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.
Great stuff R.J. -thanks so much for your thoughtful and enthusiastic comments. Yes, there is indeed an opportunity to join us in Ithaca! Would you like to co-lead this with me?
I'm not a programmer, but do work closely with our IT staff here at Cornell's Mann Library in leveraging ITC tools and platforms to connect people with each other, and the data and information resources they need to be successful. In fact our library has done a lot of work with Drupal and open data. Check out http://aims.fao.org/tools/agridrupal, vivoweb.org, and more recently AgriVIVO, to learn more about some of this work. We've been developing ways to use Drupal as an interface for ingesting and publishing open data, including our http://impact.cals.cornell.edu/ site, which is kind of like a dashboard, that interacts dynamically with VIVO data. Though a bit out of date, this poster describes how: http://www.vivoweb.org/files/MilesWorthington_VIVO_conference_poster-web.pdf.
Perhaps, as you suggested, we could structure the design charrette in a way to generate specific ideas for use of the farmhack site as a farmer dashboard host, possibly leading to some new shared Drupal modules?
I'm currently working with several others on a proposal for a Northeast regional food knowledge ecosystem that could build on/incorporate this work. We're hoping to use Drupal and VIVO as part of this, and work with state, regional and federal data providers to make their data more accessible/usable (Mann Library works directly with some of these agencies, including the USDA, and serves as a repository/distributor for some data).
Our ultimate goal with the regional knowledge ecosystem is to create an open platform based on open standards, that supports further work and innovations from people like you (including paid work). Ideally this would include occasional hackathons.
I'll be meeting with Severine and a few other folks during the Ithaca Farm Hack, and hope to see you there as well! I'll follow up by email shortly to discuss. Cheers, Jeff