Last week I attended AdaCamp Montreal. AdaCamp’s website describes it as  “a two-day event dedicated to increasing women’s participation in open technology and culture, including open source software, Wikipedia and other wiki-related projects, open knowledge and education, open government and open data, open hardware and appropriate technology, library technology, creative fan culture, remix culture, translation/localization/internationalization, and more.”

Simon, from our OpenFarm team, suggested that I attend and I am really glad that he did. The unconference was enriching and helpful for me both personally and for my work with OpenFarm.

I have a bit of a geek in me, but I don’t program. So working on a team to build an online platform is comprehensible to me, but a bit out of my field. It was so great to connect and converse with people who are passionate about their work in technology, especially other women.

AdaCamp is an unconference. For any readers who don’t know what that means I will break it down a bit. Unconferences are a part of the popular education and OpenSpace Technology movements. Popular education is non hierarchical method of education and a great tool for community development. I would love to go on about Roberto Friere, and the Pedagogy of the Oppressed right now, but for the sake of staying on point, that is talking about my AdaCamp experience, I will just link some keywords for you. OpenSpace Technology was created in the eighties by organizational consultant Harrison Owen. You can read his thoughts on this format for meeting here.

Continue reading AdaCamp, listening and emergent ideas from collective spaces →

We’re proud to say that OpenFarm is officially incorporated as a California Non-Profit Public Benefit Corporation! Read on to see why we chose this legal entity.

First off, why have a legal entity at all? The answer is for several reasons:

1. To separate and protect OpenFarm’s finances from our staff’s personal finances
2. Because we offer a service and because we collect and store user information, we have liability. This means we need legal protection and insurance, of which a legal entity gives a framework for protecting our staff, our users, and the organization
3. To hire and pay our staff members and pay any taxes due on revenues or other activities
4. To enable us to partner with other organizations and individuals in a more formal way
5. To allow the organization to be perpetuated if/when the founding team members move on
6. To protect the organization from internal conflicts and interests especially related to ownership, intellectual property, and revenues
7. To formalize the organization’s purpose in a legally binding way
8. To ensure that any assets and capital the organization owns is in good trust to be used for the intended purpose of the organization

Of the legal entity options available, we considered the ones below and had the following thoughts about each. We ultimately chose the non-profit public benefit corporation based on our analysis of the options and our goals and intentions for the organization.

Continue reading OpenFarm Inc – A California Non-Profit Public Benefit Corporation →

Last week I (Kat Ying) attended a Transitions conference at Concordia University, a really active University in Montreal where I live. Some students, staff and organizations at this school are undertaking a big project to transition the food system of this campus to a local, sustainable, with student and community run and owned enterprises. It is a great dream.

So the majority of the people at this conference were people who have a hand in growing food, social enterprise, academics, activists, community organizers and farmers. They are my kind of people 😉 And they are really great people to collaborate on OpenFarm. They have a lot of knowledge and networks to share with OpenFarm; and OpenFarm could be a great platform for them to share their knowledge, work and projects with each other and more people too.

But I wonder how much can they connect to the OpenSource Ethos of OpenFarm? When I first hear about this project I had a lot of questions to ask about opensource. Basically I wanted to know, what makes this a community business, and not just-another-website. But after talking to Simon and Rory about the open source aspect of the website I began to see how we are so aligned. In fact, among gardeners, permaculturalists and community organizers, there is a lot of talk about ‘openknowledge, and openeconomies’ in our work. But I wondered, how much do the gardeners and community builders who could really use OpenFarm know and understand opensource and the creative commons as is meant for web site developing and intellectual property online? Especially since these are big tenets of the OpenFarm project? Continue reading Transitions Conference Survey →

One of the core and inspiring principles of OpenFarm is the Open aspect. I work in community development and gardening. This project has brought me into another magical realm of human creativity, the internet. Through this I have come to see how gardening, community organizing, and the internet are structurally analogous, networks. In all three the strength and the value grows when we network, and even more, when we share. In all three there is an inversion of how a capitalist system creates value. The more you hoard, the less abundant and valuable your product becomes. The more you share, the more you network, and the more you network the stronger and more abundant the products of the network become.

In Gardening and Farming we work with the soil. A couple weeks ago I attended a great conference about soil to kick of 2015 as The Year of Soil. The panel was almost as diverse as the complex substrate we were celebrating. An indigenous seed saver, a social entrepreneur, an artist, a local organic farmer, a social organizer, and a soil scientist. The social organizer called herself a soil worker. I found this a powerful metaphor. I like this thought of people and micro-organisms being functionally so similar, linking living things, structures, organizations and aggregates that together weave a complex, mysterious and wonderfully habitable space. Continue reading Network for Networks →