USA Planning

International Community
21

Just wanted to chime in that we’re on board with this.

We’ll have an initial instance set up next week sometime. We’ll be deploying it on AWS lightsail for now, which means that it won’t take a great deal of traffic, but it will certainly be robust enough to demo, etc.

I’ll be glad also to give admin rights to anyone within the OFN community who wants to make sure it’s setup correctly. I’ll probably rely on @NickWeir or @Kirsten or anyone else they suggest to tell me how to proceed here.

And I’m open for any other suggestions you may want too chime in with.

Thanks.

22

Great thanks @jveilleux I am pinging @pmackay who did our UK server set up in case he has any advice - thanks Paul

23

Sustainable Community Development Hub is a Colorado not for profit technology organization that I am part of. We have the support of a small private data center in Atlanta, where we hope to run an instance which could be maintained by OFN devops teams. thanks all for the progress!

1 Like
24

Hi @ecocity - it is great to have you involved. It would be good to hear from you about how you are linked to OFN and how your plans link with Jim’s above.

25

Hi Nick, thanks!

I am a full stack web developer, working for and directing a new non-profit
in Denver, (scdhub.org) using Wordpress, ionic, django & python natural
language toolkit right now, to develop a series of free educational tools
that support community goals supporting the most vulnerable first.

We see the OFN service as very important in many areas of the US struggling
to have more foundation for the rural organic and natural small to mid
sized emergent service economy, and value added products to come from farms.

I like the idea of making use of the views that are in production on OFN
sites as a starting point and refactoring the views into a microservices
architecture based system (read only services, react & mongoDb) that would
not require much overhead to run and would be easy for developers and new
groups to get their own hub software running.

i like the idea of starting off simple services to new hubs based on this
project as a starting point:

sorry if I don’t love Ruby :stuck_out_tongue:

Greg

26

@NickWeir Thanks so much for your contributions.
One issue is that the OFN project is hard to shoehorn into US nonprofit law. Unless there is a major education or charity component to the project, the US government doesn’t usually grant 501©3 status. And the nonprofit sector doesn’t really seem to understand nonprofit tech efforts. Fitting into the mission of a larger nonprofit is a really good angle though it has issues in that the organization’s decisions can be overruled by a change in politics at the parent institution.

@ecocity Hi Greg! It is really exciting to see you in the conversation. I’m not sure I understand everything in your last comment (refactoring views into a microservice architecture?). But a lighter system that still lets farmers sell through multiple markets would be great! The OFN upgrade may make more Ruby/Spree modules available, but until we have something functioning and generating revenue, interest, clients and grants, the US is a bit of a drain on the broader US.

Supporting vulnerable farmers (and eaters) is SUCH an important part of bringing OFN (or a product with similar capabilities) to the US. There are so many ways for very early stage farmers to fall through the cracks and struggle to move product. This needs to be solved in SO many parts of the country. I think small/medium towns are our ideal locale to build marketshare. Athens.LocallyGrown.net is a great market that grew quickly, I think partly because word of mouth travels better in smaller towns.

Sorry all that I missed the call yesterday. I was travelling home from… Colorado! Too bad I didn’t see any ecocity messages before then! We could have met up!

cc @jveilleux @MikeiLL

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27

Hi Eric

We designed the scd hub non profit ( only incorporated this year, no 501c3
yet) so that we could help house tech projects. The model would be that
SCDHub would help train tech maintainers and work to keep costs minimized
for software users that
run hubs as their own social enterprise. So I do t see a conflict in for
us to be a provided we have some more ‘tech experts’ on our board so I will
bring this up and try share how we wish to proceed.

By microservises I really mean to separate the app that you use from the
server that computes and stores info, and move those to third free/ low
cost party services like mlab, cloudfront, Redislabs, GitHub and bitbucket
static resource hosting, and AWS for 3 year pay in advance small micro
servers a testing instance of spree that we could work on rebuilding from.

This part dream ( of low cost operation) and part realty - I have done
things like this, just budgeting my time to see what a minimum viable
product would be to as you say “a lighter system that still lets farmers
sell through multiple markets”.

Let’s use github!
G

28

@ecocity. Are you suggesting making a new, simple-as-possible application that would basically take the “pages” (front end) code (views) from specific OFN features, applied to a SPREE back end designed to work with specific microservices like AWS? If so where would React come into play? Doesn’t React run in the front end?

