I'm excited to announce the launch of a new tool I just finished building in this current beta testing mode, it's called the Site Intelligence Report Designer.
If you are a certified permaculture designer or a enthusiast and you've ever advised or consulted or helped out with a project, or had your own clients, then undoubtedly you had some method by which you did research about the site.
You interviewed the client with a questionnaire, there's always the need to compile data, everything from maps to soil tests to anecdotes and reports and folklore and anything you can discover that's relevant to what you wanna be putting in that in that cauldron to create that stew. That is the design process.
Everyone's got their own way of doing things. Certainly people are still using pen and paper and whatnot, but in terms of modern technology, we have available more tools.
So what I've built is an application that allows the leader of the design, a person who's responsible for fielding in all this information about the site and being very dynamic about how that information can be amended, how it can be edited and changed...how it's all gonna flow downstream to eventually the decisions that are made for design.
So people could be doing this on paper and pen, they could be using a suite of cloud platform products…
I'm creating tools where there is no sharing of the data with a cloud provider, and it's a far more private and secure experience by design.
I've talked at length about what those design parameters are. I'm gonna just mention that briefly here, as I always do, talking about the security profile of the tool itself, the privacy profile.
You can either save that page and use it offline in a browser that's not even connected to the Internet, because there's no communication back and forth between my server.
All you're doing is downloading the file, and then you're not interacting with my server when you interact with it in your browser.
It is portable in a sense. You can use it offline, or you can use it on a computer that's not even connected to the Internet at all, and just run it in a browser.
You can save and export and resume your work. So it works like a web page, but it's a web page that you have the ability, once you save and download it, to continue to iterate upon it in your own private realm without sharing it with anybody that you don't want to.
So eventually, if you wanted to email your work in progress HTML file that you will have that could be saved and re saved over and over as you work on it, you could attach and email that file to a client and then they could open it in a browser and it wouldn't be making any resource calls or pulling in anything unless you put links in there if you said hey I'm gonna put a bunch of links in here then it will be your browser wanting to connect to the Internet to do that.
But in terms of being backwards compatible, it's you're independent of my server. Once you download it, you can run it offline. You can share it privately. You can work on it privately. It's not, quote unquote, phoning home to report back to my server.
A lot of the platforms in the cloud, that's their whole business model to extract the context and the content of what you're doing, so they can have a bidding war with advertisers in real time and make your browser crash.
I don't go for any of that stuff. I would be selling out if I ever did anything like that. So hopefully, I can afford to never sell out. And if I do, I will be very transparent about it.
But right now, this is about my ethics of being independent from a lot of the systems that we're trying to replace with permaculture.
I always have that kind of disclaimer and explain that in depth, as much as necessary and as much as it relates to the functioning of a tool.
So moving right along, what is it that you get? If you go to this tool website, you're starting with the template framework that you can extend and build upon, or you can edit and modify to fit your needs.
In my designer history, I have used my own methods of fielding information about a site, and I've used other pre-formatted interview questions and questionnaire packets and whatnot.
So what I've built now is influenced by my direct experience and by my use of various tools over the course of many years.
This is a synthesis of all that experience and information, this is also derived from my experience of my own checklists and various checklists that I've had with clients and crews.
So if I wanna synthesize all of that sort of intelligence and make a tool that is extensible and very dynamic and editable in the sense that you could create checklists within checklists.
You could create interview questions within check boxes. This template gives you a starting point, and then you can build your own process based on it, where you are able to add information in.
It's not exactly like a form, it's more like a list of headings and sub headings that I refer to as branches so you get to get into the anatomy.
You have up to five different branch types. The first branch is your parent categories, your broad categories, and then each branch below is gonna indent the the item on the page.
So it's easy to visually follow the branching out process and go, okay, this is the sort of the main category. And then there's a list of sub topics or sub questions, or whatever it's gonna be, then within those it can keep branching out all the way down to five points. Then at each level, at each of those branches, there's an option to add what I call a leaf to that branch.
So that is where you list the final endpoint of that consideration.
You choose whether it's a leaf for a branch, and which sort of size or how far out that branches from the trunk.
It will create a blank new item that you can edit and it'll put that at the bottom of the whole list of whatever you've got going.
