Initiated by the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, the Northeast Food Knowledge Ecosystem (NEFKE) is an ongoing cooperative effort supporting communication, coordination and collaboration among a broad range of agriculture and food systems stakeholders, researchers and supporters. We envision this evolving knowledge ecosystem fostering a “network of networks”, helping align and link private, public and civil society sector knowledge assets for collective impact, in support of shared goals for sustainable agriculture, healthy, equitable food systems and resilient communities in our region.
Farm Hack is a vital part of this knowledge ecosystem, providing critical R&D space supporting collaborative problem solving and open innovation. The NEFKE Open Shop has been created to share resources and ideas, and for presenting "problem statements" to the Farm Hack community.
A "Farm to Institution Open Data Standard" problem statement has been posted here.
I've created a fairly extensive list of ag and food related data sources on my Food Systems Reference guide: http://guides.library.cornell.edu/local_food. General data sources are here, and spatial data/maps here.
We're hoping to migrate the GIS data repository I help maintain at Mann Library, CUGIR, to an open source collaborative platform called Open Geoportal, enabling more seamless data sharing/discovery. It already provides some useful capabilities like web mapping/preview, but we'd like to extend those if possible, possibly in conjunction with GeoNode, which the MetroBoston DataCommon uses.
Here are some additional potentially useful resources specifically related to data management and sharing: -At Cornell we've developed a Research Data Management Service Group (RDMSG) to assist folks here in working with and managing their data. -Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF), non-profit organization dedicated to promoting open data and open content in all their forms - including government data, publicly funded research and public domain cultural content. Projects include: *CKAN, a free open source data management system that makes data accessible by providing tools to streamline publishing, sharing, finding and using data. CKAN is aimed at data publishers (national and regional governments, companies and organizations) wanting to make their data open and available. *Open Data Commons - a set of legal tools helping users provide and use Open Data
Cheers, Jeff
P.S. Attaching a DRAFT late breaking addition to a International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists (IAALD) conference I'm helping organize this summer at Cornell. The first session of that post-conference event on OPENING ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE IN AGRICULTURE: "A collaborative discussion about how to get started in the area of agricultural data management among partners, presented in a simple, practical way". That and the conference itself might be of interest to some....