Are you thinking of an application that supports multiple hubs? Or just a single hub with various producers?

I’d be interested to see what the MVP features you are envisioning would be. I do think that the social network of OFN, and not the software is–and should be–the strength of the project. So having different approaches within the OFN community running in parallel could make sense.

@jveilleux and @eric it was a good discussion. It looks like we are at least one hurdle away from an OFN codebase that supports STRIPE with configuration as to what money goes where and when.

That doesn’t sound like a terribly large challenge, but of course these things are always more complicated than one might hope.

29

Thanks @mikeill I may have some terminology wrong - by mixroservices I
meant offloading as much as possible
To 3rd party services like stripe, PayPal, mailchimp, and mlab, have no
more spree backend, and optimize the low footprint of the application so it
scales well and remains low cost.

I will play with the different interaction screens that are currently
customized
for OFN , that is the part I would like to use react for but I have more
experience with angular, whatever is easier. I plan to use nightwatch for
unit testing and Travis ci simce it’s free as well.

Thanks
Greg

30

There are great descriptions of the configuration processes in the ‘super admin’ category see: https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/c/using-ofn/super-admin

31

Thanks @ecocity @eric @MikeiLL for your thoughts on how Greg can help with the introduction of OFN to the USA. There are lots of people around the world looking at linking up with OFN in similar ways.
In the meantime, I believe that it would be very helpful to have an instance up and running of OFN as it currently exists, so that you all can play with it and producers and hubs of various kinds can actually use it to boost grass-roots, local food economies. This will give you a much better feeling of what it OFN is capable of and how much additional development it might need to fit the needs of US users.
So this post is to encourage @jveilleux to carry on with his plans described above. Let us know if we can help with this.
Looking forward to seeing OFN become part of all your plans for a better food system for the USA :grinning:

2 Likes
32

Hi all- I have something working, but running out of time working here, this is the noSql schema fyi, and its working! - working from this setup – >> https://github.com/LocalFoodSupply/ionic-firebase-shopping-cart
{
“category” : {
“cat01” : “Lettuce Mixes”,
“cat02” : “Local Honey”,
“cat03” : “Natural Soap”
},
“featured” : {
“item1” : “slide_1”,
“item2” : “slide_2”
},
“hubs” : {
“item1” : {
“available” : true,
“name” : “cat01”,
“description” : “item1 description”,
“image” : “chicken_maharaja”,
“address” : “New Chicken Maharaja”,
“contact_person” : 130,
“contact_email” : 100,
“website” : 100,
“start_date” : “9/22/2016”
}
},
“menu” : {
“item1” : {
“available” : true,
“category” : “cat01”,
“description” : “item1 description”,
“image” : “lettucemix”,
“name” : “Organic Lettuce Mix”,
“price” : 130,
“stock” : 100,
“producer” : “2”
},
“item2” : {
“available” : true,
“category” : “cat01”,
“description” : “item2 description”,
“image” : “big_spicy_chicken_wrap”,
“name” : “Organic Basil”,
“price” : 120,
“stock” : 100,
“producer” : “2”
},
“item3” : {
“available” : true,
“category” : “cat02”,
“description” : “item3 description”,
“image” : “thumsup”,
“name” : “Organic Garlic”,
“price” : 40,
“stock” : 100,
“producer” : “2”
},
“item4” : {
“available” : true,
“category” : “cat02”,
“description” : “Organic Onions”,
“image” : “mccafe_ice_coffee”,
“name” : “Ice Coffee”,
“price” : 140,
“stock” : 100,
“producer” : “2”
},
“item5” : {
“available” : true,
“category” : “cat01”,
“description” : “From local heirloom chickens”,
“image” : “mc_chicken”,
“name” : “Fresh ORganic Eggs”,
“price” : 190,
“stock” : 100,
“producer” : “2”
},
“item6” : {
“available” : true,
“category” : “cat02”,
“description” : “item6 description”,
“image” : “Honey”,
“name” : “Fresh Local Honey”,
“price” : 70,
“stock” : 100,
“producer” : “2”
},
“item8” : {
“available” : true,
“category” : “cat01”,
“description” : “item8 description”,
“image” : “salad_wrap”,
“name” : “Organic Arugula”,
“price” : 150,
“stock” : 100,
“producer” : “2”
}
},
“producer” : {
“id” : 2,
“available” : true,
“hub” : “1”,
“offering_description” : “regular high quality lettuce mix produce, and contect person for local seed bank initiative”,
“image” : “farmer_icon.jpg”,
“name” : “Lara Maestro”,
“email” : "lara@scdhub.org",
“phone” : “3035551212”,
“sms” : “y”,
“phone_type” : “ios”,
“farm_id” : 2,
“price” : 150
},
“farm” : {
“id” : 2,
“available” : true,
“hub” : “1”,
“description” : “grown at elevation, naturally farmed”,
“image” : “farmer_icon.jpg”,
“farm_name” : “Magnolia Organic Yards”,
“farm_contact” : “Lara Maestro”,
“farm_webpage” : “”,
“farm_” : “”,
“email” : "lara@scdhub.org",
“phone” : “3035551212”,
“sms” : “y”,
“phone_type” : “ios”,
“farm_name” : “Magnolia Organic Yards”,
“designation” : “uncerfified organic”
}
}

