Greetings GOAT folk! Very much looking forward to (re)connecting and perhaps scheming with some of you in October.
- I’m Jeff Piestrak (he/him). Though I haven’t as yet been directly involved with the GOAT community much, I’ve been a fan and follower of the work it and its members do for years.
For the past 25 years I worked at Cornell University’s ag and life sciences library, Mann Library. I wore many different hats there in support of our Land Grant “knowledge with a public purpose” mission. That encompassed a variety of activities supporting the research, learning, and extension needs of our on and off campus communities, including our Cornell AgriTech ag experiment station, Cooperative Extension, and New York State residents. I’ve also been involved in several different community and regionally-based food systems initiatives. That includes a collaborative project with Dorn Cox/Farm Hack and others piloting a networked “Food Knowledge Ecosystem” in the Northeast US (which Dorn writes about in his dissertation ).
- I recently retired from Mann Library and am now focused on helping cultivate and support regenerative agrifood systems which are “scaffolded” in some way by open technologies, and part of larger community and solidarity economy outcomes. This work is informed by my work at Cornell as well as my many years of front-line food systems work, from farm, orchard, and sea to plate. I also have a master’s degree in Community and Economic Development, with a concentration in Social and Community Informatics.
At home, my wife and I tend to a productive garden on our 5 acre hilltop homestead, directly adjacent to an 11,000 acre wildlife management area. I have a small nursery there where I grow native trees and shrubs. I’m using those to gradually replace invasives on our land, which we share with a wide variety of feathered, furred, and aquatic friends. I have a keen interest in agroforestry more broadly, and have started working with a friend who operates a forest farm nearby, and is an agroforestry expert with the Cornell Small Farms program.
- In addition to the previously mentioned activities, I’m currently working with Prosocial World on helping cultivate the Prosocial Commons, a community of practitioners using the hylo.com platform (amongst other tools). Prosocial is a transdisciplinary approach (based in part on the work of Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom) helping groups and groups of groups work together more effectively in support of shared values and goals.
I’ve also been working with the Cooperative Development Institute, exploring ways to survey, map, and assess solidarity food networks in New York State, using tools like sumApp and Kumu.io. I’m a former board member of the CDI affiliated Data Commons Coop.
- Much of my past work has focused on what might be described as outreach and engagement, network weaving, boundary spanning, and coordinating. But I also have a set of specialized skills related to digital collection development, research support, data management, GIS, WealthWorks “value chain coordination”, and Prosocial facilitation.
- Open approaches (tech, software, standards, etc) can enable greater access, interoperability, and innovation. Theoretically this can result in a greater number and diversity of people and orgs contributing to and benefitting from this work. But I’ve come to understand that open in itself is not enough – we must pay attention to who is able to a) recognize the potential “affordances” those tools offer, then b) have the resources to put them to “effective use”.
If we’re not careful, open resources can be unfairly exploited, e.g., by free riders and co-opters, worsening existing equity issues. Ensuring resources and services are not only open but FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable, can help remedy this problem. Fair ownership and governance are also important, which is why some are calling for commons-based approaches in order to avoid what Nathan Schneider calls The Tyranny of Openness. That’s one reason why I’ve been drawn to the work of Elinor Ostrom, and more recent efforts by Prosocial World to “generalize the core design principles” of commoning she and her students identified. I hope to explore these issues and opportunities with others at the GOAT 2022 gathering, informally and possibly through an interactive workshop.