Thanks Myriam! We just did a kickoff with the Swedish seed team. As of now the Norwegian friends are supporting us but we will soon be more or less self-going I would say. Could you please connect me the German guys? Is there a German slack channel or what´s their communication channel? Where are they based? Thanks 
@fj.arnuga, I can connect you via email to Janina, she is not yet on this forum or Slack, and I pinged @orangeman who is also investigating around OFN in Germany, send me your email address on private message and I will introduce you 
CHeers!
Yes, Myriam, please connect me to the German guys. My email is fj.arnuga@gmail.com Thank you!
Hi Guys,
I’ve been kicking about OFN UK for the last couple of years, but have some time (and we have funding!) now to contribute to the support services for hubs and users in the UK. @sstead @danielle I’m up for helping with testing, especially new features which I’ll eventually have to explain to users. My background is in community development rather than tech or programming though, so be warned that I may ask lots of questions! You can get me on here, or email me direct at support@openfoodnetwork.org.uk.
I’ll try and join in a Dev hangout one of these days, but they keep clashing with a morning commute to other work!
1 Like
I am really enjoying working with all my OFN colleagues - here in the UK and all you lovely global people!
I helped set up Stroudco 10 years ago and am now communications manager for OFN UK which involves marketing the UK instance and trying to make our internal communications as smooth as possible - the OFN UK team hardly ever meet so almost all our communication is online
More about me here
1 Like
Hiya @mags, your offer to do some testing is a wonderful thing 
@sstead is leading the charge when it comes to testing things for releases, so I’ll have a chat with her about how we could get you involved and we’ll be in touch!
Hi everybody!
I wanted to give a short status update with regard to my engagement with OFN, having not been active for quite some time now.
In short: I will remain inactive on OFN global & OFN France for the time being. 
[I will remain a (more or less) active member of the board of OFN UK.]
But needless to say I’m still in love with OFN, full of support, good thoughts and digital smiles and hugs to all of you (especially those I know)! 
In long: I’ve been living out of my backpack for over half a year, traveling in the US and Europe, doing a lot of trainings, spending quality time with family & friends, some freelance work and quite a bit of enjoying life.
For the coming months, I’m going to focus my energies on two new work opportunities as a freelance (one as a coach to eco-village- and community-projects and the other as a consultant on creating regenerative global supply chains).
HOWEVER, if there are any (mostly) offline, off-screen work needs in Europe (speaking at events, representing OFN at conferences etc), I’m willing and interested to help out on that sphere, if you guys think that might be useful. Please get in touch via email to anselmibing {at} posteo {dot} org in that case.
ALL THE BEST and “bonne continuation” as the French love to say!
@Kirsten @serenity @lin_d_hop @NickWeir @danielle @tschumilas @Angie-US @MikeiLL @eric
3 Likes
Thanks for the update, man. Sounds like you are doing good things. It’s been great getting to know you. Things are slow here in the states, but haven’t completely died out yet. Still have our staging server going.
Thanks for the update / love / support @Selmo !! By any chance are you doing work with http://www.terra-genesis.com/ ? If not, you should look them up If you are: AWESOME.
Hi @serenity - yup that’s them! I’m so excited to start working with them! How do you know them? Hugs
I don’t know them but I read their white paper re 4 levels of regenerative agriculture last week. One of the best things I’ve read in a while! I think there is a lot in it and worthwhile thinking about how OFN fits / can align / support…
Hi @mags I’ve started putting together a bit of a testing handbook for anyone who’s interested in doing some testing for the first time - Testing Handbook
Hi everyone! I would like to introduce you to @pierredelacroix. He lives in Paris and is deeply committed to human solidarity, and share a holistic vision of systems transformation. !he is super interested by governance issues as well, and was involved in the “Nuit Debout” movement in France, which you might have heard about. Talented Ruby developer, he is, like all of us here, driven by values and wants to contribute to meaningful projects Pierre is going to work with us on some features needed in France (and elsewhere!), he has deployed his dev environment but he might have at some points some questions to ask you @maikel or @RohanM or @pmackay or… when navigating into the OFN code. @oeoeaio he will especially starts working on some quick fixes on the tax issue (I’ll ping him on Github so that you see what he is going to work on). @pierredelacroix I hope I didn’t say anything wrong, please correct me if I did! And welcome to the OFN community
1 Like
Hello guys,
I’d like to quickly introduce myself and the project we are trying to get started here in Germany
My name is Janina and I am the project initiator here in Germany for a project (which we haven’t got a cool name for yet) where we look to create a food distribution network using existing stationary village centres and the power of the OFN software. Our project has it’s current regional base around Cologne/ Aachen in the very western part of Germany and we will look to launch the pilot phase with 3 village centres in this area. We have a large wholesaler and at least one regional partner for each centre for the pilot and are also arranging the logistics.
