February 20, 2017

1707 - Plant Buddies and Open Education

27 minutes

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How do we make sustainability, permaculture resources, and education more accessible? Are free and open source tools a way to answer that question?

To start that conversation, Botho Willer, the creator of Plant Buddies, joins me to talk this open source tool which makes finding compatible companion plants easier. During our time together Botho also shares his work with Serlo.org, an open education platform and project modeled after Wikipedia and designed to provide high quality education worldwide, free of charge, and without ads.

As mentioned in this conversation, open source tools matter to me. I've used these resources for years. My first encounter with Linux was in 1995 as the senior student systems administrator for my high school. In the early days of the podcast the show was recorded and edited entirely on a Linux laptop, and to this day the podcast website is hosted on a Debian Linux server. Even after 6+ years, I continue to edit the show with Audacity, a Free and Open Source editor.

As a result of all of that, I would like to see more independent education like you find on the podcast, or on YouTube through the videos of Geoff Lawton or Blake Kirby . With so much information available, however, sometimes it can be difficult to find high quality resources, which is why sites like Serlo are important for curating this information in open, crowd sourced, democratic ways. Together, with our skills and talents, we can contribute the a regenerative future.

If you know of other projects or programs like Serlo, let me know.

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Resources:

Plant Buddies

Serlo (English)

Serlo (German)

Green Gold - John D. Liu (Documentary - YouTube)

The Language of Image - My discussion with David Bilbrey mentioned in this interview. (A Patreon Exclusive)

...more