2023 Update:
I graduated and moved to Martinez, CA in 2019 and, shortly there after, started working with Purdue University in the Ag Informatics Lab with @sudokita. More information on our lab website.
In the last several years I’ve engaged in data stewardship with the four national cover crop councils (NECCC, SCCC, MCCC, and WCCC) and more recently with the NRCS focused on conventions regarding capturing data from conservation monitoring activities.
Howdy,
I’m Juliet Norton. I live in Southern California, but am originally from Florida. I am in the Informatics PhD program at UC Irvine. Openness in ag is important to me because I think it can support both professional and grassroots communities who are working towards sustainable agriculture. For my dissertation, I am working with a grassroots agroecology community in Orange County, California to create a plant database web application that supports agroecosystem design in their local context. This is a really interesting project because the local community has an interesting set of core values that dictate their Information Technology values in ways that are often times at odds with typical IT development and use in broader society. For example they value technology non-use, they value modular tools that can be updated instead of entering the waste stream, and they prefer open-source to proprietary tools.
Here is a bit more about me.
Roles: PhD Student in Informatics, Lead Researcher on NSF funded project: Fostering Non-Expert Creation of Sustainable Polycultures through Crowdsourced Data Synthesis, Founder of UCI Perennial Polycultures Group
Professional skills: ethnographic research, programming, user testing, teaching, conference and workshop organization, workshop facilitation. Other skills: amateur gardening and farming, organization, facilitation, and teaching community education programs, garden volunteer coordination.
Interests:
Open source software for amateur and professional agroecology and sustainable farming
Moving away from or avoiding development of technologies that enable heteromation in agriculture. Heteromation is the computer-mediated extraction of value from unpaid or low-wage human labor into large firms that aggregate the value to make large profits (Heteromation, Ekbia and Nardi 2017).
What I can share at GOAT:
Chapter describing requirements elicitation process from amateur sustainable agriculture communities, and a demo of a “homegrown crowd-sourced” plant database for Orange County, CA amateur sustainable agriculture community
I’m looking forward to meet you all.
Juliet