Separating Crops and Guides

[roryaronson]

We've been having some conversation in Slack about how best to manage two different needs:

1. Everyday people wishing to learn to farm/garden who are seeking factual information about Crops, and instructional information from Guides
2. Other food/ag/plant projects wishing to use the factual Crop data from OpenFarm via our API (names, images, taxonomic rank, etc)

So, would it be beneficial to break out the crop database from the guides database? This would make OpenFarm an application that uses the crops db.

This would potentially allow more people to contribute to the crop database's code/content because it wouldn't be tied to the monolith that OpenFarm is. Likewise for contributing to OpenFarm - it wouldn't be tied to the crop database as much so contributing would maybe be easier.

[tkeifer]

This is pretty much the exact reason I hadn't gotten more involved. I love the idea of having an open database with detailed information on crops, but the guides aren't very relevant to me.

[simonv3]

@tkeifer do you have any ideas on organizing this?

@andru has some ideas, and we've considered using something like pirate pad http://piratepad.net/crop-data-ideas to keep track of the ideas.

We've considered using WikiData but my personal hesitation (and I'm sure some other's) is that it's built on top of PHP.

I've been playing with Redis myself and feel like it would be a wonderful fit. Fast, appropriate, etc.

(sorry this is so quick, I'm in the middle of other things, but just wanted to get this all down).

[simonv3]

@roryaronson should we have something pointing people here from the general openfarm page?

[tkeifer]

I've been working on a similar project myself and think I share a lot of the interests in the group, but not sure how much aligns to your goals/objectives. Happy to discuss though...

[simonv3]

Hey @tkeifer have a look at issue #2 that @andru just set up. There we might get at the actual goals of this.