[Pil-pc-oceania] Jim's Permaculture

[jedd]

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007, Linda Shewan wrote:
> I am starting to feel quite anxious about the direction of this
> thread. 

 I'd suggest that you shouldn't.

 As I see it, there are some people we don't know, about to
 do some stuff (the details of which we don't know) but which
 we probably feel is A Good Thing for them to be doing, and
 ultimately there's roughly nothing that anyone here can do to
 change it anyway.

> And who would have the right to implement such a system - I
> thought the word permaculture was deliberately NOT Copyrighted
> or Trademarked - or am I wrong?

 You're wrong that it's deliberately not (c)'d or <tm>'d.

 As I understand it, Bill did attempt to acquire sole rights to
 the word, but left it a tad late.  The intent of this activity is
 something I don't know, but I'd speculate it was part of a plan to
 provide better legitimisation of the science of permaculture.

 Which is pretty much what we appear to be talking about trying
 to do here and now.  Oh well.

> If someone has very high expectations as stated in previous
> posts then I am sure they will check qualifications, reference sites etc
> before they make a decision to hire someone. If there is another
> available permaculture designer with more credentials then those that
> can afford the more experienced, and thus more expensive, options will.

 I don't think this is as simple as you make it sound.

 Using the most popular search engine on the net, there's only two
 .au sites shown in the first 20 hits (about 10 more than most people
 will bother scanning through).  Neither of those provide any clue
 as to an index of domestic permaculture practitioners (one of the hits
 is David Holmgren's site, which is slightly encouraging, but not all
 that useful in this context).

 Similarly, there's no way to 'check qualifications' of someone, as
 there's no central registrar, no way of comparing the quality of
 two permaculturist's output, and as with any skill, there's little
 chance that someone that doesn't know much about the subject will
 be able to determine how much someone else does know about the
 subject (a truism, and a common problem in all fields, to be sure).

 Jedd.