Right now it's starting out pretty long. But if you wanted to delete all of these and start over, you wouldn't have to be adding all the way the bottom of this whole list. But since this is a template for the purposes stated above, the point is you get to add a new item from the menu at the top. It's gonna put that item at the bottom of your list, and then you have the button to save and export at any time.
It's gonna automatically create a title for the name of the file that's being exported as an html file, it's gonna derive that from the date.
So obviously you can change that. You can rename it to the site name, or whatever versioning system you want to use, but it starts out by default by giving a file name that is Site Intelligent Report Designer.
Then it gives you say, Wednesday, April 17 2024. That's what I'm looking at right now.
Then, next to that, importantly, there is a gear icon at this top menu bar where if you click on that gear icon you're basically toggling the display of all of the different units, all the different items and all of their edit options.
So you can take away the tool bars or hide the tool bars.
It's important to know that you can use that gear tool at the top, which is gonna show and hide the tool bars for each of the items below. That way, you can clean up the document if you're sharing this document, which I'm not ready to turn this into a real time collaborative online experience, because that would require a lot of encryption overhead.
That would be forthcoming on my roadmap of development for what I'm doing on my server. But for now, if you wanted to make a presentation, if you wanted to clean it up and walk through it and just have those tools disappear to give you a more clean looking document, then you can click that to toggle that on and off.
It starts out with them on by default. So now we get into the intelligence of the intelligence report, which is the template items that I'm starting you off with.
So the main categories, you start with history, geography, watershed, access structures, climate, energy, sun, wind, soil, neighborhood, legal, financial, design, waste stream, on site resources, wild vegetation, wildlife sectors and vectors.
You could create top level topics or categories, that's the beauty of it.
You can recreate this as you go along, you could say, oh, I don't like this here. I think it should be its own category.
I wanna give a list of give the list of tools that you have to work with per each item. What you get from left to right is a pen icon. It's a button where, if you click on it, it takes you into the title of the item, the list item, so you can edit, modify it.
There are restrictions on the type of markup you can put in there because for security reasons, you wanna strip out various tags and whatnot.
So it's just plain text and numbers. So you can put in whatever you want there and edit it.
That's the point. Whatever you started the item off with, it gives you just a blank unit so you can type in whatever you want there and after you type it in, do something else, you decide you wanna go back and you wanna change that, you have that edit button. You can click on it, then you can modify the contents.
So the next button is the diamond icon indicating the priority level.
When you click on that, the color of the text of the item is gonna change.
It's like an alert level. If it's checked off, if you want it to be completed, you can click through this button, mark it green.
You got yellow, orange and red as the priority levels, and that can be changed over time.
So if you wanna escalate the priority or something, you click on the button that that is on the tool bar to the right of that item, and you can change priority color. Then, you'll be able to know, okay, these are all completed, these are kind of neutral, or these are low priority, mid priority, high priority.
That's the point of that. You just click that button to change it, and if you click it, it cycles through all the different color options.
So you may be clicking it once, you may be clicking it two or three times to get around the dial until you get back to the color that you want.
Next we have the up and down buttons, and that gives you the ability to take an item and maybe decide you wanna put it within a different branch.
You wanna put it on a lower on this tree system, you can drop it down, pressing the down button, or move it up with the up button.
If you have different sections where you wanna duplicate it, that's the next button. It's a copy button. So you can copy an item and it will include, the type of item it is, whether it's a branch or leaf, and what number of branch or leaf it is that will determine its size and its indentation.
So if you copy an item, it's gonna give you the input that you put in, and the category that it is.
Let's say you had a number of items that belonged in several different branches then you can copy the item and use the up and down buttons to move it wherever you want it to be.
The next button is a trash can icon, and that will delete the item, which is simple enough, but it's great because there's a running count of how many items you have here, and it's important, it updates that.
It's kind of behind the scenes, but if you have an item, if it's completed, you're ready to check it off, and you don't want it to just be there lingering after it's no longer relevant, you can delete it.
Or if you're modifying this template for your own purposes, and you say, these don't apply, you just eliminate them by clicking the trash can, and then the page will automatically adjust and remove that item, and everything else will slide where it needs to go.
The next button, the last one in this version is a plus symbol where it gives you the ability to add an item directly below the current item that you're on and that's useful because if you were to use the add new item button at the top it's always going to default to creating that new item at the bottom of the list.
So you may be bouncing back and forth along a document working on different areas and it's gonna be useful to be able to add an item exactly where you are.
Once you add it, you will have the ability to edit it and to change its priority and to move it up and down as you see fit.
So now I'm gonna go into what's on this template list.
The history, I've got previous uses, previous issues, usage timeline, and that breaks down into how long have you been there? How long you intend to stay...just basic ideas of what you wanna be able to answer.
You want to investigate and study and do interviews with clients and whatnot, and they may not know the answer.
So you may have to go to find external sources. But previous uses, what were the occupants doing before, was it a gas station, that's important to know.
Was it a toxic waste brown field dump site? Was it by train tracks? What are those previous uses and issues? Maybe there are beneficial uses, maybe there's a shelter, bunker buried, that you can use.
Historical information. the usage timeline that's pretty self explanatory but with that said, you get an idea of what the point is of having this sort of template that you can use.
The permaculture design process is all about fielding intelligence and making good design decisions based on it and adapting with new intelligence.
So previous uses, oh, we don't know anything about that history, so I'm gonna mark that with a higher priority. I'm gonna add an item below. It just says, put in a bunch of question marks and make that a priority.
So then this becomes a to-do list, and it's actionable at that point as well.
For geography, We've got square footage, or acreage, elevation, slope, contour lines, rock outcroppings, peaks, cliffs, valleys, maps.
Under maps, you've got official photos, drawn, other so again, not all these may apply. Some of them are just food for thought because there's obviously all kinds of other landforms that could be going on.
Then you can add list items, if you wanted to put in a note, put in GPS coordinates, or describe them all, it is extensible.
Oh, I don't know about that. That could be critical and vital to know. I need to know that now, or sooner rather than later.
Watershed, this is where it gets real interesting. So obviously inches of rain per year. catchment infrastructure, meaning what kind of water catchment systems you have, water tanks, rain barrels, something on a bigger scale, etc catchment ponds... Plumbed access points? Where can you tie in if you have whatever kind of system, do you have of pipes?
Where are the spigots at near the structures and are there various points to tap into, wild access points, meaning are thee springs are there? Is there snow melt or other water features naturally that can be tapped into at low points?
Upstream vectors, fownstream considerations, ponding opportunities, flood areas, storm runoff, erosion patterns, wells or potential well sites…
It's important to know who you would be affecting downstream from your usage of any kind of water, anything in the watershed, as well as upstream vectors...are you down slope from a strip mine? That's important to know.
So it's pretty obvious stuff access roads, fences, pathways, security advantages, security disadvantages. Those are all items where you could be referencing various documents. I'm not adding this sort of attachment feature at this point, although that's certainly something that could be a feature in the future, where, if you wanted to say, oh, this is where I've attached all of the relevant files, maps and photos and whatnot, they can live in a folder system where you attach the link to the local file, or it could be a link out to a shared document somewhere else.
Those are features to be added if they're requested. But for now, the idea is more about gathering the sort of data that would be, you're walking around a site, what roads do you see? What roads are overgrown? What roads need repair?
Can you draw it out on a napkin? Or do you have GPS satellite photos?
So same with fences and pathways. It's more fine grain where people are walking and what security advantages and disadvantages there could be.
That's where all the tweakers hang out and get through that hole in the fence over there. Let's make that a high priority, stuff like that.
Or, hey, there's a cliff right there and we're at the top of it so it's safe from that angle of attack.
So structures, homes, workshops, offices, schools, fixed, movable square footage, current uses, potential uses.
Here you could see how these could be copied and moved around. Maybe there are five homes and two workshops and an office and a school.
It could be a whole village that you're using to design with this.
There could be multiple sub sections where you're duplicating things and you're giving different profiles of them.
So this gives you those ingredients to move around, or at least the ideas for them.
It's important to think about if this structure is movable or not, because then it could totally change its function within design if it's fixed or if it's movable.
You can compare them by their square footage, these are all important profile metrics and data to have about what's already going on on the site.
Then climate, average chill hours, frost start and end date ranges, length and range of growing seasons, USDA hardiness zone, typical high and low yearly temperatures, microclimates, useful, problematic or limiting.
So microclimates are places where the broader climate fluctuates for some reason. It could be a frost pocket or place that gets a lot more wind because of its placement on a slope, could be a place where heat collects, like on the surface of of water, and you can design around and work with those.
Sometimes you can modify them or create them or inhibit them.
So it's useful to be thinking about what microclimates exist, and whether they're beneficial or problematic.
Then we get into energy, solar, grid, air conditioning, heating systems… People might have different generators or have all kinds of other hydroelectric whatnot.
So this is not necessarily a checklist, but it is an idea that if you're on a site, how are they getting their power currently?
What are the uses of that air conditioning, heating systems, etc. Are they on grid? Are they on solar? What is the story that you wanna be telling about energy?
There's a lot of permutations to this, but just to make it simple, sun, shade areas and patterns...that would include an understanding of the angle of the sun, the summer sun, the angle of the winter sun.
You can add all that stuff, listing different areas of shade and how you wanna design and deal with those situations.
The next is wind. So prevailing wind, wind blocks needed, wind blocks in place. Winds can be a very destructive feature, so it's one of the most important elements of dealing with it.
The soil section is next, so test documentation, PH type, composition, type, depth of top soil, depth of sub soil.
Depending on how much of a soil scientist you are, you could add all kinds of sub categories and top level categories within this.
The idea is, some sites, they've already had a soil test done, and they've got it somewhere in a drawer. So if you can find that documentation, great, otherwise you can do your own sort of spot treatment of ph testing.
If you're gonna be growing different crops that have different acidity and alkalinity profiles...the composition type is basically having intelligence about what the components of the soil are, including silt, sand and clay, the main components that you're gonna find.
There's something called a jar test, where, if you take a sample of the soil and put it in a jar, a quart jar with water and shake it up, those ingredients, those elements of sizes, grains, they're going to separate into layers and give you a good sense of what the percentage or the ratio of those layers are.
So next one is neighborhood. This is more the social environment, but we've got mutual aid patterns, contracts, agreements, liabilities, belligerence, sound restrictions, parking restrictions, gathering size restrictions.
I'm looking forward to go through this again and actually reference my experiences with designing for and against and with all these different factors, but the idea of belligerent neighbors that make life miserable for anything you try to do, and they're gonna throw the book at you with the height of the grass limitations and what fruit and vegetables you can't grow because it's not ornamental enough in the front yard.
They're the ones who call the cops, or they call code enforcement about your work parties and your gatherings.
So parking restrictions, sound restrictions, gathering size restrictions, those are all things I've had to deal with the friction of neighbors around.
Of course, the point is to respect and understand the circumstances, and then you have to do the fence mending in order to grease the wheels of being allowed to do some of the stuff.
If you wanna have work parties, you wanna have people do PDCs or have contractors and whatnot. That can be something that neighbors are gonna wanna be notified of.
Don't get to a contract with them, which you might say, hey, if you're cool with me doing this for a couple of months, you're gonna be blessed with fruits from the garden afterwards.
So legal. I've got zoning, building permits, horticultural restrictions, HOA neighborhood groups, conservation, restrictions on water, use limitations rain catch legal status and legal council.
It's important to know what kind of issues you may be inheriting on a land site.
That's information you may not get from a realtor. That's information you're gonna get from the state or the county, someone who knows what the legacy is.
That goes into that history as well. But having, ideally, a legal professional within your organization, or that's accessible to you so that they would understand how to navigate getting some of this information and then navigating the responsibility to act in compliance with that information.
Once you have it, you can't claim ignorance of it, which isn't an excuse. But state of mind is big in the whole legal system. They've got to prove that you were aware of wrongdoing in order to throw the book at you. Otherwise, it's a mitigating factor. If you were just a reasonable, well meaning, prudent individual who was operating on the best intelligence they had, but you do this research and you get this intelligence now you would be in bigger trouble if you try to destroy the evidence of having had that intelligence.
So I'm not gonna give you advice on how to store this information once you have it, but do you know that once you are aware of something you therefore then become responsible to adhere to the parameters of it, and be more responsible than you would be if you didn't even know. So don't be fooled. Ignorance isn't bliss. You wanna know this stuff. You wanna be compliant, and you wanna have legal resources that can help you navigate a very difficult to navigate system of rules and laws.
So the financial is, if it's owned, is there mortgage debt? Is it paid off? Is it titled to a trust? What the property tax situation? Is it a monthly rental, long term lease? Are their debts and liens, what's the insurance status?
Liability for damages, liability for injuries, for guest injuries. I had those because who's the primary legally liable person financially?
If there's a lawsuit, is it in a trust? Is it a corporate entity? How are you limiting your liability for financial ruin and bankruptcy if anything ever goes wrong?
That's an important consideration, that goes right along with legal considerations.
Those are all pretty straightforward, understanding the financial situation and the ownership situation.
Next, we get into where all this sort of comes together and informs your design considerations.
Starting with zonation activities, permaculture design, if you are not familiar a site, it behooves a site designer to map out the various zones of use within a site. There are a lot of ways to teach that.
So you have a section under zonation activities, the sub section, including maps zero through five, where you could describe it. You could be referencing a file or a link to a map or whatnot.
The idea is you should know from observation and from interviews, you should know what activities happen.
What are the uses of the home or uses of the facility? Is there a cottage industry going on? Is it a home school? Are there crafts being made? Is there boutique food processing happening?
What are some of the activities and uses of the home? If it's not a home, what kind of facility, if it's a business or school, what what's going on?
What is the function or functions within that facility itself? And then directly outside of that, and we go into zone one. You would call it the daily uses. Oh, there's a kitchen garden that I cut herbs from every day, and that is one of the daily uses.
Then in zone two, could be weekly uses, do I take out the trash, do the compost and whatnot. That would be zone two, based on this loose association between the distance from zone zero, or the distance from the main structure, the dwelling, or the facility structure, generally speaking, but not always.
That's why it's not really pure concentric circles, like a dart board as the conceptual design of zonation theory, because a lot of these can kind of commingle and overlap.
So with that in mind, map of zone two, list of weekly uses. An example would be composting and taking out the trash and whatnot.
Zone three is more of a monthly use, generally speaking, a little further out things you might do once a month, harvest from a certain area or check on something or have a gathering, have a full moon event of some kind.
Then zone for map four, I would call that seasonal uses. There are other lists of what these zones are good for. Some people would say zone four is where you're growing trees and sort of managing a forest of fuel fiber and fodder crops and whatnot, not so much the human garden, but more of a functional use, cultivation environment.
It's seasonal, because I go harvest leaf litter in the fall, and I bring that back into the previous zones for use.
Or I do coppicing, pollarding, tree care, arborist type works, season uses, seasonal streams, etc.
Zone five is typically wilderness areas. So wilderness uses, hunting, wild crafting, hiking, etc. These could be things that are already happening or that are in the works.
This gives you a list, an idea, to make sure you have a sense of what's going on in all these different zones.
The last one within the zonation activities is the flow patterns between zones.
What are the main uses that are sort of isolated to the zones? What are the interesting opportunities that exist in the patterns of use between them?
Because maybe it makes sense to bundle something a certain way, because, you know you're gonna come back and use it when you do the monthly cycle or the seasonal cycle.
These can all be optimized in relation to each other. They're not separate and walled off, they're very integrated and very interconnected. That's the whole point of all this.
So next one under the broader category of design is people. This would be creating basic profiles of the individuals who are occupying the land.
It could be a family, it could be a unit of an organization. It could be business, whatever it is. Name, age, professional skills, area of interest or study dietary preferences, dietary restrictions, hobbies and leisure activities. Project time commitment, meaning, are they interested? Are they bought in? Or they, are they gonna help? Or they don't care. What's their time commitment to this project?
Budget contribution. Again, are they bought in? Do they wanna contribute money so that you can budget for prioritizing different design installations.
Then their limitations, allergies, medical conditions, that gives you a sense of what to design for and what to be aware of. Certainly, if they've got allergies, you wanna design accordingly.
Then we have pets, this word gets into more of the traditional way of listing the characteristics of animals on the site design, we've got names, needs, characteristics and behaviors, what kind of food do they eat? Are they are they very passive or very aggressive by nature? How do they behave? Do they eat pests? Do they do they damage to elements of design that you want to keep them out of?
You need to know how to increase the benefits and minimize the issues caused by pets.
Then the next level down is livestock, same thing, needs names, characteristics, behaviors. Not everybody names their livestock. That's obviously optional. These are all optional.
Below that, planted vegetation. So gardens, the size, location, description, you could add to that as much as you want.
Then plant list. This is good intelligence to have as far as what I've got here, annuals, perennials, medicinals, roots, ground cover, herbaceous shrubs, low trees, high trees and vining.
So if you know permaculture design, you know that the last seven of those are actually the categories of a seven layer food forest design where you're wanting to fill the eco niches across a diagonal gradient so that everything can get adequate sunlight, and you're maximizing the potential of that diagonal gradient edge.
The idea is, oh, we've already got plenty of edible root crops in place. We can leave that as it is. Or, wow, there's a lot of bare soil. We better get some ground cover for that, etc. You're gonna be filling in all those variables of the forest ecology reverse engineering process.
As far as the what has been planted within that plant list, what's all in that list, and then how do those group together?
How do those yield various types of even more significant intelligence as they get grouped and sorted in the manner that I have done? Or you can obviously change it how you see fit.
That's a good starting point, I believe. Then an another set of design considerations, pretty straightforward, outdoor recreational features, other landscaping features, cultural aesthetics, culinary preferences, outdoor activities, privacy concerns, goals, issues to resolve, issues to mitigate, commercialization potential, do you wanna grow or make stuff and sell it?
Do you wanna be a financial cottage industry homestead? What's the potential for that? And the rest of those are pretty straightforward. But as far as the other landscaping features, that could be things like pools, pergolas, trellis, different types of pathways of flower gardens, whatever you would see landscape professionals providing, or they see something in a magazine or website, they say, I wanna install that feature.
So those are more traditional landscaping features that they may have in mind, outdoor kitchen, outdoor recreational features. Maybe they want an area to do various games or sports and whatnot.
So those are all standard landscaping concerns, as far as design considerations.
Then another one here is views and sub categories being views to keep, to expand, to block or design according to so they could be favorable or unfavorable views.
But those are important things to know, oh, this is the place with the best soil, but the worst view. How are we gonna reconcile that and come to a compromise. It's definitely not to be overlooked, no pun intended.
Next, we've got waste stream, so this could obviously change. Is there grid plumbing, septic, composting toilets? What's the trash, recycling and compostable situation?
That's all important to know, what services are they signed up for?
What are the limitations of that? What can they do with what they have?
What are the restrictions on that? That's all part of understanding the waste stream, how can they enrich it and optimize it?
Next is on site resources. So this list can go on forever, but to give you a few items as food for thought, the infrastructure, greenhouse, building materials, tools, equipment.
I have scavenged places and found the most interesting, overgrown, rusting, discarded tools and equipment that they would never know about unless they did a real thorough scavenging operation of recon throughout the site.
A lot of my work has been that kind of recon. It can be very dangerous. So definitely use your protective equipment with that.
Moving along, wild vegetation, important to know, invasive, poisonous, useful, edible, medicinal, aromatic, trellis potential, privacy screen potential, compost and mulch potential, threats to structures, marketable...
A couple of those threats to structures...Is there a branch that's about to fall on your roof in a storm? Marketables, stuff that you might be able to sell if you sustainably harvest it.
Now, arborist consult is something very important. I added this for wild vegetation, it's very important to have a competent arborist at every site where there are any trees of any considerable height because their disease and health state is gonna determine whether or not they need to be cut.
That is one of the first things to get an understanding of right away, because I've been on project sites where an arborist is brought in and sub contracted to them, and they bring in art. They tell the client, you gotta get rid of half of these trees and there goes your whole budget at that point. So what can I get rid of? What can we wait on a little bit more? Because I wanna have a budget for a garden.
They will mortify you with what you wish you didn't have to know about how dangerous to your structures, to your safety, to your neighbors.
A lot of trees are diseased with climate change. It's getting worse, and they can become very dangerous.
So a professional arborist is gonna know what needs to be cut back, what needs to be cut down, what needs to be immediately quarantined and then dealt with in a very hygienic manner in order to not spread disease.
It's very important and those are the real pillars of the design, because maybe they're protected. Maybe you can't cut it or even touch it therefore the area you wanted to garden is shaded out, and you can't mess with it at all. Or you get to have a whole new garden area, because the arborist says, these trees gotta go and that's gonna open up a whole bunch more sunlight into the site. So definitely budget for arborist consultation.
Next is wildlife so poisonous, venomous biting, stinging, pathogenic, crop eating, crop damaging, beneficial predators, endangered or protected habitats to avoid disturbing habitats, to move, or to inhibit.
