I have been talking to Nick Weir (OFN UK) about setting up an instance of OFN in Israel. I would now like to take OFN to a new level. This would enable:
· Food and drink shoppers and buyers to have more detail about the farming, environmental, social and financial practices of the farmers and growers
· Producers to better understand the needs of the shoppers and buyers.
I have started to define how we could define, standardize, collect and validate the necessary data. Please see my website here
https://miguelmna.wixsite.com/aggregateopenfood
I am now looking for 1 or 2 people in the OFN global community who would be interested to explore this idea with me and help take it to the next stage. Nick suggested that I post a topic here to start a conversation with the OFN community. Please let me know if you would like to discuss this more and clear up the mechanisms that would enable a real, concrete and strong relationship between producers and consumers.
Thanks.
Miguel
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relationships between producers and consumers - lets code ui! love to help
Working on 2018 roadmap we’ve been talking about this, it’s embedded in the “network” part of OFN.
I hope we’ll be able to start working on it ASAP.
Thanks for the inputs!
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Enrico… I invited you to link me in linkedin so you can see my working experience…
Coopdevs and http://katuma.org look great…¡ congratulation.
…and you speak spanish… that is the best…
Ecocity… Also look good ( even I am not sure how are you addressing AI (artificial intelligence) in OFN, but I would love to understand it).
So?? How do we start??
I would love to set up a weekly meeting…We should set up targets… and we define a working methodology…
I am Chilean but since 3 years I live in Israel… One hour ahead of Barcelona and nine hours ahead of Denver ( Ecocity there???).
In general I could meet Saturday nights, Sunday to wednesday after 19 hrs Israel time and friday mornings…
Could you ???
please send me an email to miguelnovik@doragroup.net so we can agree without polluting this forum …
After we advance on these issues and we agree in some needed mechanisms we come back to this forum.
In case you use it …my whats up is +972584881158
best regards,
Miguel
very interesting @miguelnovik - I won’t slow you down by getting involved but definitely interested and supportive. Please post back in here regularly to keep us updated
Thanks for motivating me … Anyway, I had not given up … 
I will try to merge my idea with Data Food Consortium.
Hi Miguel - I’m sorry for taking so long to respond to this. I see the issues you raise here - ie: getting shoppers/eaters more detail about env, social, economic, … relations behaind their food is super important. (Indeed, sometimes I feel that recently we’ve backed away from this a bit at OFN. I know we all really care about this - but lately our attention on functionality of the platform may have kept us so busy that we have forgotten the fundamentals of why we are all doing this.
I think the issue of defining and standarizing the data we want to collect and convey to eaters is a HUGE task. I’d like to help with this if I can. Before I started working with OFN, I worked extensively with organic, sustainability and justice issues with farming and food. My advice is to keep this super simple to start. (For example, in CAnada it took us 10 years to develop consensus among producers & processors on what farming practices we would consider ‘organic’. And still we are debating. And this did not include any reference to social issues as you describe.) In a global context, ‘best’ practices are very different - the practice of agroecology is specifically about context . For OFN we need to raise ourselves out of the very small details and come up with ‘higher level’ principles/practices I think. But - I suspect this isn’t exactly what you want. But maybe we can find a way, for example, to ask our producers 5 questions, and to develop a scoring system based on this. LOTS will be left out - but this is room to grow in the future. And - I want to just mention the IFOAM (International Foundation of Organic Movements) principles, and their work on PGS - which could give us some inspiration.
Theresa:
Thanks for answering.
I think that I understand the challenges and difficulties that you pose, but would you be willing to participate in 3 or 4 meetings?
You say:
…¨But maybe we can find a way, for example, to ask our producers 5 questions, and to develop a scoring system based on this.¨…
Great…
And the questions we could figure out (each one in his own country) :
1.- Can we find producers that would be willing to open their knowledge about the way they produce and the way they measure the issues ¨ that customers care¨?
2.- Can we find customers that would allow producers to use their purchase information (the information of what they are choosing to buy) (which is available in OFN and other local sustainable food ecosystems or platforms). ?
3.- Could this ¨Data Food System¨ allow us (everybody) to appreciate easily the correlation between the scoring (of the issues that producers are measuring) and the Sale increasings??? (in other words can we establish a continuous learning process about what do we care (what do we decide to eat and how do we obtain the food from producers to our homes). ??
4.- Can we measure the benefit that producers will obtain by having more information to plan production?
5.- Can we measure the benefits that customers will obtain by choosing to buy to producers who are not spending efforts to sell (avoiding marketing expenses) and the fact that customers will get ¨better products ¨ at a ¨lower or same price¨ ?
