Tiku,

Think I now understand your needs better.

Before presenting my thoughts on how WiserEarth can probably serve your needs, I'd like to clarify/inform the following points (which you may already know about):

• In essence, there's only groups and there's no such thing as sub-groups in WiserEarth. Regardless, like the example we have in the WiserEarth Editors group, where we needed to collaborate and focus on specific projects to improve various aspects of the site, we created "working groups" and "link" each to the group's homepage (in the "Related Groups" section). The process of "link"-ing is a manual search-and-click-to-add. And the label "Related Groups" can be changed to anything a group admin like (in our case, it's "Working groups - hop in anytime!").
• WiserEarth Areas of Focus taxonomy is a categorization of issues, where each area of focus (AoF) has a portal page (in essence, a standard WiserEarth wikipage), and can be tagged to other WiserEarth entities (people, organizations, groups, resources, events and jobs). There's no group, sub-group or super-group for each AoF. There's just people and a bunch of people in groups who contribute in editing the AoF portal pages.

So, in light of this, here's my thoughts on how WiserEarth can serve your needs with an emphasis on the main purpose of, in your own words, "fulfill all of our community's needs to network, communicate and collaborate, I think  the most important  thing is the function of geographic maps systems"

1. The taxonomy specific to usufruct;

• Addition to the taxonomy is possible and there's precedence for this. However, the way WiserEarth's AoF taxonomy is in a two-tiered hierarchy going from general (Main AoF) to more specific (Sub AoF), I'm not quite sure it can accommodate very detailed AoF like sacred sites, bike paths, etc. The umbrella concept usufruct can I think be placed within the Conservation Main AoF as a Sub AoF as it has a Sub AoF called Land Stewardship. You'll need to suggest this addition in the WiserEarth Area of Focus Suggestions group.
  
• Another possibility is to use the Land Stewardship. Sub AoF to tag all entities in your group and add the word "usufruct" and any one of "sacred sites, bike paths, etc." in keywords field of all entities pages, which would probably be a resource page.
• Suggest that the AoF taxonomy be expanded into a three-tiered system and add more specific usufruct AoFs under an Usufruct Sub AoF? Not sure this would be a good move as we already have keywords to add aditional tags to entities. You can suggest this in the WiserEarth Suggestions group.
  
• There's another upcoming (around September) WiserEarth entity called solutions. It is actually a directory of peer-reviewed solutions that employes a different set of taxonomy for each community of practice (who will review the solutions submitted). So, if the solutions relates to land stewardship, the solutions can be tagged with a taxonomy specific to it. This taxonomy subset will not be visible on the main WiserEarth Areas of Focus taxonomy, and will only be used by each particular community of practice to tag solutions. Thus, I imagine that bit of code to create the subset of taxonomy can be integrated into WiserEarth groups as a feature to accommodate the needs of initiatives like yours. Don't really know if this is technically possible or a good feature upgrade in the overall scheme of things. (You can view a demo of the solutions object from the bulleting board of the Conservation Yellow Pages group.
  
• Another possibility is that you just create one group for each locality (Byron Shire in this case) and purely use keywords to tag any entities in your group. The group search function should be able to filter entities tagged with each keyword. The keywords can be your desired taxonomy (City/Country Fingers, Magic of the City, Sacred Sites, Common Land, Bike paths, Fruit Trees, etc). You can then create a wikipage to accomodate links to each search result for each keyword(s) and have a wikipage or a resource page for an Usufruct Taxonomy.
  
• If you need people of Byron Shire to work on specific aspect of your community (e.g. community gardens), you can then create a group called (perhaps) "Byron Shire community gardeners", "Byron Shire small business owners", etc. where members of those group be made members of the umbrella group "Usufruct in the Byron Shire". These "sub-groups" can be linked to the umbrella group as explained at the beginning of this comment of mine.
  
• Other localities "Usufruct in the Constantine Shire", "Usufruct in the Queens Shire" can "link" to entities from your group and help edit/improve them. This includes that Usufruct Taxonomy page and maps for each pattern (bike path, feral fruits, etc.).

2. To create editable maps specific for the taxa

First and foremost, WiserEarth is a community directory and networking forum, it is not a platform to perform collaborative image editing though it is a platform for collaborative text editing (as you know). Don't know if WiserEarth should direct its resources to enable the former (image editing), but I would say that's an overkill for the near future.

Thus, hinting from the blog article you mentioned, a solution for this would I imagine be:

• Use existing mapping tools like Google Maps to get a detailed map of your locality.
• Upload all those maps to a Flickr usufruct_byron_shire account and have each of your WiserEarth group member create a Flickr account too (which they may already have) to perform collaborative editing (note-attaching) to the maps.
• Use other image editing platform for differnt needs (bike paths, etc.) and follow the same route to get your community members to help edit them.
• For those maps in Flickr (with notes), enable embedding in WiserEarth pages. A good solution is one called Mbedr which enable precisely that. Security-wise, not sure how WiserEarth can take in such embedding. But necessity-wise, I think this is a solution that wants to be born.
• Or, you can provide the image file in the "Files and Photos" tab of each resource page, and have group members download them and perform edits to then upload and insert them again for the group to see.
• Thus, you can have numerous locality-specific resource pages, each containing a Flickr map (with notes) or maps edited with other softwares to represent a pattern in your community.
• You can share each page with any other related groups (other localities, or "sub-groups") as this is a standard feature in WiserEarth.
• You can "network" those patterns either by a superimposed maps (with Flickr? or with more powerful desktop softwares) or via the entity "Network"-ing feature in WiserEarth (available in the Network tab of each entity page).

3. To identify our community in a local context.

Answered.

Conclusions:

• This is pretty much a brainstorming process for myself, so things may seem overly complex as it is an exploration for a solution. Hope things gets clearer as this discussion moves forward.
• To Peggy: perhaps we need to resurrect the idea of a tagging system for WiserEarth, which will be a parallel to the AoF taxonomy and can replace current "keywords" field in entities page? This should allow groups to easily create their own "taxonomy" while allowing it to be used and shared by others.
  
• With one severe limitation: collaborative map editing needs to be done elsewhere, I think WiserEarth can pretty much fulfill your needs.

Hope this helps. Let me know if I misunderstood your needs, missed something or you would like to clarify my points.

Best wishes,

Bowo

hi Peggy,

Im interested in creating a website that maps out local communities, local food systems and local nature, based on the idea of 'usufruct'.  I would like it to work similar to Wiser Earth, as community editable directory, and perhaps I would like to use the Wiser Earth platform.

I do not have any knowledge of writing code, but would like to seek some professional advice before starting. I can send you some more information if you need.

It would be great if you had any advice on where to start.

thankyou

Tiku

hi

I have a question for the systems administrator. Is it possible to get a contact?

thankyou kindly

tiku