ASA Membership for GOAT

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Hi folks, I have a lot of CANVAS related updates to provide, but needed to ask this one first.

Had a great conversation with Jamie Nix, membership coordinator at Agronomy Society of America, and that is a great place to potentially interface with their many thousands of agronomists and academics to talk about open source ag tech. She said that 200 - 400 people sign up for a webinar, and I think it’s time to start to really get our tools out into a broader world.

I’m meeting with her Friday - what questions would you like me to ask? I’m already going to ask about what types of webinars or events that we could do, if we could have various members participate in different ways, etc.

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This is a great idea, Greg! Let me circle up with my team and I’ll let you know what questions we have. (Realizing now your meeting is today, so I might be too late.)

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I think the specific question we have is: Is this a good forum to introduce members to free open-source software tools related to agriculture? Presuming the answer is yes, “Have you found a particular format works best for the membership? E.g. a 30 minute introduction/demo closing with an invitation to a hands-on virtual workshop (i.e. now you’ve learned enough about the tool to decide if it’s valuable to you, join us in a small group to walk you through usage after you have installed the app).

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So @sudokita and I did talk to her, and @ErikaFosterSoils and I have some funding in an existing small grant to pay for a year of ASA membership for GOAT. Here’s some quick notes and @sudokita you have way better notes to add… but…

  1. Can GOAT join, but have any community members do webinars or create written content? ie can we join as a group? –> Yes!
  2. What types of content are there? –>
    1. Educational / Training content
      1. Written (articles)
      2. Webinars
      3. Trisocieties forum
      4. (I think there’s others, ankita noted the full list)
  3. You don’t want people pitching products in your webinar and written content… We have mostly open source and freely available tech. If we talk about how to use a free tool, do you consider that educational? –> If it’s free and open, then it’s educational.
  4. What are the main groups who connect through ASA and related societies?
    1. ~8,000 ASA Members (academic, students, profs, etc.)
    2. ~12,000 Certified Crop Advisors (ASA does the certification)

@Steve-TechMatters “is there a good forum to introduce members to FOSS tools” –> short answer: Yes!, basically in all the forms (written, webinar, forum).

I’m going to get the membership, and then we’ll invite folks to hear directly from Jamie Nix who is the outreach person and listen to all the details.

I think this (and probably many like it, Kita mentioned ASABE in a similar fashion) could be really great for us as we have tools that are really consumer ready.

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So we did get an ASA membership for GOAT! Thank you @ErikaFosterSoils and Point Blue for paying for that and @samuejao and 11th Hour for the funding used for it!

Our next step is to meet with them and more completely understand how we can engage (see above).

We’ll be meeting with Jamie from ASA on January 6th at 1pm EST

Please email me or @sudokita if you’d like to join and we’ll invite you to the event or maybe @julietnpn can we get this topic on the next community call and let’s make sure folks know they can join to hear more about it.

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PS - I added this event to the GOAT calendar, I think you can add it to your calendar by clicking here (? should work ?)

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Discussion about ASA Membership options is today (Tuesday 1pm EST). Attend if you’d like to ask more about how that could be useful for your project. Notes and options will be posted here.

Calendar event is here: clicking here l

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Notes from call. She described the audience and the content / engagement types really clearly. My notes are here. We’re thinking about integrating calls for content into the monthly calls, and we’ll be discussing it in our upcoming yearly planning meeting also. If some of these are interesting to you, feel free to comment here with ideas!

PS Jamie is ASA’s Member Coordinator.

Audience

  • ASA, CSSA, SSSA Members - 8k members

  • Certified Crop Advisors - 12k members

Engagement Opportunities

Innovation Roundtable

  • Frequency: Monthly

  • Audience: other ASA CSSA, SSSA Corporate members + Jamie

  • Length: 1 hour

  • Content: Decide direction on who gets the webinars, what’s important to present to the community, what people’s feedback is, etc.

This is important to be active in!

  • Working Groups: Webinars/Events, Content/Comms, Professional Development/Mentorship

  • How to submit: NA (just show up) Jamie to fwd the calendar invite.

Internship Posting / Job Postings

  • Frequency: as needed

  • Audience: ASA, CSSA, SSSA and CCA members

  • Content: Any kinds of internship postings that would be relevant, as many as you want the portal (?) Also can submit professional development blog content for the website below.

  • How to submit: through portal (?) Email Jamie for discount code for 1 free ad. https://careerplacement.org/

CSA News

  • Frequency: ongoing

  • Audience: Goes to ASA, CSSA, SSSA Members

  • Content: Very open - always looking for content that the ASA, CSSA, SSSA Audience would be interested in. Single articles, series, etc. Ex. “10 open source tools you’ve never heard of…”

  • How to submit: Present to Jamie to review, then the editorial board reviews. Send to Jamie or submit directly here: https://www.sciencesocieties.org/publications/csa-news/about/submission-guidelines

Crops & Soils Magazine

ASA, CSSA, SSSA Editorial Board: Become a peer reviewer for the Peer Review Scientific Publications

Webinars

  • Frequency: 4 per month

  • Audience: ASA and/or CCA, large attendance (100s) and not interactive

  • Length: 1 hour (15 m Q&A)

  • Content: Must be educational to be free. Open source software, or free options, are considered educational

  • How to submit: Present to Jamie to review

  • Speaker Needed for webinar, “Emerging technologies and their career implications” - tentative April 21 at 11am

CCA Connect

  • Frequency: as needed / as interest allows

  • Audience: ASA and/or CCA, smaller attendance but interactive (‘fireside’ style, feedback, etc.)

  • Length: 1 hour

  • Content: Get feedback on a beta test, show a free open source tool, ask people questions or do a survey, etc.

  • How to submit: Present to Jamie to review

Sustainable Agronomy Conference

  • Frequency: One time in July

  • Audience: 4k people (public)

  • Every Wednesday in July

  • Content: Several topics for this year

  • Resilient Adaptive Systems

  • AI Precision Ag

  • Nutrient Biological Inputs

  • Economics and Beyond Row Crops

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2026.01.12 GOAT Monthly Community Call
2026.01.12 GOAT Monthly Community Call
2026.01.12 GOAT Monthly Community Call
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Thanks for these notes, Greg! I’m sorry I didn’t pay closer attention to this thread; I have an SSSA membership (card carrying :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:) and it sounds like we all might have been able to use it for this purpose.

LandPKS is ready to start doing webinars, with our first one tentatively scheduled early Feb. So I’ll look through the list here and put together a plan and let you all know what we’ll be doing and see if there are opportunities for collaboration.

Also, super stoked on the CCA Connect piece for feedback :raising_hands: Recruitment has been very challenging for us lately; a new pool of beta testers, survey takers, etc.. is fantastic.

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Cool! So we are a ‘corporate sponsor’ which may have more options than a personal membership (I’m assuming you mean you ‘you’ not you ‘landpks’ (?)). So it may still be helpful. Definitely share here when you all are presenting and how it goes!

Greg