Thank you for your patience with our newest GOAT experiment - the Salon Sessions!
In the Salon Sessions, we will gather as a full group around GOAT community themes that, we hope (!), represent shared work, interests, and priorities. Salon sessions are curated, facilitated conversations among a set of “first” speakers, with interaction and open discussion to follow. The sessions topics were seeded by attendee proposals collected during the application process, with additions to the core speaker set based on general application information, and additional topics selected from community discussions more broadly.
Look at the program spreadsheet to see the list of the salon sessions, with a summary below
| Salon Sessions | Description |
|---|---|
| GOAT Opening | What the GOAT? Meet & Greet. Why do we gather? |
| GOAT Orientation | Learn about who is in the GOAT community, both here and beyond. |
| How do you sustain open ag tech? | Perspectives across the funding landscape, centered around how to sustain open source software and ag tech communities. |
| What is appropriate digital technology? | What does it mean for technology to be “appropriate” for different places, people, times, and tasks? How can we design technologies that concretely serve different groups of agricultural workers? We’ll hear a set of examples for how to practice more human- and community-centered approaches to ag tech design. |
| Ag Tech in Action! | How are people actually USING technology in action? We’ll hear from a few farmers about how they are using, experimenting, and thinking about technology in their work. We’ll then open up the discussion to hear peoples’ experiences with technology in various types of work across agrio-food networks. |
| Data, Tech, and AI Infrastructure | We’ll listen to a specific example of how thoughtful data stewardship combined with critical data infrastructure can result in improvements in conservation data interoperability. Then we’ll look more broadly at opportunities and efforts to see how data infrastructure is evolving. Participants will share more about how they create, use, and manage data infrastructure and standards. We’ll see also hear a couple of examples of how people are using, creating, or envisioning AI-driven ag tech. |
| Farm equipment of the future | From electrification, miccroelectronics, automation, and tools for cooperation, the nature of farm machinery and hardware-based ag tech is changing, again! We’ll see some examples of this progression and discuss what we envision as the future of farm equipment. |
| International Networks of Communities | There are people doing powerful, aligned, and innovative community building work in open source, agriculture, and technology across the globe. While GOAT efforts to date have primarily had a North American orientation, we’ll hear from a set of people who represent international networks, and chat about how to create better bridges across global communities. |
| Learning from failures | We have been design technology in agriculture for a long time. Some things worked, some things did not. Let’s share our failures and collectively heal, learn, and grow <3 |
| GOAT Closing | Let’s plan for the future as a GOAT community, both tomorrow and beyond. |
But why “salon”?
Historically, salons were private, intimate, intellectual and social gatherings, where ideas were exchanged in an open, yet curated manner, popular during the period of “enlightenment” in France. We acknowledge that they were also problematic, in the sense that they evoked a sense of elitism, privilege, and formality, centered on social dynamics. There exist analogous gatherings across cultures, we use the term “salon” out of our own familiarity with the concept, and share this background to explain how and where the idea of this session style came from. Though our intention with the GOAT salons includes the concept of a community call, town hall, or public forum, we chose this term to acknowledge that we did curate the conversations and select the “first” speakers. We hope this background allows for each of us to also reflect on the privileges that we hold that allowed us to attend the gathering, and to consider how we may extend these privileges to the many people with voices that matter, who were unable to join us.
For any other sessions, return to the Program FAQ and find your spot: GOAT 2024 Program – GOAT
What’s this thread for?
SALON Facilitators & First Speakers will respond to this thread with any links, more description, or other details to share.
Otherwise, this space is for you to discuss the sessions as well 
