[foodhackingbase] recipes, wiki structure and other + water kefir and ginger beer plant

[Steffen Beyer]

Hello all,

On Mon, 24 Feb 2014 00:17:18 +0900, algoldor at foodhackingbase.org wrote:
> I'll make a short wiki page about makgeolli which 
> is traditional Korean rice alcoholic beverage, upload it to the wiki, 
> manual form is already there in I think proper section (Steffen was 
> taking care about that) and lets play with that as an example how to 
> link it, tag it etc. that may be the simplest way after that we can 
> apply it to the rest keeping to some "structure", what do you think? 

Good idea.

> http://design.arkreactor.com/
> 
> or we can go for some alternative, does anyone know about any 
> preferably open source?

The system is Discourse¹, as far as I can see, a Ruby on Rails 
application. Not a bad choice in comparison to PHP.  ,)

Currently we have a wiki and two mailing lists, one at hackerspaces.org 
and a new one (incubator) at our new host, Uberspace. We should think a 
moment where to go from here. The wiki is fine for now, but regarding 
forum/mailing list I see two user friendly options:

1. Stick to mailing lists, offer a web interface for reading (and 
possibly writing)

2. Switch to a web forum, users can subscribe to get email notifications

Basically I would prefer the first option, providing mailing lists to 
power users, web access for the rest of us. In any way, we should try 
to get a tight integration with MediaWiki, i.e. at least 
Single-Sign-On, instead of running multiple separate systems.

Software choices seem rather limited, suggestions welcome.

(...time passes...)

Just read a bit more about Discourse. It seems to support replying via 
email and features pluggable authentication modules, although there is 
none for Mediawiki, yet.

So this might be the way to go...?

> By the way before I run away we need as a group to talk about how to 
> properly cultivate the ginger beer plant and water kefir biofilm 
> polycultures.

I'm using the GBP from gingerbeerplant.net here, which worked fine so 
far for various brews. Usually I let it ferment openly for three days, 
then one day in bottles.

The growth of the plant is minimal, though. IIRC I read about using 
lime (chalk) to feed it. Could this be possible?

> PS And yes I'm transferring to the new email 
> algoldor at foodhackingbase.org which Steffen created for me and I guess 
> for anyone else who would like to get it :-)

Sure thing. Forwarding would also be possible.

> I talked about the idea of bringing people closer to the biological 
> principles of fermentation. What do you think of a category called 
> Category:Fermentation with two subcategories. 
> Category:Fermentation:Alcoholic and Category:Fermentation:LacticAcid. 
> We could tag every recipee with it and everynone who is interested 
> can have a look at it and understands the principles what is going on.

Yes, makes sense. But I would suggest an other naming scheme for the 
subcategories, as ":" is already used for namespaces. So instead of 
Fermentation:Alcoholic, how about

1. Alcoholic Fermentation
2. Fermentation/Alcoholic

The first option is very readable – the hierarchy graph does not need 
to be represented in the name². And we would gain more flexibility if 
one subcategory sometime gains more than one parent. What do you think?

Sincerely,
-- 
Steffen Beyer <steffen at beyer.io>

¹ http://www.discourse.org
² It is done via category tags on category pages:
  
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories#Managing_the_category_hierarchy