Tag Archives: Community Development

What do you think about the OpenFarm Guide Creation Flow?

OpenFarm Blog,

Hi OpenFarm Backers!

We’ve been hard at work adding features, data, and style to OpenFarm over the last month. Have you seen the new homepage?! Now, we could use your input for the next step in our progress: Guide Creation.

Growing Guides are the primary piece of content on OpenFarm, and so the way that someone creates a Guide needs to be well thought out. We’re aiming for a process that is:

  • Fun,
  • Easy,
  • Allows for author creativity, and
  • Guides the author to produce high quality, consistently formatted content.

Click here to see the mockups and share your input!

A sneak preview:

 

Our Code of Conduct

OpenFarm Blog,

OpenFarm is nothing without our community. From software developers, to designers, to our administrative team, to our everyday users and content creators, every person is important in making OpenFarm a vibrant community full of diverse perspectives and knowledge. We want to ensure that OpenFarm is a safe space for everyone to have fun learning and sharing with others. To do so, we have developed a Code of Conduct to get all of our community members on the same page regarding what is acceptable behavior within our community.

See our Code here: https://openfarm.cc/pages/code_of_conduct

We urge other community based projects to adopt a code as well, and you are more than happy to borrow language from ours, just as we did from other projects. Cheers to healthy, safe communities!

Help us out with a Survey!

OpenFarm Blog

Hi OpenFarm Backers,

Our team has expanded to include a few entrepreneurship students who are working with us to develop the best service for the most people. To better understand our community, we have created a preliminary survey and would greatly appreciate your participation!

Click Here to Take the Survey

An update about T-shirts: I just got back home from my travels abroad and found that some of the t-shirts we’re returned to me because of inadequate postage. I’ll fix the issue and get them out again this week, apologies for the delay!

Join the OpenFarm Discussion on Loomio

OpenFarm Blog

As the OpenFarm project and community continue to grow, it is important for us to provide open tools to promote quality discussion and feedback about how best to move OpenFarm forward.

We’re pleased to now be using the Loomio platform for open discussions and consensus voting on proposals. Check out our community group (and sub-groups), sign up, and join the discussion! We welcome everyone’s input and value our community’s diversity greatly.

Some highlights so far:

Note: Technical issues and discussion related to OpenFarm software are still discussed on GitHub.

Subscribe to the OpenFarm Email Newsletter!

OpenFarm Blog,

Hello OpenFarm Backers!

As we wrap up this campaign and our community continues to grow, it is important for us to maintain communication in an efficient way. We will still send out updates regarding the digital badges and our project champion via Kickstarter, but eventually we will phase into using our non-kickstarter based email newsletter service for other announcements.

If you are interested in receiving updates about our development, please subscribe to our non-kickstarter based email newsletter service.

Onward!

And They’re Off!

OpenFarm Blog,

Hi OpenFarm Backers,

The rewards have been sent! All of the T-shirts, stickers, and thank-you notes are now in the mail for those of you that filled out the survey with your postal address. What a sight it was to see me with a huge box of packaged t-shirts, shipping labels, and stamps coming out my ears! I was so caught up in it at the post office I forgot to snap a photo! :/

I anticipate the rewards for United States residents to arrive within the week or early next. I’m not sure how long International letters take to ship, maybe two weeks at the most? The only thing I am hesitant about is the t-shirts going through customs for international backers. Let’s hope they make it through no problem!

For the next three weeks I will be traveling in Europe for two work conferences and to visit one of the OpenFarm software developers at his off-grid farm in Spain!Because of this, I will not be able to ship out anything more until after I get back on October 18th. For the folks who have not yet filled out their survey, and those who’s packages and letters that might get sent back to me for one reason or the other, this is a heads up regarding the delayed reward delivery! Thank you for your support and being patient!

Thank you again for your support in this project! Let me know if you have any questions either here on Kickstarter or directly at rory@openfarm.cc.

Onward!

T-Shirts Have Arrived!

OpenFarm Blog,

Hello OpenFarm Backers!

The T-shirts have arrived and they look and feel great! I’m going to get everything (stickers, t-shirts, and thank-you notes) in the mail on Monday. Digital badges are still a ways off from being implemented but the volunteer team is still moving forward quite nicely! An updated search results interface and growing guides creation pages have been of higher priority.

There are still about 30 of you who pledged to receive a reward via snail mail who have not yet answered our survey for your postal address. Please login to Kickstarter and do this by Sunday evening or you will not get your reward on time!

Have any ideas for OpenFarm or want to get involved? Join the discussion!

Stickers are in, Shirts are Ordered!

OpenFarm Blog,

Hi OpenFarm backers,

The stickers are in and I can’t wait to see them out in the world on your laptops, bumpers, and water bottles! I placed the order for the t-shirts on Friday and hoping they will be ready by the end of the month.

Project Updates

  • We have setup a new discussion forum and voting platform with Loom.io so that all of you and our development team can share ideas, discuss features, provide feedback, and vote on how best to move OpenFarm forward! Join the discussion here. Note: there is not much there right now as we just set this up yesterday!
  • After a brief service outage, the OpenFarm site now supports and forces SSL connections (https) so that all information is securely transmitted between our servers and your computer.

Onward!

1000+ Backers!

OpenFarm Blog

I’m astounded each day by the support you all have given; we now have over 1,000 backers – Thank you!

As the software and design teams continue to move forward, we are presented with new and interesting challenges:

  • How might we establish feedback mechanisms to gain insight from the users and backers of OpenFarm?
  • How might we partner with existing organizations to more quickly create quality Growing Guides?
  • What needs to happen for OpenFarm to be internationally relevant and translated into many languages?

If you have an comments, ideas, or questions, please email me directly at rory@openfarm.cc.

Thank you all, let’s keep spreading the word and moving forward!