OpenFarm launched to the public on January 18th of this year – just about 6 months ago. In the time since launching we’ve seen some incredible progress. In this blog post we’ll look at where we’ve come and where we want to go next.
Tag Archives: OpenFarm Meta
Meet Kat and Kevin, OpenFarm’s Community Developers
OpenFarm is excited to bring aboard two Community Developers: Kat Ying and Kevin Bertolero. Kat and Kevin will focus on developing OpenFarm’s community in all respects: on the OpenFarm site, on social media platforms, and in their respective local communities and professional networks. Their goals and responsibilities are many, but here is a highlight of a few of them:
- Build relationships between OpenFarm and other organizations and individuals in the context of content creation, organizational capacity building, fundraising, and development resources
- Maintain and spark positive discussion about OpenFarm around the web
- Build feedback loops between users of OpenFarm and the organization to inform our development team of where to go next
- Host in-person content creation and site feedback meetups to strengthen local community around OpenFarm and bolster the site’s content
Continue reading Meet Kat and Kevin, OpenFarm’s Community Developers
Introducing OpenFarm – You Can Grow Anything
Introducing OpenFarm, a place where you can learn to farm or garden with community created Guides. After months of hard work from our volunteer team, we’re excited to show you what we’ve built! Today, January 18th, 2015, marks OpenFarm’s launch. Visit OpenFarm to contribute knowledge, explore, and learn!
Share your knowledge, create a Guide
Now, more than ever, OpenFarm needs you to share your knowledge by creating Growing Guides – structured stories describing how you grow a Crop based on your environmental conditions and favorite growing practices. Get started (requires an OpenFarm account)
Get Involved
OpenFarm is being developed by a group of software developers, business minds, designers, and community developers from all over the world. Want to get involved? Email rory@openfarm.cc or check out our code on GitHub.
A Special Thank You
Thank you to all of our Kickstarter backers! Without your early and continued support we would not be where we are today. Thank you for believing in our team and taking part in building a sustainable future. Cheers to the next chapter of OpenFarm!
OpenFarm Will Launch On January 18th
We’ve come a long way since beginning to work on OpenFarm just a few months ago. We’ve built a team of business minds, web developers, and community managers; wrapped up the Kickstarter campaign; redesigned the Homepage, Growing Guides, and Guide Creation Flow; began openly publishing our finances; and talked with hundreds of people through surveys, our discussion forum, and via in-person interviews.
Today we’re excited to announce that OpenFarm will launch on January 18th, 2015! We still have a lot of work to do to make sure the site is working properly and has all the features we think we need for a minimally meaningful product; but we’re on track, excited, and have our heads in the game to accomplish this. Save the date for January 18th and be sure to check back with us. We’ll be all ears for your feedback, immensely appreciative of your support, and looking forward to being a part of this budding community with you.
If you have any questions, please drop us a line in our discussion forum, email Rory, tweet at us, or help us out on GitHub. Thanks!
OpenFarm Now Lives in a Dedicated GitHub Organization
As mentioned previously, OpenFarm started out as a sub-component of the FarmBot Project. Because of this, the OpenFarm repository started out as owned by the FarmBot Organization on GitHub. However, over the last few months of developing OpenFarm, we have learned that this project has a distinct life of its own, and for that it should have a distinct organization on GitHub that it lives in. We just made the move last night, and you can find the web app repo and future repos from the OpenFarm team within the new OpenFarmCC Github Organization. See you there!
OpenFarm’s Finances
As an open-source project that is funded by our community and in the pursuit of a more open and transparent society, we are making publicly accessible all of OpenFarm’s finances. Note that there are two sheets, one for expenditures and one for revenues, of which you can switch between using the tabs at the bottom left corner.
To date, OpenFarm has raised a total of $21,707.91 (all from Kickstarter) and we have spent $3,265.32. We’ll be posting regular financial updates to keep everyone informed of our situation.
Our Code of Conduct
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!
Considering Gratipay
I’ve recently come across a service called Gratipay. In essence, one can pledge to give money each week to people or teams for the work they are doing. What makes it interesting is that it is all based on having gratitude for the work others are doing, and for those on the receiving end, having gratitude for the Gratipay they receive. There is no limitation or rules as to how the team’s Gratipay is split up, so the system is heavily based on trust, honesty, gratitude, and openness. Another point worth noting is that Gratipay is an Open Company, whereby they themselves are funded on Gratipay and operate very much so like an Open Value Network without the accounting of value aspect, rather that is replaced by the trust model. There are some interesting blog posts from the Gratipay team on being an open company, their motivations, their challenges, and more. I read through most of them and found them to be insightful. Continue reading Considering Gratipay
Creating and Running a Successful Kickstarter Campaign for OpenFarm
In this post I’m going review the entire process of creating and running the successful OpenFarm Kickstarter campaign. I’ll cover what worked, what didn’t, and what we would do different if we could do it all over again. I hope this helps inspire others to run their own campaigns, and inform them of what they should be thinking about and doing throughout the process.
Intentions and Metrics of Success
A common misconception is that crowdfunding is exclusively about the money – that the total pledge amount on your campaign page is the only thing that matters. Though the money is obviously a very important metric of success, it is not the only one. There are many other factors that can make you and your idea succeed.
In order to define our metrics of success, we first set out our intentions for creating the crowdfunding campaign. What is the purpose of creating the campaign? What do we want to achieve? With the OpenFarm campaign, these were our intentions: Continue reading Creating and Running a Successful Kickstarter Campaign for OpenFarm
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