Announcing the Australian Ethnobotanical Society

[whitewind]

Thanks for your response Toast, I'll try to explain that "recreational" thing below. To be honest, I think recreational covers Parks, Landscapes and Gardens as well as ingestion for pleasure. But hey, we can read what we want into it, the government has a copy of The Constitution, and there is a process to change it, but I think it covers what we want.

This is an ethnobotanical society with a unique heritage, in that it is formed primarily out of members who have an interest in psychoactive and medicinal plants. Only one member never posts on this forum, that's because he is busy helping run another plant society and our Facebook page among other things.

Contrast this to every other ethnobotanical organisation in the world, where psychoactive plants rarely get a mention among the diverse and extensive plants which are useful and used by people.

A plant society or association is made up of a committee, who run things and point the general direction, and it's members, who over time may become part of the committee or even take it over. Now if the only people who sign up are interested in vegetables and herbs, then we may have a problem in that the membership is at odds with the committee. The committee is bound to be broad-based in commitment if not intent, and things will inevitably change over time. However, we are giving the psychoactive community a chance to get involved in this project at the start, as it is generally so under-represented everywhere else and because we are dedicated to the cause of increasing their availability, use, and understanding of their importance in human psyche, development and culture.

An organisation is made up primarily of it's membership, the wider the membership base the bigger it will be, and therefore have more support and resources. Greenpeace for example, would only be small if all it covered was forests or whales. Instead it covers an extremely diverse range of environmental causes, which allows a much greater membership and thus sway in the media and government. To be a true ethnobotanical society, we need to cover in some way all the uses and interactions between people and plants, which is why our Mission Statement covers all of these in some way shape or form.

[whitewind]

Bogfrog, those Brugs are amazing! I just love those colours, I don't think I've seen an image so evocative. You should work on some Daturas too.

I think the pic is of Nymphaea not Nelumbo, which I think has a more Egyptian heritage than the Buddhist Lotus? I think maybe the Asian Lotus is more Australian, it also contains nuciferine and aporphine, so it is probably more appropriate actually . I'm guessing other "appropriate" plants are Acacia, great choice but hard to logo-ise.

Love your scrimshaw, if you could do a lotus that would be amazing!

[whitewind]

Hi Qualia,

I thought I answered these before but I will try and make it clearer.

essentially we will have to provide a list of names and addresses upon request to anyone who asks for it

anyone? so anyone and everyone or is there some sort of legal requirement?

Under association rules all the names and addresses will have to be kept on a register..

Section 39 of The Constitution - we will upload a copy of this as soon as is possible.

39. Inspection of books etc

(1) The following documents must be open to inspection, free of charge, by a member of the
association at any reasonable hour:
a.) records, books and other financial documents of the association,
b.) this constitution,
c.) minutes of all committee meetings and general meetings of the association.

(2) A member of the association may obtain a copy of any of the documents referred to in subclause
(1) on payment of a fee of not more than $1 for each page copied.

Please note that we will also keep a list of contact email addresses which we will use, where necessary, to disseminate information - usually this information will be posted on the online forums and will be emailed as a notification. These email addresses will not be kept on the register as they are for forum use only.

As far as I understand it, these documents will be made available to members only and not generally disseminated, though as I say, a copy of The Constitution I am happy to post online in the interest of transparency, and I'm pretty sure that there are other, legal ways of non-members to acquire this information should they wish to. Any concerns we have with requests from outside and inside the organisation will most likely be posted online to inform everyone that this has occurred, although there may be situations where this is not possible. We understand security concerns as much as anyone else (in fact, we will be the primary and initial targets of any government or other interest being the founding committee members) and we have done our best to address those, but we are still bound by association rules which we can't by-pass if we want to remain a legitimate organisation, in the eyes of the government.

absolutely, but the rules surrounding membership would be appreciated if you want people to join

A copy of The Constitution will be uploaded shortly, I'll let you know as soon as I do.

