Kyle Birchard
Portland, Oregon
I have a few gathering ideas:
Fundraising workshops: These could be in-person, virtual, or hybrid. The idea would be to provide a venue for people to offer up projects that could benefit from a little extra “oomph” in the form of dollars, resources, and tech.
In our developer funding session on Tuesday, the group hit on what I might call a portfolio approach for funding activities. For example:
- Friends and family
- Crowdfunding
- Investors
- Contracts (government)
- Grants (government, but maybe philanthropic)
- Corporate sponsorship
- Developer charity
- Product sales (e.g., farmOS/Farmier)
The format would be something like: everyone who wants to bring a project can do a brief walk-through, then with help from others, identify fundraising resources, timetables, and maybe put together some boilerplate application text based on common RFP requirements. Then, we can track progress and create a venue to share successes and things we learn!
A second idea is organized meetups with people in the university and private sector ag tech worlds. I know an early-career faculty member at Oregon State University who is starting to convene a group focused on new hardware and software technologies for ag research. OSU has great ag engineering and data science programs, and Washington State University has a number of centers that might be interested. I have also struck up a relationship with a regional economic development agency in the Salem area that is quite active in connecting tech folks with farmers and food people in the region.
I would be happy to take on tasks related to local logistics.