AgGateway Mid-term meeting Opportunity and Request

Open Ag Technology
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Hi all. I’m proposing some funding to attend the AgGateway midyear meeting event to talk about our community and standards we’re using and build relationships and find collaborations with the AgGateway folks.

Event / Plan

AgGateway’s midyear meeting in Altoona, Iowa, June 8 - 10.

I’ll have an hour presentation focused around the Common Farm Convention, but I’m proposing to expand it to talk about the DFC, Common Farm Convention, Better Deal 4 Data, the GOAT standards group and GOAT generally.

Purpose

AgGateway is our nearest-neighbor standard-setting body, and we already have a lot of connections with them (Modus soil standard development, Adapt as a farm recordkeeping standard, and projects with folks like Ben Craker and others). It’s also a community like GOAT, and a community that would be great to engage in GOAT more (and vice versa). So the goals are:

  1. build connections and relationships
  2. identify concrete opportunities to work together
  3. share the standards in our community (DFC, CFC, Better Deal 4 data, etc.) and hear more about theirs
  4. invite them to GOAT 2026 in SC.

In addition, let me know what other goals GOAT members may have and I can try to work on those as well.

Cost Request

The total trip will be about 1100 miles, 3 hotel nights, and my time (2 days). We’re requesting the split the cost:

  1. $700 from GOAT
  2. $1000 from GOAT standard group (Float Funds)
  3. $480 from Our Sci (covers 1 day of Greg’s time)
2 Likes
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AgGateway is really confusing to me. It seems like we’ve been trying to meaningfully engage with them for many years now but they haven’t really done much in return. As I recall, there were a handful of Modus standard meetings that never went much of anywhere. It seemed like our community did a lot of work and it was never really received nor acknowledged.

Perhaps we haven’t had the chance to share back in the right way. If the member-only virtual gatherings aren’t it, maybe the member-only conferences are? :person_shrugging: They seem like a community that works in a similar industry as GOAT - but as a community are very very different (and that is OK).

I appreciate you continue to try and engage with them. I too want to encourage and support this but am hesitant because it feels like GOAT/members have already spun our wheels enough on it. Maybe approaching it as more of a GOAT + AgGateway relationship will be good and is different from how past work has been presented to them. Those are my two cents. But also want to acknowledge there may have been more recent developments that I am not aware of.

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I would support this - Thanks Greg for engaging and happy to brainstorm/support prior.

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Down to support this. It might be nice to also report out after so that the broader GOAT community may learn more about the many prior GOATmembers + AgGateway collaborations to date!

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I support this, and second Ankita’s request that you report out. Greg, I request that you report out at the July Community Call.

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Thanks all. I appreciate your perspective Paul… AgGateway is not fast by any means :slight_smile: , but they do have a large member base and actually have pretty good processes for keeping what they work on up to date. Adapt is particularly expansive and where a lot of their efforts have gone, and something that we may want to connect into. Ben Craker and folks are really genuine and have shared intentions also, and would love to have more folks from there come to GOAT. They have maintained modus and continue to shepherd it, and while modus 2 isn’t out yet they are still active around it.

Anyway, hopefully that gives more recent background. I’ll do my best to bring things back that are useful!

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Hi all - back from the conference. Met lots of folks, presented about GOAT and GOAT standards groups, DFC, CFC, and BD4D, and also talked about AI (including the OFN work we’ve done, but also broadly about how open source and privacy intersects with AI).

It’s definitely a different community than GOAT, though lots of overlap (Jennifer was there, and Stuart Rhea also) - very supply chain focused, midwest row-crop, and also very member focused which has pluses and minuses, but I find their membership commitment really admirable. Also, they have a very refined and effective process for building consent in complex groups (Jim Wilson), which was impressive to watch (and we could learn a lot from IMO). I also learned a lot about their most active members, like Growmark and AgVenture, what they do, who they serve, and what tools they use.

It was also awesome to see where some open source-related ideas connected and with who (and when, where and why they don’t), and I definitely expect some more folks to apply to GOAT from AgGateway. I think that cross pollination will be useful and important in the future.

Happy to give more of an update in July. Spent less than expected, so here’s my expenses + breakdown:

Expenses

271.32 Hotel La Quinta, See “hotel.pdf”

315.96 Rental car “Enterprise Rental Agreement 3QS26K.pdf”

93.16 Fuel. Distance = 1096 miles at 50mpg = 21.92 gallons x 4.25 / gal = 93.16.

960 2 day of Greg’s time (8 x $60/hr)

1540.44 TOTAL

Expenses Notes:

It was actually cheaper to rent a car and reimburse directly the rental expense + gas than standard per mile reimbursement (which is 70 cents per mile and would have been 770 dollars!). I didn’t keep gas receipts, but the miles are from Ann Arbor to Altoon PA, and the price of gas is a conservative rough average across the drive. For the Hotel, I wasn’t able to get an actual receipt either (I don’t know why actually… I have the confirmation email but not a receipt email), but I included is the email confirmation with the expense. I can’t post both docs here, but will post them in OC when that’s set up and ready.

Split

480 Our Sci (covers 1 day of Greg’s time)

1000 GOAT Standards Group

60.44 GOAT

Split Notes:

I spent $639 less than we budgeted, and I applied the savings difference to GOAT @julietnpn it’s kind of up to you if you feel that’s appropriate, but if so the above split is correct.

Next steps

@julietnpn I think next step is to set up an OC project that GOAT / GOAT standards can put money in and I can push to? As you suggested, I can reimburse from Our Sci directly from Dan, so that doesn’t need to be included in the OC Project. So the total in OC would be $1060.44. Please confirm.

Thanks!

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Since Our Sci is fiscally sponsoring the GOAT Conventions and Standards grant I just need to create a project on OC for $60.44, and you’ll need to bill Our Sci for the rest.

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Well I’m realizing if you haven’t already… let’s just not do it at all then. That’s not worth the hassle IMO.