Open Food Network The Open Food Network (http://openfoodnetwork.org/ (link is external)) is an online marketplace that connects people with local farmers and food hubs. Their about/mission statement:
“We are the Open Food Foundation and the Open Food Network is our first project. It is afree and open source project aimed at supporting diverse food enterprises and making it easy to access local and sustainable food.
The Open Food Foundation is a non-profit, registered charity established in October 2012, to develop, accumulate and protect open source knowledge, code, applications and platforms for fair and sustainable food systems.
While established in Australia, the organisation intends to support global collaboration on open projects for food system transformation. We want to build and support communities that bring the people who need the software together with those who can develop it.”
Technology The Network is being built off of SpreeCommerce (http://spreecommerce.com/ (link is external)), an open source e-commerce engine built off of Ruby on Rails. Spree already has a vibrant third party developer community and very importantly has an RESTful API (http://guides.spreecommerce.com/api/ (link is external)) already built in, which is big if want to be able to create other open-source tools and layers that can tie into the food hub network.
Link to OFN project roadmap: http://stage.openfoodfoundation.org/project/open-food-network/wiki/ofn-roadmap (link is external)
OFN Project Trello: https://trello.com/b/cDDdFBV2/ofn-big-picture (link is external)
Testing server which gives a look at the current default customer interface: http://staging2.openfood.com.au/ (link is external)
OFN project code is on github under an Affero GPL license: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork (link is external)
OFN Project Status They are trying to finishing building out the first beta of the network, but are dealing with constraints stemming from lack of developer resources. OFN is based in Melbourne, AU but apparently there are not an abundance of interested Ruby developers there… they need help completing the first network build and could use stateside developer inputs if we can drum up support.
nice post