đąâď¸The future of Permapeople
Hi!
Long time no see! This not only goes for the Permapeople newsletter but also for the rain here in Berlin. Again. After a super wet winter and a promising beginning of spring, there was no rain for weeks again. At least the Fiddlenecks from the green manure and my trusty Horseradish do not seem to be bothered. The rest of the garden looks pretty dry.
Our success
Permapeople has existed for almost 4 years now. In 2022, we started with a plant database focused on Permaculture information but quickly expanded to other things like lists, a marketplace, and a journal. Han joined 2 years later and spent a lot of time building his dream planner into the website. Since we have it, we see a constant influx of new people creating plans, adding and fixing plant data, creating lists, and sharing their progress in the journal. It is amazing and we are super happy and proud of the small community weâve helped create. Currently, we have over 1300 users on the site, more than 550 subscribers to the newsletter, and almost 100 people on our Discord. And it keeps growing every day.
The challenge
Intentionally, we do not make any money with Permapeople. Our core idea was and will always be: share everything without any restrictions. Because we believe that every individual contribution should benefit the whole community. Someone sees an error in a plant profile and fixes it. Great, everyone has now better information on that plant. We are always on the lookout for sharing wider and simpler, for example by providing an API or sharing CSVs of the whole dataset for interested users.
Sadly the amount of work and time necessary to maintain such a project grows with the size of the community: Keeping the lights on, adding new features, answering questions, or just fixing plant data. Everything happens in our spare time between family, our gardens, and the work that pays our bills.
The ask
We want to try something new and see if one of us can start working at least part-time on Permapeople, so we can keep maintaining and developing the service but also keep growing the community and help out if there are any questions or problems or just provide some tips on your next growing project.
For this, we need some funds and this is why we are asking you today to donate. If you can spare a little money and think Permapeople is a good thing that should keep evolving, please hit the link below:
Donate to Permapeople
As always, we read and respond to every email, so please don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or feedback you may have either by hitting reply or by sending an email to hello@permapeople.org.
Thank you,
Ben and the Permapeople team
PS: We also changed our newsletter service, please reach out if anything is not working as expected.