…Maybe we can find better questions… but if we agree that we can achieve a Data Food System that is needed, that it have value to the end customers, producers and distribution system will use it, they will line up with it…
(If we can agree about it in 3 or 4 countries, for sure we will find the way to build it)
…let us meet to find the right questions … and the way we will investigate them in each country…
Hi @miguelnovik and thank you for this thread and your will to make food data more transparent and fluid I definitely share that vision and your views. But my deep inner conviction is that to be able to move forward on that, you need first to put around the table people who share the same vision and are ok to work together on this, so that’s why I started the Data Food Consortium project 2 years ago. It took me one year to just align the major local food platforms in France to cooperate together on that. And we’ve been meeting 2h every other week since a year now. We are at a point where we are about to publish a new version of the semantic business model, it means that it took us one year to agree on one common description of “what we are doing and how we do it”. Facilitation is the key factor of success in here for me, much more than the technical dimension, which has actually already changed quite a few times during that process.
i’m happy to share with you on a hangout what we’ve done in DFC and explain you where we are at and the perspectives that opens up to us now. And also learn more about what you want to achieve and how you envision it. I could Tuesday next week for instance, let me know!
@miguelnovik You might find it interesting to check out ‘Participatory Guarantee Schemes (PGS)’. Successfully finding the kind of standards you speak of is less about ‘what you define’ and more about ‘how you go about the process of defining’. PGS’s out there might offer you methodological insight.
Yes, thanks a lot.
Also @tschumilas mentioned it last year.
That is the focus:
Clear standards and participation.
Any way we need to move to an even more simple scenario, Less words and more numbers and clear measurement methods. ¨Average customers¨ have to understand the benefits based on concrete data, (measurable and comparable).
We are working on it, I will let you know, and share, any concrete achievement. (By the way, we aim to provide our own virtual community money (not cryptocurrency neither a new ICO,), to encourage this whole ¨participatory participation¨).
Blessings,
Miguel
fyi - I think there is one very simple step (I think it would be simple anyway) that would help with communicating standards to the end buyer - see: Ensure WYSIWYG functionality for all user text imputs
I know you are more interested in standards for participation on OFN - but at least in the short term, the ability to clearly communicate what various properties (standards) producers are using mean - would be a useful step.
I would like to update the status of this project.
Since October 2018 we are 3 people in Israel looking for the best way to implement these ideas. (My two parters are PHD from Telaviv University).
Since May this year, four people connected to the ¨Peer to Peer¨ movement, (one from Italy, 2 from South Africa and me) started working one hour a week to define a ¨Global Prosumer Collaboration Agreement¨.
Through these meetings we agreed that ¨to share sell information¨ is a must if we really want to enable ¨collaboration that brings proved ecosystem benefits¨.
In Israel, after many meetings that we focussed on the indicators, (defining the right indicators, measurement method and credibilities mechanisms), my partners in Israel also agreed to focus on finding the farmers and organizations that are willing to share data to enable collaboration.
It´s been hard. We know that this is a new paradigm, but we visualize the benefits for the whole ecosystem.
We hope more people will understand the need to rip out from the self destructive competitive game and will help to find the actors (farmers ) that are willing to understand that we need a ¨total open transparence ¨ to create new and better food systems around the world.
You are welcome to clarify this proposal.
Hi @miguelnovik it is great to hear that you are progressing with your plans. I agree that transparency is very important in our food systems and in the way we improve our food systems.
As you know from the conversation above there is also a lot of thought and conversation in the OFN community about how we address these issues. We would very much like you to be part of these conversations. Maybe you would like to be closely involved in how OFN develops or maybe we just keep in touch as we work on parallel paths. However until you are closely involved in the OFN planning process I would like your website to link to OFN rather than appear as if it is part of OFN.
I would like to arrange a time for a conversation about this so that we can find a way to support the good work that we are all doing. Please can you suggest a few times that would work for you and I will set up the call.
Thanks and very best wishes 
Great. Thanks
Let us talk by phone and we schedule the meeting.
Blessings
Miguel
Hey @miguelnovik !
Yes, as Nick said you reflexions are interesting, and I actually too work closely in France with Open Food Facts that you probably know that is all about open data on everything possible connected to products, prices, sales, etc. For now it’s mainly on products… but as Nick said, even if we agree this discussion is important, in OFn as a community we are building commons rules about projects that are part of the OFN and branded as such, and we have a consent base agreement process for new “affiliates”, following a community pledge we have written together and are updating at the moment. So let’s discuss to understand better what you do so that we can guide you better on the relationship you can build with the OFN community on that project !
Hi @myriamboure
I really understand that you need to take care of OFN brand.
I do not see any problem with that. I will read the community pledge, but if it doesn’t put limits on our work, the OFN “umbrella” could be “a plus”.
It is very, very hard to “change paradigms”. We need gather strengths.
This Friday from 2 to 5 I could join you.
In general from Sunday to Thursday after 7 afternoon.(France"s time).
Looking forward to working with you.
Blessings
Miguel
