Thank you @MyriamBoure for taking the time to show Franz-Josef and I around the OFN Network. I am very excited about the prospects of an OFN for Germany and am keen to support its’ growth in whatever way I can. We run a small CSA on the eastern borders of Germany and have out of necessity linked up to neighbouring farmers and producers for mutual support and the potential to buy in for the lean season. Our members are keen to acquire more than ‘just’ vegetables. There is the potential to offer milk, meat, grain, handcrafted cheeses, honey, eggs, Walnut and Linseed oils to start off with. I would like to test run a demo with these products on offer and see how it is taken up. I am convinced that ‘Mundpropaganda’ (word-of-mouth) will breathe life into it. I look forward to dialoguing this further…
Awesome @Odi! @fj.arnuga please feel free to tell also a bit how you think it could be possible to do a quick set up on a server just to be able to show a German version of it and for Odi to make some first pilote project 
On Transifex it’s only translated up to 8% I think, so i one of you want to move forward on the Translation that can also be a first step alongside setting up the first local instance 
Ping @maikel as I think you will be happy to learn that OFN might start soon in Germany and @Kirsten as it can fuel your further discussion with @janina (I know you are on maternity leave but I’m sure you’ll be happy to see that when you are back!)
Herzlich willkommen @Odi.
Great to see you being keen to contribute. If you wanted to translate the OFN into German, you can start at: Localisation, OFN in your language
The next step is to find a hosting provider. I don’t know if you have a friend who could offer a VPS (virtual private server) or if you can find funding for it. It starts at 8 EUR per month.
Thanks @maikel,
what prerequisites would the hosting provider need to have? What kind of space volume does the OFN software take up? I will try to chip away at some translation here and there.
Viele Grüße vom Heckenhof,
Odi
The hosting provider question may be one for @fj.arnuga?
There is an overview of currently working servers at https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/ofn-install/wiki/Servers-and-domains. It needs at least 2GB memory (RAM). The other requirements are usually met. The Canada server uses 6.3GB hard disk in total. The rest is just a matter of speed and can be upgraded later.
@Odi @fj.arnuga @maikel you’ll find some useful information here also: What infrastructure do I need to run an OFN instance and what are the estimated associated costs?
Hello again Just received the following message from @fj.arnuga - "Sorry. I really have to uncomit from OFN Germany for now. As much as I cherish the cause, I simply do not have the bandwidth. We are establishing the ecovillage in Norway. All focus goes into that. OFN Norway might surely become a pillar there. I´ll be happy to support you with particular requests, e.g. introducing you to a contact from my network. Let me forward you the sources I dug up for finding a hosting provider. I cannot invest time on analysing it right now: http://programmingzen.com/the-best-ruby-on-rails-hosting-services/
OFN Norway is using: Digital Ocean.
@CynthiaReynolds can give you feedack if they are delivering well."
I could use some support on the hosting question if anyone can pursue fj’s tip (or another) so we can get a pilot site up and running that would be great. I have four producers ready to go and our members are very keen to try it out.
@maikel I can finally put time into translation from this weekend. Its looking good though so far!
Love and greetings from the briefly frozen east,
Odi
@fj.arnuga has been in touch with me about the eco village in Norway
and yes, we use Digital Ocean, as far as I know we have not had any issues, but maybe @sigmundpetersen could shed more light on the subject as he is our tech guy here in Scandinavia
great to hear that you have producers ready to go… Best of luck!
Hi Odi, I did a little research about hosting providers in Germany. I looked for German providers that use eco-friendly energy.
- https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_vserver/cx20 8,21 € per month
- https://www.strato.de/server/linux-vserver/ 8 € per month
- http://teuto.net/de/produkte/v-server.html 49,90 € per month (no idea why they are so expensive, but they are a smaller company unlike the other two)
Any of the above would be a good choice.
With just a little bit of good timing, the village centres team have re-emerged - @rustil will be taking over from @janina to get things moving over the next few months.
I think the Village Centres Project (VCP) has similar scale ambitions to the potential French client, so, it might be worth considering the analysis and estimates done for the ‘desired’ infrastructure for a National instance carrying a large load - Big user Infrastructure Estimate
I don’t think is necessary to take all this into account right now, just for getting something set up for you to pilot. But it might be easier to choose hosting provider now that easily handles these more complex infrastructure set-ups for scaling up, rather than needing to move later. @maikel @MyriamBoure do you have any thoughts on that? (Myriam - I think it was a Simon likely handling this from HappyDev but I can’t find - could you ping whoever is likely handling this for France to get their opinion?)
Odi - Janina and Lennart are just getting their thoughts together, but I’ll look into organising an intro meeting / discussion shortly. Not sure if you are anywhere near each other geographically (they’re in Cologne / Aachen)
Regarding hosting and scaling, the first two options I posted are two big players in hosting with international business. Scaling should be no problem.
Hi @Odi
maybe this helps https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/compare/master...orangeman:master (just some bits of german translation)
Some time ago I ran a german OFN instance to play around… talked to lots(!) of farmers but no one seemed to be interested. If you need help setting up an instance I’d be happy to help…
Regarding hosting requirements I used a 12€/month server. OFN is a bit heavy weight and resource hungry but for a few farms and a few hundred users I’d guess that to be more than sufficient. To serve all of germanies food supplies we’d want a decentralized transnational network of many independent servers anyway… just 2cts
@Kirsten The precise work about how the servers will be set up to ensure the scalability will be done by Glenn Rolland (not in this forum yet) if we get the French client, I shared his profile on Slack. What we came up with until now was more general server capacities depending on how many users.
Here is a visual representation that I did, hope that helps ! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YcgrY173BTU9dWsn9TUO-c_hWZvNXEOkvb0t2yfYp8c/edit?usp=sharing
And the original calculation based on what Rohan came up with : What infrastructure do I need to run an OFN instance and what are the estimated associated costs?
Hello Germany Group!
My name is Luke, I run a small production bakery in Berlin and have been wishing for something like this for a while. I would be interested in offering a small CSA to play and experiment with the platform and connect some farms and customers. The majority of our customers are cafes and restaurants that are searching for quality local produce, ourselves included, I’d like to help connect the dots as much as possible. I just spoke to MyriamBoure about getting more involved in the project, she mentioned I say hi to @Odi. @orangeman I’d like to hear about your experiences with the farmers and lack of interest.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Hey @orangeman, sorry to take so long to reply… It would be so great to have a proper team to get OFN Germany off the ground! I can only translate when I have a German to hand, so that side is slow. Producers are many though and I’m confident we could get a good spread together for a pilot. I can’t get very far with our English ‘ghost’ site (being all in English and not viably ‘active’). Do you have a mock up that could be used for here? @lukesmetham just wrote - hi! - full of enthusiasam - yes it would be great to link up and maybe get two pilots parallel…? Berlin is bound to be brimming with potential Mitmacher/innen… If we can get to the stage of having a hosting provider with a provisional OFN interface we can get the ball rolling by inserting a handful of producers, live, and just run it - one for Berlin, one for Görlitz. As I’ve said, we have over 40 members in our CSA who well up for accessing more local produce beyond our veg) and there are at least four producers ready to give it a go. Maybe we should set a date to brainstorm? Greetings from the Oberlausitz, LG Odi
Probably I’m not that good at “sales”. First I though producers are needed to get consumers interested but most farmers didn’t seem to be interested to invest time if there are no customers yet. Probably the best way to start would be a small pilot with one foodhub, a few producers and a few customers all at once 
What do you think?
I would offer 2 servers on my hosting plattform. (One testing, one live) I would take care of the costs for a least a year from now.