This is a completely legal organisation running on association rules, and we will have to abide by the regulations enforcing them, which aren't enormously complicated or weird but are legally enforceable.

sure, but you can appreciate this isn't like the local "petunia appreciation society", there's legitimate interests in peoples privacy and the disclosure of personal information,

but i apologise if i'm sounding negative again, i'm just voicing my personal concerns and i'm sure concerns of others as well ,,,, in light what we've seen in WA re: one of our members you can see the need for discretion

Actually, this organaisation isn't dissimilar to the local Petunia Society, at least in my eyes. Just because we are a little more politically active than most plant societies doesn't necessarily make us more of a target, it depends on the membership and how active we get. It essentially this IS a plant society, but with members who are being targetted by the government in an extremely prejudiced manner. It helps to remember that. Ethnobotany and ingestion of plants is a legimitate right for all humans, sharing knowledge and information and material is also a legitimate right, we are just denied those rights in some areas.

Edited July 21, 2013 by whitewind

[whitewind]

You can now view a copy of our constitution on the Membership page of the website.

EDIT Which is down at the moment.

Direct link is here:

http://www.pdf-archive.com/2013/07/21/aes-constitution/aes-constitution.pdf

Edited July 21, 2013 by whitewind

[whitewind]

Website back up. Still nutting out the technical glitches!

[whitewind]

So, to re-iterate, we have a LOGO COMPETITION which looks like it's going to be won by Bogfrog by default

I won't mind, but if we can have excitement with creation and competition then it will be more fun!

The winner of the comp will receive a most fantastic and wonderful prize as has never been seen before on SAB !!!

1 . A Signed copy of Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Paul Stamets !!!

2 . Cactus seedlings of many varied and interesting hybrids

3 . A plethora of rare medicinal and edible seed stock

4 . Cactus seed

5 . Medicinal mushroom cultures

6 . Edible mushroom cultures

We'll even find a way of sending it to our wonderful overseas competitors (that reminds me, I was going to make it ANZEA but it seems someone has already stolen this acronym, sadly)

The prizes have been donated by the Shaman Australis nursery and the founding Australian Ethnobotanical Society committee members.

We will finalise the prize list very shortly and post a more comprehensive list here!

We'd really love someone here to come up with an amazing logo, anything goes but I'm thinking based on a psychoactive or medicinal flower which is iconic and beautifully structured, preferably Australian or Australasian, and easily rendered on a computer screen. As I said before, I'm not sure a plant with a notorious history would be too ideal, much as we love them, but if you must then you must and we'll certainly look at everything submitted. It doesn't even have to be floral!

I'm not sure we have set a date for submissions, but I'm guessing people will need a few weeks so we'll see how it goes, maybe the last weekend in August?

Saturday 31st! Midnight! We'll be having our first meet roundabout then too.

[irabionist]

Graphic Designer Mode ON! Would love to design a Logo!

[Scarecrow]

I'll definitely make an effort to produce something, those prizes sound great!

Got any specifications for the logo, like dimensions or shape? Or maybe even just a spot on the website where you're going to put it? Any of these details would help a lot with making something that will match the rest of the website properly.

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

Hey scarecrow. To be honest, no not really!

It'd be great of the logos were of a large size so we can tweak them later as needed. I'm also keen to build a custom style website sooner rather than later, and in my mind the perfect logo COULD have the site designed around it ;)

Web designers feel free to contact me also! We're defiantly not rolling in cash, but I'm sure we could tempt some work out of you with some plants etc as payment. You'd only receive rare plants as payment

D00d

[2Deep2Handle]

Dood....More than happy to help lend a hand with the web design, dev or architechture. And the prospect of rare plants excites me greatly. Pm me for links to my portfolio if ya need to see some work. I can see youve used Wordpress by the looks of things. pretty damn familiar with this CMS and many others, as well as building custom CMS's from the ground up if need be.

-For the security, Just take the details in a '"members'' DB table, MD5 (encrypt) all sensitive info (like address and even names),

and you just create a ''view''(kinda like a table on-the-fly) (not materialised view) of members names and addresses for anyone who requests it, where the opposite ''decryption'' MD5 algorithm is used to convert the scrambled text in ''users'' to readable text for the ''view'' (maybe called member list or something).

It (the view) only ever exists when it is requested by someone, and you have control over who you let request with your server side scripts like php etc. Now your secure and fulfill your requirements of membership accessibility.

[irabionist]

This is a very quickly done and dodgy basic representation of the direction i'm heading in for the design

Should I continue developing this or does anyone have any recommendations?

also, i'm unsure about the 'A' and the 'E' being connected like that, but I was thinking of making the 'S' a native Australian ethno (atm it's supposed to be a caapi vine)

[whitewind]

Thanks Sabry, great work!

Have you been in touch with d00d yet?

I have to say I'm more in favour of representing indigenous Australian plants, even though we do love and appreciate plants from all around the globe I'm thinking our logo should celebrate the fact that we live on this wonderful continent that isn't well represented worldwide!

I like the organic form of the S if that could be grown throughout the E and the A too I think that would be quite beautiful.

I'm also looving the purple and green of the background images on the Facebook page, I'm guessing the harsh black and white might print well but it hurts my brain a bit.

Bogfrog, have you been working on the logo too? Would love to see if you have come up with something

I'll definitely make an effort to produce something, those prizes sound great!

Got any specifications for the logo, like dimensions or shape? Or maybe even just a spot on the website where you're going to put it? Any of these details would help a lot with making something that will match the rest of the website properly.

Eeeuw not really! Bigger the better I suppose so we can muck with the size, it might be good to have a larger image if we want to print at some point in the future.

I'm guessing top left-hand-side of the website, but logos can pretty much appear anywhere so if it looks good on both sides of the page that might be worth considering. Shape I'm thinking square or circular rather than extended, but that's only because I can't really think of any logos that aren't that way inclined, but honsetly I think we could incorporate anything if it's cool enough, at least I'd be willing to try. It's not as if we intend to be rigid or conservative in our approach.

One thing is, a colour logo must print out in black and white/grayscale so there must be definition and difference between colours that can be determined by a printer, otherwise it comes out as a blob. Ideally a logo represents all your core ideas OR a kind of two phrase "mission statement" clearly (I guess ours would be plants=people or Australian Ethnobotany - same thing really) but that's probably a bit hardcore to represent.

I'm guessing too much of a blank slate here has flummoxed people a bit!

[bogfrog]

Sorry WW havent done anything yet. Im kinda hesitant by the whole 'dnt know how to make it computerised' part.

My dad is a CAD expert tho, so i should get to work and see if he can translate it for me.

[whitewind]

Just scan it to a high definition jpeg file, and we can do all the manipulation

[bogfrog]

Hell yeah! I have been gathering ideas.

Edit: watch out contenders, these are rough first sketches but it wont be long until I can draw a symmetrical lotus

Another 3dit: nice website!! It looks very classy and the articles seem to be very informative.

Edited August 11, 2013 by bogfrog

[upside]

Hey bogfrog,, to get a symetrical drawing, unless u like a challenge, draw a vertical line lightly, the sketch one half,, photocopy or trace that image, then use the copy, place and match it to the other side and trace or copy. Voila, a symetrical drawing Hope that makes sense?

[bogfrog]

Thanks Upside, i'll give it a go.

Hehe i do like a challenge though!

Its always fun trying to draw a new plant.., Whitewind, I wish ariocarpus were native to australia!!!

I drew my 1st ever ariocarpus the other day and thought it would make a beautiful logo lol.

It seems to share several aspects with the lotus though, so the spirit of the ariocarpus will live on in my lotus ;)

Edited August 11, 2013 by bogfrog

[upside]

Here is something I came up with today. Hope u like, it can be simplified if needed.

Duboisia Hopwoodii...

[upside]

And another that just popped into my head... Done quickly, so its kinda rough.

Acacia Acuminata..

[bogfrog]

Wow

Edit: I'm out. No way can I compete against Upside's skills.

Edited August 14, 2013 by bogfrog

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

FIGHT FIGHT FIGGGGGHT *end high school boys voice*

[theuserformallyknownasd00d]

Upside, that first one is sweet tho, maybe traditionalise it up? (Is that a word? Lol)

[altenate]

Don't give up Bogfrog! They are awesome!

Upside, I like yours too!!

Any one else got some logo ideas?

[upside]

Haha Dood, the drawing gloves are on ;p

don't give up Bogfrog, I like what ur doing, keep drawing

Traditionalise... Whether a word or not, I like it either way lol can u post an example of what you mean? I'll have a crack at it over the next few days.

[bogfrog]

I thought the same thing, i reckon the drawing is great (fantastic actually) but the text looks kinda gangster