MetaGOAT Workshop: GOAT Community Stewardship
In this workshop session, we’ll put together a plan for how we want to broaden participation in our community. Thinking deeply about how to decentralize GOAT events, engage in local community actions, and reach out across space and time to connect our diverse organizing efforts.
Prior GOAT stewardship involved ad-hoc outreach and organizing efforts to support non-conference efforts, performed by a loose network of volunteers. These efforts require significant coordination and collaboration among GOAT volunteers, and we anticipate the need to develop a strategic plan for community stewardship to share the burden and joys of organizing and outreach. Some examples of community stewardship activities hosted by GOAT volunteers are listed below.
- Monthly community calls to foster ongoing community discussion on member projects, mini-community events, and other topics related to open agtech, including, community review of this GOAT proposal and community organizer hiring strategy. Virtual movie nights, virtual social hours, and even in-person local meetups to foster community well-being and friendships.
- Hackathons to lend our development expertise to value-aligned organizations including: Bionutrient Food Association to develop accessible, data driven, location specific tools; USDA Agricultural Research Service to develop open access to data and tools resulting from public agricultural research; and The Organic Center to develop equitable, open source technical infrastructure for organic agricultural practices.
- A traveling conference booth to help the food and agricultural community learn more about open agricultural technologies, research efforts and opportunities for collaboration, educational materials and other informational resources and so on. This includes flyers and demonstrations of tools built, maintained, and used by GOAT community members. GOAT representatives also look to learn more about how to support and connect with a diverse set of agricultural communities.
- An ad-hoc crew of GOAT infrastructure volunteers maintain our web presence including our website, forum, document storage, chatrooms, meeting rooms, and servers! These volunteers have provided emergency support when our servers face downtime, perform routine maintenance, and generally ensure that technical bugs are anticipated, caught, and handled.We seek to provide more structured ways for community members to take on tasks, share institutional knowledge, and more efficiently and effectively manage our infrastructure.
Missing from our community stewardship efforts, and often discussed during community events, is the lack of capacity for concerted outreach and engagement with underrepresented groups. Through a more deliberate approach to outreach, engagement, and community stewardship, we hope to bridge the gap and improve representation within GOAT, including from underrepresented and historically excluded communities. In his reflections on attending GOAT 2022, John Bliss, a Maine farmer aptly describes this issue: “GOAT faces an uphill battle in bridging the divide between the farmer and the developer. Trust, the baseline for all relationships, will have to be a primary focus if the open technology community and that of sustainable agriculture are to find solidarity into the future.” (The Main Organic Farmer & Gardner, 2023 )
This session targets the GOAT 2024 Proposal - Goal 2, as supported via a grant from the 11th Hour Project , a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation.
This will be a 60-min session to discuss, create, and plan next steps.
If you already know you’d like to participate, please let @sudokita know.