PEP eBook early draft

Do NOT buy this book!   It isn't a book yet.  Maybe in the next few months I'll flesh it out a bit. Or maybe it will be years.  We'll see.

During my last kickstarter I offered it as a stretch goal.   So I am putting it here for those folks.   And, I figure, if somebody is willing to part with 15 bucks then they can look at an unfinished book too.


currently calling this version 0.6 alpha.

What's the best way to help with typo spotting?

Shared doc? Reply comments with ¶ and word numbers? Shutting up because it's still Alpha 0.6? Fourth yet unnamed method?

AWESOME!

I can’t get it to download to my iPhone. Any suggestions. PDF files usually come in on Safari and can be opened in the Books app.

A great start.

Carol Barta wrote:I can’t get it to download to my iPhone. Any suggestions. PDF files usually come in on Safari and can be opened in the Books app.

Which iphone do you have?

Do you have plenty of space on it?

Ash Jackson wrote:What's the best way to help with typo spotting?

Shared doc? Reply comments with ¶ and word numbers? Shutting up because it's still Alpha 0.6? Fourth yet unnamed method?

Hmmmm ....   I think it would be good to give a select few people the ability to add notes to the transcript.  ...

We had a meeting today to discuss whether to leave this book at this state indefinitely (because PEP should be treated a bit more like wikipedia) or to push it to a full and complete book complete with a kickstarter.  At which point, we will need reviewers and editors and stuff.

Click on the thumbs up for this post if you (anybody) think that you would support a kickstarter featuring a polished form of this book.

I have been looking through the protobook and it looks exciting and challenging. Clearly a lot of work has gone into it.

There are two areas that are not covered and, to me, they seem essential for homesteading. One is emergency and disaster preparations. People benefit from thinking out and planning for times when things go wrong. Things as simple as a laceration or as devastating as a wildfire.  The other area that I would include is a general topic of caring for others. How to contribute to the community and how to make the homestead able to adapt to people with disabilities, even if it is just for visiting family members. Maybe I am missing some of this because I did not read everything through all the advanced levels.

In general, I do not think the sand badges represent 5 hours of work in many of the areas unless that person is already very experienced in that topic. For someone starting out, it is likely to require many hours of learning and working. At least, when I look at the topics I know nothing about (like cutting trees) I suspect it would take a very long time for me to learn what to do. (Not even counting the time I worry that I might spend getting patched up from injuries acquired in such activities.)  Even the ones I am experienced in (like gardening and cooking) would take more than 5 hours even if I exclude cooking time and growing time. Maybe I'm just slow.

I am not saying this to ask for any changes, just to provide the perspective of someone who is approaching a lot of this as a newbie.

I think emergancy and disaster fit under both natural medicine (https://permies.com/wiki/108662/PEP-Badge-Natural-Medicine) and homesteading (https://permies.com/wiki/108328/PEP-Badge-Homesteading). Homesteading has the installing smoke and CO2 detectors and fire extinguishers. It also has the stocking/creating of a first aid kit. That's all in the sand level. I think more advanced disaster prep might go under the straw level. I think we even discussed having it in there in the planning stage.

Herbal Medicine has the person basically create their own medicine cabinet of useful herbal preparations, and teaches the uses and cautions of different herbs.

There is a community section, as well (https://permies.com/wiki/pep-badge-community), but it's more focused on "BUILDING community - which is different from experiencing community." There are leading workshops and doing work parties and cooking meals, which could all be applied to helping disabled and visiting family members. There's no age ranges on WHO is eating the meal or doing the work (or having the work done for) or attending the workshop. There could be meals for the elderly, workshops for children, and work-parties to help a disabled person.

And, yes, the 5 hours is definitely calculated based on the active time of a professional/experienced person. So, when knitting a oven mitt, it's going to take a new knitter a LONG time to figure out how to not drop stitches, etc. But, someone who's been knitting for years can pump one out in about an hour while watching a video or holding a conversation. It's also not counting the time it takes to assemble materials and tools. I think it's reasonable to usually think that each badge will take a novice a good 15-20 hours to do--at least, that's how long most of them took me!

I agree, this is amazing, thank you so much!

This might be addressed somewhere in the PEP forums, but I was wondering if maybe a "To Do" list would be created to help laser focus people's attention on the overall immediate priorities and then longer term actions with such a large and ambitious project?

