Developing "How to" Resource Librar(ies) for Food Enterprises

International
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Organisations set-up to roll-out OFN are also providing support and advice on how to set-up and run food enterprises of all shapes and sizes e.g. Altifrem in Scandinavia. OFN Australia has received a grant to set up a support service for community food enterprises in Victoria (non-profit and for profit). This involves a resource database. There are already some great resources out there in particular Making Local Food Work in the UK; Local Orbit in the US etc

Let’s design the resource database and community p2p support platform so that it can be used by food enterprises over the world! There might also be an option to have multiple resource databases (eg to cater for regional specificities / different languages) in which case we can still work together to make sure we use same categories/standards and that they are connected.

  1. Platform
    Discourse vs. a more structured wiki (pb wiki). There are pros and cons either way. If we were to use discourse, we at least need to set it up with TAGS plug in (so we can use top down category system and bottom up tagging). In Aust, we are going to start by setting up test platform on discourse with tags and have a play with a set of resources to see how it works.

  2. URL (we need to set this up for Aust funded project anyway - could make global general?) e.g.
    foodenterprise.community ???

  3. Categories and tags
    Justina Sung has started as intern with OFN Aust. Justina has done an analysis of resources on Making Local Food Work and Local Orbit and others and come up with a first cut list of categories and tags. The full analysis is in this google doc - the first sheet is summary of first cut tags and categories.

PLEASE MAKE SUGGESTIONS DIRECT IN THIS GOOGLE DOC! (Feel free to create extra sheets for alternative systems).

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Hey @serenity ! It’s been a while since we talked :slight_smile: Thanks for sharing this !
I added the spreadsheet to the global drive in the sector dev > resources > operational guidelines, I think that’s where it stands.
I think before being able to give a concrete feedback I need to clarify where this stand in our general sector dev strategy. IMO it’s some aggregation of useful resources, that we might want to use to build services (through training, consulting, incubation, etc.) and from what I understand it’s first a “curation job” of analysing whgat is already available ans ahre it in a structured way to make it more accessible to food hubs creators.

I think in this structuration work of resources we will unfortunately need to manage languages issues… there are also lots of material in French, and I’m sure in other languages, so basically we need to do the same job of searching and curating in various languages and countries. And some interesting material in a language might worth being translated… if they can be relevant for other countries and no such resource exist in the language of these countries.

I’m actually also wondering how to go further as curating is a very first level of adding value : people still have to read 15 documents on marketing, etc. What I would LOVE would be to build synthetic resources aggregating the best of all these for each topic / domain, and maybe then point to some specific document for details, etc.

Also these marketing, logistic, operational guildelines are just one type of resources, there are at least two others we might want to use : use cases and research deliverables.

About the FORM of the sharing, I’m really not sure, and from where I stand it’s too early to think about that, I feel like I first need to understand the need, and maybe interview users, food hub creators we are discussing with at the moment, etc. Maybe some “top down synthetic and clear information” is a first step, and THEN a forum where people can discuss on topics if documentation is not clear.

A bit like now we have the OFN handbook AND the community forum. When discussions happen on the forum, and we identify a need, we complete the documentation, or clarify it. I don’t like the wiki approach as it’s making the debate / discussions stage invisible through more obscure content curation process. Or it could be a wiki + a forum, or a wordpress site + a forum. I like the wordpress idea as we could have pages but make them searchable through various entries, various combination of filters, which is a bit your tag logic. But again, I don’t feel mature to really share an opinion.

Let’s include that in the strategy conversation we gonna have soon on sector dev !

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@serenity , thank you for sharing this very interesting and usefull work.
Do you know how long it took Justina to do this job ?
We are considering doing the same in France.
Thank you!