How to creat OFN in Belgium?
I work in Oxfam magasin du monde. This organisation have to axes of work: FAIR TRADE - POLITICS.
=> https://www.oxfammagasinsdumonde.be
They have craft partners, 70 Fair trade and second hand shops, 5000 volunteers, 70 workers.
Sind 2013, they develop Nord Fair Trade.
In next general meeting, they will discuss about their position to develop local food.
I meet the “PDG” last Tuesday and they are really interested in OFN to propose it during the general meeting.
The next step is to build an kind of a agreement from the OFN community and Oxfam magasin du monde.
Maybe a good discussion for OFN meeting in Barcelona?
Let give your impression about the “independence” value of OFN.
Thank you @Theodore for this post, and great to see your energy and the concrete actions that you already took to make the OFN Belgium happen 
For the rest of the community, @Theodore did an intership with OFN UK, and is now starting to facilitate the development of a local community / instance in Belgium. We had 2 calls aready.
This is a beautiful opportunity to create some links between OFN Belgium and Oxfam! They definitely are value aligned and it would be great if they would be willing to “kickstart” the deployment of OFN Belgium, and use the platform to serve their beautiful projects
I would be careful though about two things, related to the “independance” and “inclusion” values that we ask all OFN associates to share (cf community pledge).
- If OXFAM is the “host” of OFN Belgium, would the governance of the project be open enough so that any other community can participe in the governance? As we said we don’t want more than one “OFN associate” on a give territory so it needs to be an entity that is open and democratic enough so that any new actor who want to deploy OFN there can join it.
- Also I’m afraid about the image confusion / If OFN appears as a project of OXFAM, I would be worried about the independance of the OFN Belgium and the image impact on the rest of the community.
I think I feel a bit worried about having an official OFN associate hosted by such a big machine as OXFAM. What about Oxfam being one of the co-founder of an independant non-profit cooperative, around wich you could gather other community networks like CSA networks, producer networks, etc.?
Does Oxfam want their platform (in that cas that would be more a white label platform for me) or do they want to kickstart the deployment of the OFN so that they can use it, but also others, and co-govern it with the others?
Also we discussed a bit about the deployment of the OFN Belgium instance. It’s great when you start a local instance to have a local platform asap, so that some groups can strat using it, and you have local stories to tell. Do you have some local expertise that could help you on that? Or some budget to get support from the community? Could OXFAM for instance support the project with that “small investment” as a first step? @Kirsten / @tschumilas can you remind us what was the budget to setup and support OFN Canada in deployment an upgrade? That would help @Theodore organize operations I guess…
@tschumilas @Kirsten @NickWeir @enricostn @CynthiaReynolds would be great to have your views on that 
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Hi and welcome @Theodore. I can share my experience with OFN-CAN with you because its a little bit similar. OFN CAN was started y the Laurier (University) Centre for Sustainable Food Systems. I was working with them as a post-doctoral researcher and so proposed their sponsorship for launching OFN-CAN. This was prior to the community pledge that @MyriamBoure mentioned above, so the Centre signed an agreement with the Open Food Foundation (the Australian charity that originated OFN). Basically it was the same as the pledge, but it also made it clear that should should the centre decide to not continue sponsorship, that the new entity would have to be a not-for-profit or cooperative entity. We were also concerned about muddled branding. So it was only a year or so, and a group of us registered OFN-CAN as its own not-for-profit. So the Centre continues as a sponsor, now there are other funders too, and the branding is very clear. So in my view it is better if OFN is its own organization, but I know how hard that is. It takes a lot of resources and energy to start an organization to maintain it. It would be easier and cheaper for OFN-CAN to be a project of another organization - and frankly, we still might end up there - but if this is the case, then there needs to be a separate ‘advisory’ or something for OFN, and separate branding. In other words, OFN needs sovereignty - to set its pricing, to ensure particular users benefit, to ensure openness …
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Hi @Theodore - sounds exciting. I am wondering if the model that we have with the Village Centres project for setting up OFN Germany might be the most applicable to you at the moment. I will send you the MoU we have with them. Basically they have supported the establishment of OFN Germany so that they can use it and also have it available for others to use. The MoU covers the transition to an independent, democratic non-profit when that group exists and is ready to take it on. I think a model like this could enable Oxfam to take on this (extremely helpful and awesome) auspice role, w a provision to handover to another group when the time arrives.
Given the barrier that getting the right organisation in place has presented to many instances, having an existing and reputable non-profit keen to take this role is great I reckon.
Re. ‘their’ instance or public one - the Village Centres project is planning to access OFN Germany only via embedded shops in their own websites.
NB. Having just scanned through this, I think a revised version for this case would be made somehow with the global community rather than Open Food Foundation
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Tanks for your contributing!
I have two News:
- General director of Oxfam magasin du monde would like to meet the community in Barcelone to build the relationship between OFN and Oxfam mdm.
- Oxfam magasin du monde is ready to invest 2-3000 euros to develop the platform for Belgium or Benelux.
How could we have a meeting during Barcelone week?
Great news @Theodore - just pinging some people who will be in Barcelona to make sure they see this - @MyriamBoure @NickWeir @enricostn @sauloperez @danielle
Hi @Theodore yes it would be great to see you and meet your Oxfam colleague in Barcelona. I want to check with @sauloperez and @MyriamBoure to see which day would be best for the Oxfam meeting. Is there a particular day during the period 5-11 July which would be good for your Oxfam colleague? We have a lot to fit in to the week and I know that Pau is planning some trips out so if you can suggest a few possible dates, we will try to fit in around one of them.
Thanks very much for setting this up
Yes, great news @Theodore! I would suggest more between 8th and 11th as the first days there will be more devs and maybe then more tech stuffs, inceptions, etc. Hugo leaves on the 8th, Luis on the 6th or 7th. But I guess we can arrange the agenda anyway, we can have parallele dev / other stuff sessions. @sauloperez do you have confirmation about the day we are in Barcelona with Katuma community? Probably we can invite the director of Oxfam to a couple of days, he can spend an evening/night with us at the house I guess (if he wants to :)) and we can have a 1/2 session with him?
The first good news is that you might be able to fund the deployment of a Belgium instance so that you an start piloting with first users
hey some news.
I cocreat with oxfam workers a document of OFN description and an other document of the link project OFN - Oxfam magasin du monde.
This week, I start to work with the first Oxfam team to see if they are agree to work with us with the B Planet foundation (10 000 euros).
Next step will be a meeting with several contact that would like to devellop the community in Belgium.
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I have several questions:
- Have we got an analyse of the orders?
- I hope to find an average of order during one year in serveral countries ?
- a devellopement curve from each countries?
- severals question to build a Business plan
Thanks
Hi @Theodore
There are some numbers getting organised at the moment that should be able to help you. I have sent you the links. If anyone else needs them let me know - just all very in flux at the moment so not ready to have completely public
Cheers
Kirsten