Autonopedia

In the beginning, the Internet was a free place, without boundaries. As commercial use began to take hold, less and less information was offered to the public, and many sites became nothing more than lengthy advertisements. With this trend, the proliferation of free content and the desire for knowledge is slowly being eradicated.

The goal of Autonopedia is to promote learning in it's purest form - by offering comprehensive archives of every conceivable type of sustainable living material and resources.

The importance of a sustainability movement and having the info we need

It is utterly vital now to make the all of the knowledge and know-how of living ecologically freely available to all and everyone, without prejudice. This is the only way to ensure the general concepts catch on and develop everywhere!

There is no place for anyone to claim ownership of such knowledge just because they have written a book, or regard themselves as the only official body etc. Not everyone can buy the book, take the course, buy the kit or whatever although those that do so will generally still do so, in-fact many more of them will do so because of Autonopedia. Being more like a good DIY manual or self-help book than a website makes it accessable and understandable to as many people as possible

Computers are becoming ever cheaper, and more rugged and portable. Even wind-up computers are soon to be available to schoolchildren in many parts of the world. It is one form of technology that soon will be found in even the remotest corners of the planet.

Although the internet has harnessed this power to give us the vast evolution in global communication that we are now experiencing it has become a very complex machine and often finding the information you want can be a time consuming and often frustrating experience.

Having a site such as Autonopedia saves much of this time and energy to allow the creative element thrive, to stimulate and enhance the creative and learning process by supplying the necessary information effectively in one place.

This is a non-profit web site, dedicated to educational study and research. All copyrights belong to their owners and are acknowledged. All material presented on this web site is either news reporting or information presented for non-profit study and research, or has previously been publicly disclosed or has implicitly or explicitly been put into the public domain. Fair Use applies.

Funding

Although Autonopedia contains some advertising it has always been and will always remain a not-for-profit project. The purpose of the advertising is fourfold:

1. Nothing can be done for free, high bandwidth webhosting costs money and eventually Autonopedia will need it's own dedicated servers and these are not cheap.
2. To really fullfill the aims of the project needs many hours of work which at the moment is done on a purely voluntary basis. Unfortunately we all need to eat, have somewhere to live etc., and there is only so much time one can give on a voluntary basis. A few full time staff and some maybe means to pay some part time copy writers would go a long way to making this a truly sustainable project. Many of the areas within Autonopedia could do with a rewrite if only to make it easier to provide legible translations to other languages and also to avoid potential copyright problems.
3. No-one involved needs that much to live on as simple lifestyles are what we are about.
4. To invest in actual project building so as to be able to properly document and prove what we are publishing. This is a very important factor that we would like to pursue...
5. Advertising can actually be rather useful as a means to find suppliers, services and resources. It is also a means, of course, for responsible providers to be able to attract potential customers. As far as possible only ethical traders can advertise although we cannot guarantee this to be the case with Google Ads.

Wikipedia vs Autonopedia

Quite a few people have questioned the need for Autonopedia when there is Wikipedia, but there is a big difference.

Wikipedia doesn't have much in the way practical hands on stuff and it is too wide ranging to create any focus on the important issues. It is also open to a lot of abuse and to a certain degree, misinformation. If you look up any of the Autonopedia subjects in Wikipedia you will rarely find anything of a really practical nature and often find a lot of waffle and links to academic discussions and papers (more waffle).

Autonopedia only has relevant practical info for sustainable, autonomous living and community and the idea of the networking side is to bring together people working toward these aims. Bringing relevant info together in one place makes things easy to find, not everyone is good at scouring the net, or even has the time, yet alone figure out what is accurate, really works or is actually viable.

Autonopedia also has great relevance to third world communities as well, where it is impossible to raise funds for technological solutions and people have to make do with what they have and what they can make.

Autonopedia As A Download:

Ultimately we want to provide Autonopedia as a download

By having Autonopedia as a portable application as well as a web site it becomes accessable everywhere on any computer that can accept a CD or a portable flash drive. And soon on any PDA/ phone coupled to a reasonable display or via a computer.

• By following the KIS(S) [Keep It Simple (Stupid)] principle we can store a vast amount on one CD or a small pocket flash drive.
• This can make it available when and where it is needed, which is generally when doing the job being described, not when hooked up to a phone line.
• By having an update mechanism built in it can have auto or manual update via the internet.
• This also makes it easier to compile, easier to index and easier to use.

To make this work properly requires investment in time and money. The coding and software to enable this to work effectively comes at a price. Although the basic web pages are easy to export, an effective, hands free update mechanism is another matter, as is a decent search facility that works on multiple operating systems. We know that it can be achieved so it is just a matter of time...