Who are we? I want to know the people behind the names :-)

Hi everybody!
I wanted to give a short status update with regard to my engagement with OFN, having not been active for quite some time now.
In short: I will remain inactive on OFN global & OFN France for the time being. :frowning:
[I will remain a (more or less) active member of the board of OFN UK.]

But needless to say I’m still in love with OFN, full of support, good thoughts and digital smiles and hugs to all of you (especially those I know)! :wink: :slight_smile: :hugging:

In long: I’ve been living out of my backpack for over half a year, traveling in the US and Europe, doing a lot of trainings, spending quality time with family & friends, some freelance work and quite a bit of enjoying life.
For the coming months, I’m going to focus my energies on two new work opportunities as a freelance (one as a coach to eco-village- and community-projects and the other as a consultant on creating regenerative global supply chains).

HOWEVER, if there are any (mostly) offline, off-screen work needs in Europe (speaking at events, representing OFN at conferences etc), I’m willing and interested to help out on that sphere, if you guys think that might be useful. Please get in touch via email to anselmibing {at} posteo {dot} org in that case.

ALL THE BEST and “bonne continuation” as the French love to say! :slight_smile:
@Kirsten @serenity @lin_d_hop @NickWeir @danielle @tschumilas @Angie-US @MikeiLL @eric

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Thanks for the update, man. Sounds like you are doing good things. It’s been great getting to know you. Things are slow here in the states, but haven’t completely died out yet. Still have our staging server going.

Thanks for the update / love / support @Selmo !! By any chance are you doing work with http://www.terra-genesis.com/ ? If not, you should look them up :slight_smile: If you are: AWESOME.

Hi @serenity - yup that’s them! I’m so excited to start working with them! How do you know them? Hugs

I don’t know them but I read their white paper re 4 levels of regenerative agriculture last week. One of the best things I’ve read in a while! I think there is a lot in it and worthwhile thinking about how OFN fits / can align / support…

Hi @mags I’ve started putting together a bit of a testing handbook for anyone who’s interested in doing some testing for the first time - Testing Handbook

Hi everyone! I would like to introduce you to @pierredelacroix. He lives in Paris and is deeply committed to human solidarity, and share a holistic vision of systems transformation. !he is super interested by governance issues as well, and was involved in the “Nuit Debout” movement in France, which you might have heard about. Talented Ruby developer, he is, like all of us here, driven by values and wants to contribute to meaningful projects :slight_smile: Pierre is going to work with us on some features needed in France (and elsewhere!), he has deployed his dev environment but he might have at some points some questions to ask you @maikel or @RohanM or @pmackay or… when navigating into the OFN code. @oeoeaio he will especially starts working on some quick fixes on the tax issue (I’ll ping him on Github so that you see what he is going to work on). @pierredelacroix I hope I didn’t say anything wrong, please correct me if I did! And welcome to the OFN community :slight_smile:

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Hello guys,

I’d like to quickly introduce myself and the project we are trying to get started here in Germany :slight_smile:

My name is Janina and I am the project initiator here in Germany for a project (which we haven’t got a cool name for yet) where we look to create a food distribution network using existing stationary village centres and the power of the OFN software. Our project has it’s current regional base around Cologne/ Aachen in the very western part of Germany and we will look to launch the pilot phase with 3 village centres in this area. We have a large wholesaler and at least one regional partner for each centre for the pilot and are also arranging the logistics.
The idea is for customers to order their food via the online platform (either from home or by using a terminal in the centre) and get it delivered to the village centre for self-pick up. The commissioning and logistics will be organised by us/ the relevant village centre. And the number of local food producers will be increased once the pilot is working well.
We are working with government grants (there’s hopefully one being signed off for us in the next weeks for a large sum of money - keep your fingers crossed) so that we can work with you guys to help us develop the OFN software for that purpose. I am very happy for the contact of @MyriamBoure who gave me a great intro to the OFN community and to be already in touch with Serenity, @Kirsten and Danielle to hopefully get started very soon.
I very much look forward to being and taking part in this community and welcome everyone who’d want to contact me with advice, questions, help or just a quick hello.
Janina

Ps. cool name suggestions (with available domains) are also very welcome! :slight_smile:

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Welcome Janina :slight_smile: This sounds fantastic!

Yeahhh, welcom @janina!!! So happy to see you here :slight_smile:
I do believe a lot in the village center project, you know I talk about it in people working with villages in France, I am deeply convinced this is the model for tomorow, hybrid places where you can buy local food, but also have a drink with other local people, go to a small concert, play, post your mails, you could even have board with people asking or offering services, etc. I dream of it :slight_smile:
This is totally aligned with the vision and growing movement of “third places” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
If you want to discuss further I would be super happy, we have more and more related project connected to the OuiShare community as well, and I’m working more specifically on the rurality dimension on the collaborative economy with my “OuiShare” hat :wink:
I’ll be super happy to come and visit when a first prototype is on! We didn’t manage to meet in Norway, maybe we’ll do in Germany :wink: Or if you come to France let me know!
We received messages of other people in Germany willing to contribute to a local OFN so I’ll connect them with you through email.
Cool names: my German is as good as my Japanese, but I’ll brainstorm with some people about some cool names in English and share them here if we find something that worth sharing :slight_smile:

Welcome!!! I’m @tschumilas in the early stages of launching OFN and building a community in CAnada (OFN-CAN). To learn the platform and to raise some profile, I have been setting up a system of food hubs - where there is a ‘mother hub’ that takes the lead on sourcing, aggregating, curating an inventory weekly…, and then small hubs. The ideas is that very small locations (schools, worksites, community centres) would be too small on their own to source and curate inventories - so they draw on the services of the mother hub. In a region of 300,000 (the city region I live in) there could be one mother hub and dozens of smaller hubs. We are using OFN to enable this.

