who are the top people in permaculture

Nicole started something interesting in this thread.  I suspect that in a week or so, we will have about 130 people on that list.  Folks will have rated all of those people in three ways:

  - apple poll
  - people's choice poll
  - poor man's poll

These three polls will indicate about 60 people that are pretty substantial permies.  My guess is that out of those 60, 50 will be alive.   And I will probably be able to dig up email addresses for 40.

So here is my idea ...

I plan on emailing those 40 people and point to the list of 130 and ask the 40 to pick a number between 0 and 100 for each person.   0 means "never heard of them" and 100 means "contributed the most to permaculture."   50 means "contributed half as much as the person with 100."  And, of course, they can add more names.

My guess is that about 15 will reply.  5 will have numbers for 40 people, and 10 will have numbers for 5 to 25 people.

I will add the numbers up and report them here.    

We will make sure that all of the reported people each have their own wiki and bio here, complete with oodles of pics and links to all their stuff.  And we will create a new wiki page for "the top permaculture contributors" pointing to this thread to say how we came up with the list.  It will show a single pic and a brief bio, a few links, and, of course, a link to their wiki page.


When the 40 are choosing numbers, the choices must be based on their own permaculture values.  Some will favor acres of land worked, and others will favor how magnificent the acres are.  Some will favor activism.  Some will favor brains infected.  Podcasts?  Videos? Books? Total number of PDCs taught vs. total number of students in PDCs ...  Each permie is expected to have different values.

Each permie is welcome to give a score to themselves - although that number will be ignored for the sake of this scoring system.

Anybody have any thoughts or suggestions about this process?

Maybe each of the 15 people replying should get 40 points for replying?

Seems like a good plan for getting a broad perspective.

I think giving them extra points for replying to their email isn't a great measure for how great they are at permaculture.  Plus the busier they are solving the world's problems, the less likely they are to be able to respond to email.

I'm assuming their scores/votes would be confidential?  Maybe allow them to suggest new names somehow?

Mike Haasl wrote:Seems like a good plan for getting a broad perspective.

I think giving them extra points for replying to their email isn't a great measure for how great they are at permaculture.  Plus the busier they are solving the world's problems, the less likely they are to be able to respond to email.

I'm assuming their scores/votes would be confidential?  Maybe allow them to suggest new names somehow?

I edited the first post so that adding new names is allowed.  

Yes, who gave the points, and what points they gave will be kept confidential.

extra points for replying:  I think I want to give them points for participating in this.  Maybe 40 is too much?

I think to give the final results as much meaning as possible, I'd try to tie their willingness to respond to a different sort of incentive.  Better bio...  Pair of socks...  etc

I'm thinking that the criteria will be anybody that meets one of these criteria:

- 2 or more points in the people's choice
- 15 or more apples in the apple poll
- 5 or more points in the poor man's poll

paul wheaton wrote:I'm thinking that the criteria will be anybody that meets one of these criteria:

- 2 or more points in the people's choice
- 15 or more apples in the apple poll
- 5 or more points in the poor man's poll

Aaaaaaaand, here they are!

(Sorted first by People's Choice, then Apple Poll, then Poor Man's Poll from Top 100 People of Permaculture)

Rank	Name	People's Choice Votes	Apple Votes	Poor Man Poll
1	Bill Mollison	25	130	22
2	Paul Wheaton	11	111	27
3	Geoff Lawton	11	108	10
4	Sepp Holzer	10	119	2
5	Joel Salatin	7	62
6	David Holmgren	5	125	10
7	Bryant Redhawk	5	103	12
8	Toby Hemenway	5	44
9	Ben Falk	4	24
10	Allan Savory	4	20	7
11	Sean Dembrosky	4	8	5
12	Willie Smits	3	44
13	Ruth Stout	3	29	14
14	David the Good	3	21	7
15	Brad Lancaster	3	21
16	Heather Jo Flores	3	16	8
17	Narsanna Koppula	3	2	1
18	Bill Wilson	3	2	0
19	Masanobu Fukuoka	2	47	15
20	Morag Gamble	2	32	5
21	Mark Shepard	2	29	12
22	J I Rodale	2	22	3
23	Alan Booker	2	17	2
24	Wangari Maathai	2	16	16
25	Rachel Carson	2	14	14
26	Jack Spirko	2	14	5
27	Rob Avis	2	11	5
28	Tom Kendall	2	11
29	Eric Toensmeier	1	26	7
30	Paul Stamets	1	24
31	Joseph Lofthouse	1	21	8
32	Elaine Ingham	1	20
33	John Shuttleworth	1	18	1
34	Gabe Brown	1	6	5
35	Zach Weiss	0	48	3
36	Justin Rhodes	0	18	9
37	Vandana Shiva	0	17
38	P.A. Yeomans	0	17	5
39	Ben Law	0	16	5
40	Helen Nearing	0	12	6
41	Mike Oehler	0	10	6
42	Rajendra Singh	0	7	5
43	Rosemary Morrow	0	6	4
44	John D. Liu	0	5	5
45	Diego Footer	0	2	6
46	Jacqueline Freeman	0	1	5

And, if I'm understanding correctly, these people will be our judges to determine the Permies.Com Permaculture Leader Maestro Awards!

Any particular reason why Martin Crawford isn't on the list?  Maybe I've misunderstood how it works.

To make the list, the person needed to meet one or more of these requirements:

(A) 15 or more apple votes (Martin has 13)

(B) 2 or more People's Choice thumb votes (Martin has 1)

(C) 5 or more thumbs-up on their post in the replies--AKA the "Poor Man's Poll." (The amount of thumbs Martin has is unknown, because there's three names on his post, and so I can't tell how many of the 12 thumbs go to him, and how many go to Ken Fern and to Robert Adrian de Jauralde Hart. This sort of thing happened on a few Poor Man Poll posts, and Paul said to not count those thumbs, because we simply have no way of knowing who they go to)

Thanks for clarification, Nicole.

Nicole Alderman wrote:

And, if I'm understanding correctly, these people will be our judges to determine the Permies.Com Permaculture Leader Maestro Awards!

Did Paul want 46 people to judge, or just to determine the top 46 people? I ask because several of the people on the list have completed their circle of life, and Paul has to be *really* special to be able to contact them.

Tee-hee! Well, I scrounged up email addresses for Paul, and I didn't even attempt to scrounge up the ones for those who've passed beyond this existance. I just got emails from those who are living. Paul will send and email to all of those (36?) people. I don't know how many of the living will reply, but hose are the people who will determine who gets the Permies.Com Permaculture Leader Maestro Award!

I'll be making graphics for the Permies.Com Permaculture Leader Maestro Award, People's Choice Award, and Apple Award (of which there will likely be some overlap). I think there will be 10 in each category.

The awards will look probably something vaguely like this, but 300x better, because this is low quality work thrown together quickly to give a general idea of the fact there will be three awards.

(And, when we do our next polls, we'll end up with three awards for those, too. So, say we do Best Permaculture Demonstration Site, which seems to be the current front-runner for our next poll. There would be a Permies.com Permaculture Demonstration Site Maestro Award and a  Permies.com Permaculture Demonstration Site People's Choice Award, and a Permies.com Permaculture Demonstration Site Apple Award)

Wow, I am speechless,  it is such an honor to see my name on this list, even more so to be listed so high on such a distinguished list.

Redhawk

I posted some info about how the results were going and I have now learned that that is a mistake.  I got some votes today where the person making the votes said that rather that giving values honestly, their intent was to game the system to move people up that they felt should be higher up.  

I'm going to go ahead and count these votes, because the fault was really mine for thinking that these people would not do that.  But I did remove that post I wrote so that others won't be tempted to play that game.

The polls are now closed.  We will announce the results soon.

There will be ten maestro award winners, and six people's choice winners.  

The winners will be announced through a youtube video.  My patreon peeps at https://www.patreon.com/pwvids will see the results days before everybody else.  And the people subscribed to my youtube channel will see the results next:  https://youtube.com/paulwheaton

paul wheaton wrote:The winners will be announced through a youtube video.  My patreon peeps at https://www.patreon.com/pwvids will see the results days before everybody else.  And the people subscribed to my youtube channel will see the results next:  https://youtube.com/paulwheaton

uploading now.

The video is now viewable to patreon peeps.

The full results are here:  https://permies.com/w/leadership