The idea is for customers to order their food via the online platform (either from home or by using a terminal in the centre) and get it delivered to the village centre for self-pick up. The commissioning and logistics will be organised by us/ the relevant village centre. And the number of local food producers will be increased once the pilot is working well.
We are working with government grants (there’s hopefully one being signed off for us in the next weeks for a large sum of money - keep your fingers crossed) so that we can work with you guys to help us develop the OFN software for that purpose. I am very happy for the contact of @MyriamBoure who gave me a great intro to the OFN community and to be already in touch with Serenity, @Kirsten and Danielle to hopefully get started very soon.
I very much look forward to being and taking part in this community and welcome everyone who’d want to contact me with advice, questions, help or just a quick hello.
Janina
Ps. cool name suggestions (with available domains) are also very welcome!
2 Likes
Welcome Janina This sounds fantastic!
Yeahhh, welcom @janina!!! So happy to see you here
I do believe a lot in the village center project, you know I talk about it in people working with villages in France, I am deeply convinced this is the model for tomorow, hybrid places where you can buy local food, but also have a drink with other local people, go to a small concert, play, post your mails, you could even have board with people asking or offering services, etc. I dream of it
This is totally aligned with the vision and growing movement of “third places” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
If you want to discuss further I would be super happy, we have more and more related project connected to the OuiShare community as well, and I’m working more specifically on the rurality dimension on the collaborative economy with my “OuiShare” hat
I’ll be super happy to come and visit when a first prototype is on! We didn’t manage to meet in Norway, maybe we’ll do in Germany Or if you come to France let me know!
We received messages of other people in Germany willing to contribute to a local OFN so I’ll connect them with you through email.
Cool names: my German is as good as my Japanese, but I’ll brainstorm with some people about some cool names in English and share them here if we find something that worth sharing
Welcome!!! I’m @tschumilas in the early stages of launching OFN and building a community in CAnada (OFN-CAN). To learn the platform and to raise some profile, I have been setting up a system of food hubs - where there is a ‘mother hub’ that takes the lead on sourcing, aggregating, curating an inventory weekly…, and then small hubs. The ideas is that very small locations (schools, worksites, community centres) would be too small on their own to source and curate inventories - so they draw on the services of the mother hub. In a region of 300,000 (the city region I live in) there could be one mother hub and dozens of smaller hubs. We are using OFN to enable this.
So you asked about ‘cool’ names - so we call this 'Really Cool Markets" But we spell ‘cool’ as C02L - because we are transacting products that are produced by farmers and artisans who don’t use fossil-fuel derived fertilizers, and have other practices that are ‘cooling’ the planet. In english we play on ‘cool’ (as in ‘nifty’) and ‘C02L’ is in carbon dioxide. I know it likely doesn’t translate that way into German - but I just thought it was funny that you said you were looking for a ‘cool’ name 
Nice pay on words @tschumilas It’s hard actually to find names for a German project when we don’t speak German @Selmo if you are around maybe that’s a cool game for you to play with In English I like the notion of Food Connexion, food hubs are also a way to reconnect people with one another. Or I like the BeLocalist approach of the BALLE network (https://bealocalist.org/). Or in French and Quebec the growing term of “micro-markets” which is a farmer market at a micro scale http://www.distributionqm.ca/en/micro-markets-0 ok this example is not really a farmer market, but the one in france is, and I like the term, very much third food revolution style It could be somethink like The Micro-Market Fair, or MyMicroMarket, or any play on words around it. I don’t know the german translations so hard for me to see of some cool names with available domain are there @janina :-o But hope that helps!
Hi everyone,
I’m hashfyre. I work as a DevOps Engineer for Razorpay. I’m helping SreeHarsha to setup the India region servers in DigitalOcean with the ofn-install ansible repo.
You can reach out to me on @hashfyre on twitter
I have also been part of the OFN slack channel for the last couple of months, just lurking in on the banter.
2 Likes
Hi @hashfyre, nice to e-meet you, and welcome to the community! If you have any question on the infrastructure, etc. you might find answers on this forum or on the github wiki: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/wiki. Don’t hesitate to open a post if you run into difficulties you don’t manage to solve, hopefully people who have gone through that journey in the community can give you some tips!
Cheers