Open Design Workshops for Crop Plan Tooling
New Ways to Get Involved with Runrig
Thanks everyone who signed up early for the Runrig newsletter! As promised, we finally have some events scheduled and other ways to connect with the Runrig community, for those of you looking to get more involved. We plan to keep these newsletters pretty infrequent, but just email Jamie if you have any feedback. Normal unsubscribe stuff etc at the bottom.
Open Design Workshops
The Open Design Workshops are, for now at least, the main venue where both the Runrig community and its core technologies are taking shape. These informal sessions will be held on a regularly recurring basis, with some spontaneous sessions arising whenever seems appropriate. Currently, workshops are held every other Saturday at 2pm Eastern, and the next will be held on July 8th. See our community page for the full schedule, more upcoming dates and info on how to join the call.
Crop Plan Auditing Tools
So far our workshops have concerned an Early Warning System for the Richland Gro-Op, which emerged from our Skywoman MAIA interviews with the Ohio-based urban farming cooperative and the OSU Microfarm Project from the fall of 2022. To achieve profitability while aggregating yields from relatively small production lots, RGO takes orders in advance of planting and allows very little margin for error. Verifying each farm's status is therefore critical, but potentially quite time consuming. While on-site visits will always be necessary, the primary aim of this system is to provide the coop manager with reliable insights into where she can best focus her attention.
GitHub - runrig-coop/rgo-early-warning-system: An early warning system for Richland Gro-Op to coordinate field health.
An early warning system for Richland Gro-Op to coordinate field health. - GitHub - runrig-coop/rgo-early-warning-system: An early warning system for Richland Gro-Op to coordinate field health.
The Early Warning System (EWS) is one possible solution we identified to aid in the process of auditing crop production and ensure it is on track with the crop plan shared by all farms in the coop. It is an auditing dashboard that reports when and where (in terms of relative urgency) an on-site farm visit or other action may be required. Through a combination of automated, manual and verbal survey submissions, the status of each farm can be updated with regular crop assessments and reports on general field health. View the rest of the preliminary design doc for the full details and other possible interventions to aid with crop planning and cooperative farm management.
With this and future Runrig projects, we intend to provide users with carefully designed tools that can help bridge existing software platforms to meet their specific needs, while helping to improve the overall ecosystem of open technology. At the same time, we strive to make each application more than just a proof-of-concept or a prototype, but rather a targeted, production-ready intervention that delivers immediate gains for farmers and other food workers working in the field today.
For the Early Warning System, we're looking towards potential integrations with SurveyStack, the farmOS Data Model (particularly plans), and L'Atelier Paysan's Qrop.
Join the Runrig Community
Finally, we have quietly started a Runrig Matrix room, #runrig-coop:matrix.org, or you can still find many of us hanging out on the Skywoman Discord server's #design-tech-incubator channel. So whether you have general questions and suggestions, requests for mutual aid tech support, or just want to chat with folks in the community, you can join the community there.
We're also using the GitHub issue queue and discussion tab for chatting about the project specifics, so feel free to jump in there as well.