I think that would help everyone understand at a glance how to help keep moving the project forward and not stall.  We use a "list of open points" at my work very successfully to help keep track of the 2,000 things going on at any one point in time.

Thanks for your help,I finally succeeded in downloading the pep book.

(edit)

To clarify in case it wasn't clear, this PDF is fantastic for compiling the total list of how to complete the badges and is greatly appreciated.

In my question, I was thinking more about how everyone can help you to develop the entire program to see what assistance you need to develop badge levels that don't exist yet at this time.  I thought maybe a simple spreadsheet with your wish list would be cool to see what you would request next to delegate to all of us minions. :)

I think a master list of what still needs to be done to finish the badges and their bits would be great. Right now, it's hard to remember or know what still needs to be done. There's a LOT of badges and bits, that it's easy to not know what to do. For a while, we had a thread kind of like that that Shawn made, telling us what still needed to be done, and people would say "I'll write up the the roundwood badge bits" and another would say, "I'll make the badge bit page for drying in a solar dehydrator, etc." Now that we've got all the straw and wood and iron badges to do, and each of those has progressively MORE bits in them, it's easy to get lost and overwhelmed.

Awesome, ok so I think a simple database may be the way to start, which can be done in Excel.  I'm working through the final design for Geoff Lawton's PDC and I'll be traveling next weekend, but I'll see if I can compile a simple spreadsheet to take stock of the current situation by the end of the month.

So I was a little optimistic with my initial target of the end of the month to have the database created - I had some problems with my computer getting locked up last week and was gone Friday through Monday.  I'll attempt to have a simple database created with each task and whether or not a work instruction exists by next Friday (the 8th) or the Friday after (the 15th).  I got the first six done and I'll go through the rest and try to double check for any errors.

Hi guys, good news that the last part didn't take as long as I thought I would.  Below is an Excel file to try and list out each discrete task, but also listing whether or not the "work instruction" is complete.  There's also a column to let you rank priority if there's a certain set of tasks you'd like to complete first and a column for the volunteer that will write the instructions for that task and a target completion date along with a column for oddball points.  Being in Excel, the list can also be filtered by topic and see at a glance which categories are missing, for example.  I couldn't upload the Excel file here, so the spreadsheet is at this link below to download a copy and you can make it your own to modify.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15fkesvaw-UrOT8a0D6SZIO-LpszDLgam/view?usp=sharing

I hope this helps everyone to organize and help work towards bringing the project out of alpha by having a master database with the "to do" list all in one place.  I was picturing for this file to end up in its own post to corral the troops and keep an updated copy there whenever new tasks are added.

I saw about 300 work instructions for approximately 600 tasks so far - that's incredible!  Fantastic work so far in filling a need in the permaculture community to help with the process of learning new skills step by step and also in developing a system for certification of those skills.

Thank you Paul! Cant wait!

Thank you for this. I just found your forum recently and I am thrilled to find such thorough guidance! I'm so glad to be a part of this!

I wasn’t able to download on my old iPad but I have been reading it. The problem may be the “old” part. I’m up to page fifty something and very impressed. That’s an awful lot of detailed instructions. Great job!

PEP is a brilliant concept and the eBook is very well written. Answering all the questions I had about it!

Adam Chadek wrote:I agree, this is amazing, thank you so much!

This might be addressed somewhere in the PEP forums, but I was wondering if maybe a "To Do" list would be created to help laser focus people's attention on the overall immediate priorities and then longer term actions with such a large and ambitious project?

I think that would help everyone understand at a glance how to help keep moving the project forward and not stall.  We use a "list of open points" at my work very successfully to help keep track of the 2,000 things going on at any one point in time.

In my question, I was thinking more about how everyone can help you to develop the entire program to see what assistance you need to develop badge levels that don't exist yet at this time.  I thought maybe a simple spreadsheet with your wish list would be cool to see what you would request next to delegate to all of us minions.

Ah-ha! I was sure there was a program already made, and I just found it! Check out Ash's PEP tracker--it might be just what you're looking for! It has three different ways to track your PEP badge bits: https://permies.com/t/119155/PEP-Badge-Tracker-easier-track#963012

If you like this sort of thing, head on over to the https://permies.com/f/383/skip section of the forums.
Where we talk about SKIP,  PEP, Badges and BBs.... All The Time.