information describes (and gives structure to) knowledge.
• Data are the abstract facts that can be distilled and derived from information which can be stored on, and manipulated by, a computer.

Sharing knowledge is the most important thing we can do.

In order to share our knowledge effectively, GrubClub will adopt Semantic Web standards throughout. The best way to describe why this is a good idea is to give an example of the achievements and (current) limitations of another social project; and there’s no bigger or better example than Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s two greatest assets are (1) its content, and (2) the users that manage and maintain it. The majority of the organisation on Wikipedia is done by a minority of its users. The information in Wikipedia is organised for humans to consume; the organisation is a manual process and herein lies its main limitation. There’s a lot of administration work that is eats up time but doesn’t open up the information for new uses.  For example:

If there is a page detailing the top ten foods consumed in your country last year, then building a similar table for this year would require a lot of the work to be repeated to create a similar page.  If we wanted to replicate the table for all countries then extra work would be necessary to generate the extra pages.

Whilst the diligent managers of Wikipedia’s pages work hard to organise the information, there is notably little “distilling” of it to create reusable data. If data (rather than pages of information) is available it can be queried and combined with other data, so:

1. Similar pages for any country could be automatically generated.
2. Novel perspectives could be derived, offering alternative insight into the original knowledge. i.e:
   

   What if countries are not the segregator you’re looking for and instead you’d like to see the information organized by distance from the equator (separated into 100 mile wide hoops that surround Earth)? If we have latitude data for countries then such a page can be automatically generated.

   What if you’d like to see the same data segregated by annual rainfall, mean population age, or by some other socio-economic criteria?

   Unless a wikipedia editor (or you) spends the time to create every one of the pages you want to use, you’re going to be unlucky; and even if you or someone else does do the work to make the pages, it’s time that could (and probably should) be better spent distilling the data and working out how to automatically generate the pages you’re interested in, so that the next person who wants to query something similar has less distilling to do.

There is always organizational overhead, but the as time is spent organizing data, much more time is saved by avoiding the generation and maintenance of pages that are useful only to humans.  The crux of the matter is this: at the time knowledge is captured we are unlikely to know how it might be used, or how it may be combined in new and novel ways, so the key to effective knowledge sharing is the storage of data that is freely accessible to as many humans and as many machines as possible.

To this end we should strive to:

1. Distill information into data that has semantic markup – small indicators that enrich and clarify what the data is and what it means.
2. Avoid locking knowledge into inflexible structures, and applications.  Instead we should favour flexible, open and integrable standards that allow us to describe what we know, but do not limit us in the way we interpret that description (because structured data is good, and some data cannot exist without structure but there’s never just one correct way of describing anything, so if we are flexible we are with the data, we create opportunities to squeeze knowledge from it).

Sharing knowledge is the most important thing we can do, and the technologies that will allow us to be most flexible and open in sharing this knowledge are Semantic Web technologies.

GrubClub needs your help.  It would be useful to hear from anyone with experience of being involved in a food coop: as a volunteer, a member, an occasional shopper, an employee, a producer or anything else.

What’s good and bad?  What makes you mad?   What could be improved if technology (and technological cost) were no obstacle?

There’s no upper or lower word limit – so please leave a comment, share what’s in your brain and help others!

The interview explains it better than I can, but the important bit is that they discussed how vast transnational corporations are directly responsible for inequalities within and between countries. These inequalities impact on both physical and mental health; and the corporations are responsible for climate change: not good stuff, but, but despite their negative impact on the way we live, there are things from within these corporations that are quire useful, including the idea that:

“the ability to communicate instantly throughout the world and a vast array of management processes which enable trade throughout the world is not such a bad thing”. Gerry Gold

Burning the banks and destroying everything that went before for a clean slate is not the solution, but instead, composting capitalism might be. To resolve inequality we need to promote greater participation in industry and workplaces.

For example:

In Park Slope, in Brooklyn, they have a food coop. Everybody in the coop has to do three hours a month. You have to stack it, you have to label, work the tills, work in the ordering department, what have you. They employ a couple of people to keep track of what they’ve got and need. They cut deals with local farmers just outside New York and give above-supermarket rates, and because they’re not interested in making a profit, they manage to reduce the prices on everything. I went in there thinking yeah yeah yeah food coop it’ll just be a couple of manky apples, an organic thing, so it looks ugly. You get there, and it’s the most remarkable thing I’ve seen, and they do it using all the technologies [Gerry] is describing.  Mark Thomas

The above, which is a fairly faithful quote left me thinking “Wow. Why is there no food coop near me? Maybe there is a food coop and I don’t know about it. How would I set up a food coop? What’s involved? What are the key roles? How do I find other people who’d want to help? What knowledge do you need to run one efficiently? How do you start approaching producers? Are there any resources on the web that answer these questions? How do I find them and if they don’t exist, what do I need to do to create them so others can do it too?

Whilst I’ve got the technical know how to find some of the knowledge that’s out there, and to create some services, it could be so much more if I could create a site that others can help with. Right now I don’t know how far it will go, or what needs to be achieved.

So if there’s a gap in the market, lets see how big it is and fill it with something that promotes increased equality through participation and benefits everyone by improving local trade.

• The Park Slope Food Coop has a website.
• The Mark Thomas interview with Gerry Gold is available through iTunes or can be downloaded (as mp3) from Mark’s site.

The blog is powered by WordPress. The wiki will no doubt be MediaWiki and the forum will most likely be bbPress. All are released under the GNU Public License.

What else do we need immediately?

The long term goals are simple:

1. Help and inspire people to create and consume sustainable foods.
2. Write, maintain and host web-based services that support this goal.
3. Publish everything we do under a free license, so everyone can benefit, every word we write, every tool we create will be free for anyone to use.
4. Incorporate GrubClub as a public service not-for-profit organisation.

So if you can help, let us know what you know, what you can do & how you can help.