So you're operating on not just property owned by some legal human entity. You were potentially an uninvited guest on property that's really inhabited by the wildlife and they can give you very bad day. They can end your life. They can be very pathogenic. You wanna get lime's disease because you didn't manage certain vectors on the site? That's a major consideration and it's growing across all regions because of climate temperatures changing across the world. So pathogen vector, pathogen carrying insects and other critters, that's to be worried about.
We get to the last main section, which is sectors and vectors.
So we've got pollution, noise, smell, and then hazards, emergency risks and disaster risks. Under hazards, I've got issues with structures. Obviously, if they're condemned and about to fall over, you need to be aware of that.
Power lines, where are power lines? And what is their status? Drainage pipes, sewer pipe, septic, buried electrical other wires and pipes, chemical leaks and spills, other hazardous material contamination.
You might be consulting with previous owners or the county, or other institutions that might have some of that information, and you definitely wanna design according to that, and then keep those records very well maintained.
That's an ongoing process of making sure that people know, if you buried a bunch of new pipes and new lines and whatnot, or you notice where you create issues with structures as you're building things, you gotta know what you're liable for, and you better have insurance for what you're doing if you're modifying anything or even advising to modify anything, this is very general advice, what I'm getting right here. So that's my disclaimer. You have to hire your own insurance agency, hire your own counsel. I will say these are the things that I put last, because they're the least fun.
You don't want to put them at the top, put them last. Then you have a lot of things to look forward to, already established in the imagination of your client and you get to the part, that's the least fun at the end.
That's the list of the hazards. Obviously, this is very trimmed down you will be adding a lot to this.
But I just created the broadest categories because I'm not gonna list every possible emergency and disaster potential.
That's all something you would wanna do. But to have essentially a framework of categories to start with, list the emergency risks, and then I break that down into natural and human made.
So you can add as many items below that list them, move them around, duplicate them, whatever you wanna do.
I don't know if this could be a hundred times longer, eventually, by the end of my life, because I like the idea of laying out at least the within reason, as many different things, from starting points, branch points on this as really critical and then let the things that are very site specific or very nuanced, those are the things that you can fill in as you go along.
But the things that I believe at this point are non negotiable intelligence, you've got to have, from the most benign, like, do you wanna Pergola or not, to the legal and the financial considerations, the liabilities and the hazards and risks.
These are starting points for gathering intelligence that I would want to have.
I had never sat down before to create such a comprehensive template for this process. That is what this is all about. I've done a lot of talks on my show about the philosophy and the need for it this is where it really is 100% about being practical.
This is the design process.
So of all the pictures on my website and all of the philosophical shows behind all that is this intelligence gathering, decision making, problem solving, very adaptive and dynamic intelligence process.
This can involve a lot of people. If you're doing your own site, then by all means, it'll be easy to go through this relatively speaking.
If you're working on a crew and you have a company that you're responsible working within, and there's a hierarchy of who talks to the clients about what, then handing off and managing this design, documentation or intelligence reporting process is gonna get more complex.
But I believe that this is well suited to be a very extensible starting point for people.
I'm gonna be hesitant to add features that sort of breach its inherent elegance of security and privacy.
But there's always ways to enhance privacy and security when you do integrate more features. That's my commitment to my web design, web app development process.
So for now, you've got something to where you have no excuse to act like you didn't know that all this stuff is at least worth considering, or considerable, even if you don't think it's worth considering, you now are made aware of its existence.
There's no turning back. And for me, if I for myself or for anyone else, if I do a permaculture design, certainly if I sell it when I'm selling my services along the way in the process, if I fail to address any of the items on this template as it is, then I am a hypocrite. I'm failing. I'm doing it wrong. And that's a problem.
So trying to create these guard rails for ethics and for professionalism, accountability, I'm excited about this.
This to me, is, again, what it's all about, and how you do this.
The design course trains you so that any anybody who completes a permaculture design course, they should be able to go and make this list for themselves.
They may start out and add a lot more to it, or they may decide, a lot of stuff that comes from experience as well. But that's what we do to compound that wisdom is to help people learn more lessons easier, not so much the hard way.
I've learned a lot of hard lessons, a lot of things on this list, I'll tell you later, but a lot of things in this list are there because I don't want that to happen again. Never again do I wanna make that mistake.