- Dan Gordon -
- Providing some background and perspective on what building big structures of innovation
- Next person
- Frustrated by the money going into ag tech but not creating a lot of innovation
- How to connect technology users with solution providers. repetition of efforts is a problem.
- Mike Stenta
- Has been shepherding FarmOS for a long time. Hoping to roll into a larger organizational structure.
- farmOS - Open Collective Using Open Collective to develop some funding possibilities. Not enough to pay for dev but helping pay for website, etc
- Biggest opportunity is to educate the public about the value of open source software.
- Next person
- SAMR process to think about how we’re performing our research and design work
- Thinking about already existing structures that can be of use to help dev tech
- Implementation science - initiated in the health sector. Onus is on the developer to give people what works.
- Next person
- Sustaining is about engaging farmers continually in the process and conversation of determining what is needed.
- What is the decision making process to prioritize the needs of one group over another.
- Sally
- Owner of the ranch and hosting this convening
- Spends a lot of time in the philanthropy space
- Spent the first half of her career in the tech world in Silicon Valley
- Giving from a place of collective accountability; not structured like venture capital
- Natural outgrowth of this movement is to have people-based, relationship-based
- Drew
- Recovering entrepreneur
- Listening to growers and stakeholders
- Samuel
- Started as a farmer (got into farming as a college student, food system activism), recognized that there weren’t a lot of appropriate tools which led him to building tools
- Moved into working with friends, engineers, geeky people and then began to hold events and make batches of tools
- Started to work with Farm Hack and then internationally
- Now at 11th hour/Schmidt Family Foundation as the agtech person
- At this early stage, requires a lot of support
- Tries to fund technologies that push the thesis forward at a network level
- Mapping the network at events as a group and
Floor opens for questions…
- Morgan
- Q:
- Wondering how transparency plays into the conversation. There are hidden reasons for success in our communities and we should be letting it become clear what those are.
- A’s:
- Work from PIE ranch — the toolkit offers case studies which share the stories of projects.
- Need to recognize, fund, sustain the labor that is part of the dev process.
- Q:
- Why has the money that has been put into agritech not been successful?
- A’s:
- It’s an unstable time for venture and specifically in ag/food.
- Using a special purpose vehicle now which is a lower risk strategy
- How to understand current and future value —
- It’s an unstable time for venture and specifically in ag/food.
- Q:
- Money is one of the many resources we need to sustain. Let’s spend time thinking about all of the other resources? Community-backed side — maybe hearing from Mike Stenta?
- A’s:
- Found we needed to hire professionals to really make it work. How do we deal with the combination of volunteers, employees, farmers and then tensions between all of those folks.
- Mike Stenta -
- Unseen value in all of the other projects being built on top of. FarmOS used underlying open source dependencies from other communities who are dealing with the same questions
- Need to value what we’re building on top of. Need to be thankful for all the work that’s gone in that has allowed us to build on top of them.
- Unseen value in all of the other projects being built on top of. FarmOS used underlying open source dependencies from other communities who are dealing with the same questions
- Q:
- To FarmOS — did you go into debt with any capital from anywhere?
- A’s:
- Decided that he didn’t want to approach it as a venture-sponsored startup. No debt. Very slow to build it. A huge privilege that he could put in free time to build it on the side.
- It’s complicated when you’re trying to do it boot strap style.
- Decided that he didn’t want to approach it as a venture-sponsored startup. No debt. Very slow to build it. A huge privilege that he could put in free time to build it on the side.
- Q:
- What are some persistent problems that are arising and what are some solutions you’ve seen?
- A’s:
- Mike Stenta — data entry is really hard and no one wants to do it and tech can only help so much
- Sharing data is tricky because it can be misused
- The biggest problem is individualism. People don’t see the power of commonality.
- Unaffordability of food and processed foods are massive problems. One solution is food vouchers, food subsidies, food as medicine.
- Q:
- Role models within the open source space? Thinking of QGIS. Other ones that we can look to? There is a distinction between OS software that is just being used by massive corporations and stand alone projects that aren’t serving corporation?
- A’s:
- Greg A - Seeing people who are community managers creating communities themselves. We have to create collective action circles. There are a lot of examples in the open source science space
- Q:
- Conversations that are happening here are conversations that happened or are happening in other industries. Where are the corollaries from other industries that we can learn from? Where are we learning from the larger ecosystem?
- A’s:
- UC Santa Cruz is looking at this.
- On the interoperability side, health data seems to be a good model to watch and in this case mandated to create interoperability. Agtech hasn’t been mandated
- Q: