The Farm Hack River of Activity

The code is broken currently...?

Hi R.J., OLE's work is fascinating to me -hope to learn more! You can find a wealth of curriculum resources on my Food Systems reference guide here http://guides.library.cornell.edu/content.php?pid=84833&sid=631485#2080119 . You might find useful resources scattered throughout the guide elsewhere too.

Cheers, Jeff

If you are not wedded to Google and their suite of apps. Outlook.com is Microsoft's version of cloud computing. You can register (for free) and get email as well as Skydrive which will sync with Exel workbooks stored on a computer. It might be worth a look.

I agree that the ranking should be based on numbers of subscribers/followers- and possibly displayed as a ranking, to give a bit of pride, but without exposing actual numbers or individual subscriber identities directly.

The #1 economic reason why Free and Open Source software has been successful is the additional value you generate from the improvements that other people contribute that you would not otherwise receive if you had not gone Open Source.

It turns out that this makes economic sense for ALOT of things. You created something you needed that didn't exist beforehand, you spend a little extra time documenting it and voila, other people found it useful and are suggesting improvements you never thought of.

Level up future contributors with new skills = profit

My big passion is reducing the cost of making that documentation thus making it more economically viable for more people to produce documentation; I recoup my investment when I learn from everyone. Similarly, someone with soldering experience teaching another person to solder benefits because they've just "level upped" a new potential contributor. I've very keen on thinking about how we can use the Farm Hack network to level up new contributors...

Revenue models for accelerated development

That said, other revenue streams can accelerate Open Source/Hardware development so it's worth talking about. jdb's list is a good list of revenue streams for Open Source projects. For the folks who are interested in developing a tool business, I'd like to add one more revenue stream that is specific to Open Hardware.

• Support - offering support/modifications/customization for a fee.
• Training - offering training and "How To" information for a fee.
• Customization/modification - although in the software world, modification has to fit within the license, it can still be done at a fee.
• Builds/kits - offering a fully built version or at least all of the parts in an often easier to assemble way.

P.S. I'm loving the talk. Keep it up.

The number of reads and possibly the popularity of the article wrt other articles in the same group. I think exposing user names might be seen as a challenge to privacy.

Water weighs about 8lbs/gallon, so a full 250 gallon container would weigh at least a ton, and a lot of roofs can't support that kind of weight in a small area.

Another thing to consider is surface area - the more surface area you expose the water to, the more heat loss there'll be. So on a cold night, you may lose all of your heat by midnight instead of 6am! Using a variable number of bladders that can be easily filled from a larger water mass (tank) is probably best. Good idea Louis!

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/victorian-farm/

"Historical observational documentary series following a team who live the life of Victorian farmers for a year. Wearing period clothes and using only the materials that would have been available in 1885, historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn are going back in time to relive the day-to-day life of the Victorian farmer."

Great historical insight of the merger of agrarianism and technology in rural England.

So many of the next steps we have talked about are around improving the value for the participant in farm hack, which in my mind is access to relevant information and community. One of the values of participating in opensource is as Rob mentions, is access to project capital that would otherwise not be available. This is clearly an area that has a lot of potential to be enhanced on the site through facilitating multiple distributed funding methods - but this is just part of the value. Another value is access to documented ideas and experiences from folks with skilled minds ready to problem solve with you - this is a little more complex because it requires a certain critical mass of people to jump in, and is more fragile because the exchange and value is more based on social relationships and a more nebulas future return which will likely not be directly linked to your own contribution. In academic terms it is "complex reciprocity" - it is like a barn raising. By showing up and contributing, you put yourself on the list when you need a barn raised by the group - it is a sort of informal community contract. As in a barn raising those that make large contributions are recognized by the group but that return can come in many different forms - in learned skills, in shared experience, in good food, and in future connections and idea exchanges.

I, as a farmer, am not interested in developing a tool business, but in improving my farm and I would like to have access to the best tools for a kind of agriculture that has not yet been developed. I see the speculative R&D and manufacturing being a poor fit to rapidly develop adaptive technology that will meet my needs and the needs of the next generation of farms and farmers needs. In my view, anytime there is a license involved, it puts up a road block to expanding on that bit of insight, which will slow down innovation (think apple/samsung). The music industry and sampling controversy is the most common example, but there are so many examples (patent trolls in computer hardware and software making a fortune by producing no value but instead creating a toll in road of common progress).

Fashion is the most public example of a billion dollar industry based on no design protection. Anyone can copy anyone else and they do - that is why the brand identity is so important. It identifies quality craftsmanship, or other qualities that are built on trust (maybe not the best industry to emulate, but you get my point). However, what you see in fashion is constant churn of designs and rapid adaptation to changing markets. I think this characteristic fits adaptive direct market agriculture much better than the model on the other end of the spectrum of living on royalties based on unchanging work done decades before.

As Lois and I have talked about a lot, there are clearly revenue models in opensource hardware (and software), but they are different revenue models based on service and skills transfer rather than knowledge protection. By sharing development risk, we can also reduce the amount that we each need to recover back from a project in order to move on to the next project, and instead of looking to recover a large development cost, we can focus on marketing our products and skills. Even Wikipedia now has professionals making a living - not by licensed content or ads, but by writing and maintaining really good entries for third parties.

Our project is a little different than wikipedia, but I believe not as different as we would think. I think we tend to dwell in our discussions on a very narrow set of projects that are expensive to prototype and require specialized fabrication skills. That is why I was so interested in the french FarmFab concept http://www.adabio-autoconstruction.org. They have an entirely separate program around fabrication skills that is much more like vocational training- with traveling trucks with equipment that can show up at a farm to do a build of a previously set design. When I was doing the weekend biodiesel workshops with Girl Mark, she would charge for the weekend and people would bring their own materials etc. SO the knowledge was free and open source, but Girl Mark's time was compensated for - (and those projects required low skill levels and few special tools). These two models might be something we could build on. I think we would do well to separate the skill development track from the documentation and design work. I think this would enable us to focus on the social and online process of designing and sharing things that are easy to share electronically and socially first (photos, software code, parts sourcing, 3d components, skills videos, shared experiences, approaches, food etc.)

There is certainly demand for fabrication skills development but by developing a separate track for projects that require it, we might be able to move faster on other projects. Not everything on farmhack will require machining and metalwork - but it is easy to dwell on it as a barrier. The fabrication skills development track and lowering the cost of access to tools- like mobile setups, coops, fablabs, partnerships with schools etc. could then continue as an objective but not a road block. I don't think this would be an abandonment of our current work, but rather a refinement that would also help clarify and define what "farm hack" events are all about (builds, skills, or designs, or documentation, and how they all relate to one another).

I agree that there needs to be some business model or at least some remuneration for all of the time that goes into such a well-designed product that you are talking about- licensing is one way, I'm sure there are other ways as well. One other potential benefit of publishing plans is to have multiple people working in parallel on the same problem and helping solve parts of the puzzle- this is how open source software works and why it is so successful. of course, that is assuming there are enough people working on it and have the time and then they publish their findings too.

So you're doing:
Panel -(1)-> 12V Battery -(2)-> 115V AC -(3)-> Appliances

Seems like you have (2) and (3) pretty well figured out. The inverter is definitely right I take it the bucket and base both have standard outlets for 115-120V AC.

I would wonder about (1) on the input side (the output to the battery makes sense). Specifically, what are the min and max voltage panel inputs it expects? Have you selected a panel that matches that?

Now that all the voltages line up, I would think about watts/current (remember, Watts = Current * Voltage). How often does the heater and pad need to be on? How many watts do they consume when they are on?

Given your charger, you can only draw 5W from the solar panels, regardless of voltage. If you always had 5W from solar panels and always had your appliances on, you would need to make sure you only drew 5W, not the 400W maximum that it is rated for.

But your panels aren't always on and I doubt your appliances draw THAT much current, so do the calculation of how much sun you can expect and how much current you will be drawing. You will probably want a timer so that you can switch the appliances on and off.

Also, just a thought, have you looked at solar water heaters? You might get away with more that way. The reason is, all this conversion of electricity gives you an efficiency drops. It's too bad that most appliances need 120V AC because they end up rectifying it and using DC locally. It would be nice to regulate the 12V DC another DC level rather than going DC-AC-DC.