Who is behind Ghini

Ghini started as a one-man project, by Brett Adams. He wrote Bauble for the Belize Botanical Garden, and later on adapted it for a couple of other users who asked him to use it. Brett made Bauble a commons, by releasing it under a GPL license.

After some years of stagnation Mario Frasca took responsibility of updating Bauble, renamed it to Ghini in order to mark the difference in activity level, and it is now Mario Frasca writing this, enhancing the software, looking for users, requesting feedback…

So even if currently behind Ghini there’s again one developer, much more importantly, there is a small but growing global users community.

Translations are provided by volunteers who mostly stay behind the scenes, translating a couple of missing terms or sentences, and disappearing again.

To make things clearer when we speak of Ghini, but should—and in this document we will—indicate whether it’s Ghini(the software), or Ghini(the people), unless obviously we mean both things.

Mission

To continuously support open and free software for the documentation, research and management of biodiversity collections, for the benefit of organizations and educational institutions that have or manage botanical collections. For example botanical gardens, arboretums, herbaria, but also for people studying or working with such collections.

To stimulate users to contributing to the improvement of the software and sharing solutions; to enhance the availability and visibility of such biodiversity collections.

Vision

The Vision serves to indicate the way ahead and projects a future image of what we want our organization to be, in a realistic and attractive way. It serves as motivation because it visualizes the challenge and direction of necessary changes in order to grow and prosper.

• by the year 2020
• reference point
• community
• development
• integration with web portal
• geographic information