Agropedia workshop...

Our backyard has become far away, West has taught us to to look far from where our roots are. today, when West wants us to look for resources, that has been depleted irreversibly by them, we are taught to stop believing our backyard. a result; we want our tacit knowledge "validated" by the western scientific theories. as a culture east believes in negotiation by participation, not colonialism. And the solution, even in the west should be community participation and not invasion. why is it that our governance, our education system has to look at paradigms that are western. And East is micro communities, discovering themselves every second day. Where is this locale? where is our backyard? Even comparatively well doing rural India (which surprisingly divides West and East again, in poverty, in population, in diversity of nature) is to a great extent, western. Our basic learning from our backyard is missing, Urbanization does not support local ecology, it invades.

So what is our culture, without which agriculture is not possible? Western model based, institutionalized, regimented approach will not look at our back yard, Our local schools are not enough, our governance structures either refrain, even protest to change and implement a basic learning system, that exists without boundaries. West is suffocated with its strictly regimented structures. So what is it that we do: new technologies demand the same approach of structured regimentation. we have, what about 56 alphabets? how could 26 of English capture the diversity?

At the end, the vision of agropedia demands involvement of communities, micro-communities and the respect to locale specificity, a community context. if we want to ensure agropedia (...agropedia indica?) built to realize the vision, only possibility is through community participation. which, is not permitted by the institutional and governance structures, to which, you and I belong.Capacities are not needed in in scientific validation, but in building trust and developing micro-communities; could we imagine five farmers running a micropedia? the research...scientific validation, could not be a burden on freedom of knowledge. somewhere we are not, under the current circumstances, not doing and cannot do. unless we go to people, go to their backyards; but then privacy becomes a issue. a tricky question must be sought locally. we need to capture a large picture through agropedia, where fractal patterns are woven. A difficult task could only be solved through democratization of information and technology. agropedia is much larger.