So you asked about ‘cool’ names - so we call this 'Really Cool Markets" But we spell ‘cool’ as C02L - because we are transacting products that are produced by farmers and artisans who don’t use fossil-fuel derived fertilizers, and have other practices that are ‘cooling’ the planet. In english we play on ‘cool’ (as in ‘nifty’) and ‘C02L’ is in carbon dioxide. I know it likely doesn’t translate that way into German - but I just thought it was funny that you said you were looking for a ‘cool’ name :smile:

Nice pay on words @tschumilas :slight_smile: It’s hard actually to find names for a German project when we don’t speak German :wink: @Selmo if you are around maybe that’s a cool game for you to play with :slight_smile: In English I like the notion of Food Connexion, food hubs are also a way to reconnect people with one another. Or I like the BeLocalist approach of the BALLE network (https://bealocalist.org/). Or in French and Quebec the growing term of “micro-markets” which is a farmer market at a micro scale http://www.distributionqm.ca/en/micro-markets-0 ok this example is not really a farmer market, but the one in france is, and I like the term, very much third food revolution style :slight_smile: It could be somethink like The Micro-Market Fair, or MyMicroMarket, or any play on words around it. I don’t know the german translations so hard for me to see of some cool names with available domain are there @janina :-o But hope that helps!

Hi everyone,

I’m hashfyre. I work as a DevOps Engineer for Razorpay. I’m helping SreeHarsha to setup the India region servers in DigitalOcean with the ofn-install ansible repo.

You can reach out to me on @hashfyre on twitter
I have also been part of the OFN slack channel for the last couple of months, just lurking in on the banter.

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Hi @hashfyre, nice to e-meet you, and welcome to the community! If you have any question on the infrastructure, etc. you might find answers on this forum or on the github wiki: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/wiki. Don’t hesitate to open a post if you run into difficulties you don’t manage to solve, hopefully people who have gone through that journey in the community can give you some tips!
Cheers :slight_smile:

Hi all, my name is Jen, I work as a sustainable food systems researcher and communications strategy person (mostly in Melbourne), and live in central Victoria.

As a researcher I most recently worked on the Foodprint Melbourne project with @Kirsten and Rachel Carey. That projectlooked at the impacts of feeding Melbourne, and what’s needed to build a fairer, more sustainable and resilient food system for the city.

I also work in communications strategy, helping sustainability and food researchers communicate their work to policy-makers and media, and working with community food enterprises on how to make the most of their comms with (almost invariably!) limited resources. I’m doing some work with Open Food Network o get the Australian Fair Food Forum started as the place for Australian community food enterprises to share lessons learned, ask questions, etc. and to help develop more resources to support community food enterprises - check out the Learn site: https://openfoodnetwork.org/au/learn/

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Welcome @Brad and @Jen !!! Happy to see you join the OFN boat :slight_smile:

Hello All, I am Sudhir Kothagunda. I am a software Engineer and have worked both in India and US, last one being PayPal. From a couple of years i have been volunteering with Center for Sustainable Agriculture (http://csa-india.org/), after seeing the distress the farmers in India are going through. Came to know that CSA also works on connecting the farmers to the consumers, to avoid middle persons by providing the most benefit to the farmer. They encourage and educate farmers on organic farming in a sustainable way, and for this Dr. G. V. Ramanjaneyulu (@ramoo) who is the Founder of CSA has already developed http://sahajaaharam.in/ (meaning Natural Food). But to enhance the whole process, @ramoo and @sreeharsha have enlightened me about OFN. Reading through about OFN, i see that many people around the world share very similar ideas. I believe OFN framework will definitely help us achieve wha wet are trying to.
Its really commendable that the idea of OFN was made open to everyone, avoiding the need for re-inventing the wheel.
I thank @sreeharsha and @ramoo for introducing me to OFN, and also OFN for such an innovative thought. I look forward for help and guidance from OFN going forward, and will try to do my part in taking this world towards OFN.

Regards,
Sudhir

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Welcome @kothagunda! I’m Myriam and I’ve been supporting @sreeharsha in his heartful involvment with developing OFN in India he is doing a great job in answering and connecting people there :slight_smile: If you want I can invite you to Slack, I don’t know @sreeharsha if you are using it in India or maybe not that much? I think you do have the right to invite people Harsha anyway, so you can do it :wink: But if you need support from the global community Slack is a good place for quick answers to some technical locks :slight_smile: Cheers

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Thanks Myriam. I do appreciate your help and hard work. Harsha has already
invited me onto slack. Haven’t got a chance to join in yet, will join in
soon.

Regards,
Sudhir

Not sure whether I will stick around, but I’m Jan Fabry, and I’m helping Voedselteams in Belgium to evaluate OFN as the replacement of our current webstore. I have only started doing this a few days ago, so I have been mostly reading this forum and some code and GitHub issues to get an overall feeling of the status of the project. That why you can see questions from me popping up - if they don’t make any sense, please let me know, I think it’s better to say something that can be stupid than to assume something that is incorrect.

I have been a developer (mostly PHP and Python for the past ten years, and did devops for the past five years. So I know software mostly from the side where the bugs come out of :slight_smile:

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