I will elaborate a little:
I have been to Peru and worked with the medicine down there and had an amazing experience, thats why i want to start this, especially after the backlash i am seeing to Kevin Nolans death.
In the old days the medicine men lived in a tribal setting with the people they treated. If they were brought patients from afar it was because they heard good things about this medicine man. This was the check/balance for practicing medicine men, if you can't heal people wont come to you, if your mean word will get out, sexually abusive...
Today people travel from very far to receive healing from ayahuasceros, they have a difficult time communicating with people in Peru because of poor telecommunications and a lack of websites. This situation has improved greatly, but a majority of the websites marketing a shaman are affiliated with said shaman. There needs to be an independent, unbiased, well organized arenea for people to review/recommend/critique shamans in the global public venue. The Shamans who choose to treat the world, make the world their tribe, this service will only help to spread the good medicine and help people to avoid the bad medicine.
qualities of site:
Independent - No bias toward one shaman and run as a service to the community
Not-For-Profit - We are not in this to make money, this is a harm reduction effort mix with an effort to make this medicine more available to the more risk adverse. If people can read reviews from an independent site that calls out some "bad" shamans, they will feel way more comfortable about taking the leap and heading to the amazon. The people I met down there did not fit a stereo type at all, except they were less risk adverse than your average fellow, all to different degrees.
Cannibalization of nexus traffic - I don't for see the site taking away any traffic from the nexus. When it comes to extractions, the science of DMT, and all that jazz, the nexus is a great... nexus for us to come together around the topics it already covers. But it doesn't function to do the review process of healers I am proposing.
Simple/clean - True to the style we have loved on the Nexus, this site should be about making the information on these healers easily accessible, not heavily burdened with advertisements and nonsense graphics. If we choose to partner and link to sites it will be in a simple non-cluttering way and strictly for the benefit of the community.
Community Driven - The shamans will not have to set up their "profiles" for themselves, rather the patient stories/reviews will be aggregated by name, geography, center name, lineage, admixtures used* etc, when a "profile" page can be made on a shaman it will to better aggregate these stories/reviews. (I currently know quite a few shamans who would register out of iquitos and pulculpa just for the possibility of attracting new peoples.) I think it would community populate rather quickly.
Develop a set of recommendations for traveler - It would be good to have a before you go guide that was pretty complete. I have already started putting one together for my next trip
This will be an ongoing project and I plan to take the lead and work on it every day until we are up and running.
more to come later.
*edit* - just wanted to add I plan on putting hours of time a week personally into this, I want this to succeed in creating a small community which is why I am not attempting this solo
I have experience facilitating group development of all kinds of projects so I am excited to lead this