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I should give you an update - this project was the brainchild of Diginahole and I back when the site started, back in '03. We stayed in touch about it for a year or so, but it never really got off the ground. Too much for the two of us to push forward, I suppose.
If folks are really interested in this, I can work on moving forward with this project. As a home for the site I registered the domain groundtradeswiki.com (even have a logo - see below). For those of you familiar with Wikipedia, the idea was this project would work using the same software, which allows anyone to create or modify the different pages on the site.
At the time I researched it I was able to find scripts that might work to let us print the thing as a manual that could be sent to the members who wanted (like Glan's idea). Might even be able to customize it with the specific company's logo.
If the project works it has the potential to change the fortunes of many in the industry, and even the industry as a whole.
Here are some of the snags I see in this project, and we should bounce them around before we go further:
1)Differing methodologies - a big one off the top of my head is the sand vs no sand debate for paver base prep. We'd probably have to include both methods in the manual. Having two version of base prep manuals isn't that big a deal, but we'd need to make sure the manual didn't become this fractured thing where there were 37 different "acceptable" methods for doing something. We'd need some way, maybe a small voting body or something like that, to decide what 1 or 2 methods for a given task would be considered the site (and industry) standard.
2) Participation. This project would be way too big for a few people to handle, and get it into reasonable shape in less than a couple years. We'd need the participation of many who'd be willing to write and/or edit content.
So if we see some serious interest in this, I'll get the wiki software uploaded, and we'll need to start breaking down all of the categories we'd want to include in this (Marketing? Sales? Record keeping? Accounting? Tool maintenance? Along with all of the "how to install a ____").
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