33

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Screen Shot 2017-07-23 at 10.39.32 PM.png2094×1426 650 KB
just wanted to show you what i have working here as a prototype. I will share it shortly, after some cleanup, and management ui update. the code is at https://github.com/LocalFoodSupply/ionic-firebase-shopping-cart/

34

@NickWeir. My IT manager just told me that the IP address will be 52.3.171.208. He says he’s on the finishing touches to have it configured.

Remember that we’re newbies so we may have something incorrectly done, but just let me know if so.

I’ll log in myself - I’m assuming we’ll use the default UN and PW, so no need to send those to you unless you want something changed.

Jim

35

@jveilleux this is very good news - thank you. I will ask @Kirsten to link this to one of her dormant OFN domains and to check that your set up looks good. Great to see OFN USA coming together :grinning:

36

Hey @NickWeir and @kirsten.

It’s up and I logged in with no problem. http://52.3.171.208:3000/

Map opens to Australia. I think we had the programmer fix that for our instance, but maybe you know how to get that to work as you want.

Let me know what else we can do to do help.

Thanks.

Jim

37

Hi Greg.

I’m not a techie, so you’ve got me lost here with what you are doing. It might be helpful if you can explain the benefit for a farmer or a hub or other seller.

But we do have a US instance set up and if you’re not going to interfere with what @NickWeir and @Kirsten want to do with the site, I’ve got no issue with you using the set up.

There’s a small group of people who in the US who are trying to advance the local food market with OFN. @tschumilas (she’s in Canada, but close enough, @hannahsemler, @eric, @woakes070048 and some others I haven’t chatted with.

I looked your website. Fascinating stuff, but how does OFN fit into your mission?

If you want to chat, I’m jveilleux on skype and 704-996-5527 the old fashioned way.

PS: I used to have an office in Denver. Jealous.

38

thank you jvelilleux. Thank you for checking out what SCD Hub is up to, OFN really fits into ‘tools and tech trainings’ that SCD Hub does. I am taking a whack at making a ‘lite version’ which can ultimately interoperate with the standard OFN’s postgres database would be nice, so I"m just reading though the official documentation and seeing how I can write a simpler codebase that meets all of the feature requirements, while keeping the code easy to work on and deploy, ( ie. inexpensive for small community orgs.)… And its a good exercise for me in ionic2/angular4, which my main work is in now…

thanks for all you do OFN heroes!

1 Like
39

Congratulations on getting a US instance up and running!

Having an instance to play on and try out will make such a difference for those trying to get a better understanding of OFN :slight_smile:

@jveilleux If you add me as an admin, I can help out with configuration and getting the US branding (logo and images) done. BTW I am based in Norway, but I am Canadian and my mother is in Florida :wink:

ping @malikyakini The OFN US website is coming together. Let me know if you would like to talk about how your work in Detroit could use it.

40

Big thanks to @jveilleux for setting up the instance and @CynthiaReynolds for offering to help with config. @kirsten offered one of her dormant OFN domain names so it would be great if we can link to that and then get OFN USA listed and linked on the global site.

I guess we also need a message on the ‘about’ page with some background on where we are up to with OFN USA and a contact for someone who can coordinate new potential users. Let me know if it would help to talk it through. I am away a lot this week but checking in occasionally. Thanks all :slight_smile: