My other work:
My portfolio for BSc in Integrative EcoSocial Design.
My essay about neoliberalism and ecosystems in Latin America.
(draft-in-progress, last updated January 2011)
Hi folks! People call me Patrick Gibbs, and I currently live in the wooded hills of mid-south Tennessee, USA, at a community land trust known as The Farm (known as a famous hippie commune in the 1970s). My work for Gaia University focuses on website management, community governance, and strategic development. In 2009 I did counseling, event planning, bookkeeping, and inn keeping as part of a 7-person collective running The Farm’s Ecovillage Training Center, where we (in the collective) all lived and worked together.
Some of my current experiments:
– combining sociocracy and Holistic Management to form integrative governance, then apply that for personal self-governance and for group self-governance.
– getting a BS degree in Integrative EcoSocial Design from Gaia University (aiming to finish on Feb. 15, 2011).
– cultural healing in myself and my community by using Non-violent Communication.
– developing the Gaia Commons cooperative to support Gaia University and other ecosocial regeneration projects (inspiration coming from Kickstarter, Dreamfish, Better Means, and others).
– language experiments to see how my speaking and thinking affect my perception, my mood, and my actions. For example, this post doesn’t include any form of the verb “to be.”
My dreams/long-term projects include:
– economic arrangements that support holistic healing and learning.
– ways of getting smarter, happier, and healthier together.
My keywords: process arts, cultural healing, unconditional love, mutual gift, bioregionalism, free/libre/open, self=universe, transformative action learning.
I signed an email to my Gaia U colleagues with this line last week: Ruthlessly compassionate self-transformation by pursuing our wildest dreams with our full humanity!
I lived my first 17 years in suburbs near Houston, Texas, USA. Now I enjoy living in a place where I sometimes go weeks without getting in a car — I move by foot or on my bike most days, and I value my growing familiarity with this forest. I want to live in a huge city for a little while to see what happens (big like Buenos Aires or New York). I draw meaning for my life from the story of evolution of the universe. Cultural healing motivates me, and I find peer counseling a very effective tool for healing.
I dream about locally-produced, organic, fair-trade, cradle-to-cradle recyclable, open source computers, and using them for ecosystem regeneration. (I see humans as part of the ecosystem.)
Mutual Gift 
I saw you talking about permaculture software on open source ecology. I’m a website developer just learning about permaculture. I had begun construction of a GPL browser based city simulator similar to simcity but haven’t really worked on it for a few months due to lack of interest in developing that type of game. I was considering developing it into a permaculture design social space where users would build a database of climates, elements of a site, interactions between elements, simulations, logging and statistics.
You can see what I had created at http://latenightsketches.com/city/
I envision the ability for easy tools for users to map their land and then create permaculture designs collaboratively with eventual capabilities to manage all aspects of the thought that goes behind designing and running these systems.
I was wondering if you had any specific ideas about the software in question. How active are you in coding? Is this something you would be interested helping me develop?