developing a ‘food system hackathon’ to take to communities to help them visualize and tech-enable their local food system; comparative tool looking across other typical e-commerce/logistics/CSA software in use and finding a way to keep it up to date; presentations re: questions to ask of your tech
to help farmers/hubs… figure out what questions to ask when they are considering tech
Esp small scale farmers really need help with on-line marketing tools - huge potential for OFN to have a ‘program’ that helps set up websites… link to mailchmp or other… for a fee. Helping farmers decide on the tech that is best for them (even when we recognize its not OFN). Offering open source solutions - for problems that can’t be solved by OFN
we’ve got good communications and governance in place - lets build on those - discourse and slack channels for things like: local food system building , improving marketing of the hub,… I think we just (at least I haven’t) made a point about sharing things not directly related to the platform. But beyond this exchange, I’d like to see us create and brand some ‘programs’ that we jointly offer - with fees that contribute to the global pot. What if we had a global marketing team that was avaiable on a fees basis to do work for local hubs for example?
Marketing help for hubs would be big. Already here there are competing ‘solutions’ (Local Line - aka the group Local Orbit joined) offers marketing blogs and ‘free’ tools, but they also build a model around selling these services to farms and hubs, and integrating with their platform. SEcond - I think a ‘program’ around how to help communities map and build local networks of networks (food system), and tech-enable these (OFN plus maybe other tools too) - is very sellable in all our instances to funders. Both Aus and Can have done work trying to nurture food entrepreneurship - so we have a basis and experience to build on. We need to synthesize our learning from this. (Maybe there is a funder who would pay for someone to synthesize our work in this area even?)
5 - first products: global marketing team working for hubs on fee for service (website builder, e-marketing inetrations), and online toolkit for building and tech-enabling local sustainable food sytems (tool kit comes with consulting fee for service options maybe)