Paicines Ranch, California

The ‘Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology’ (GOAT) held its third gathering to reconvene the open ag tech community, aiming to learn, share, and formalize our common vision for creating open technologies for our food system. With support from 11th Hour Project and the #NoRegrets Initiative, technologists, farmers, researchers, designers, civil society actors, came together at the beautiful Paicines Ranch in California.

GOAT is a community of practice dedicated to enhancing the resilience of food systems by coordinating technology design and development and bringing together diverse individuals engaged in open hardware and software for agriculture. Gatherings run as an ‘unconference’, meaning attendees actively shape and steward sessions.

During this event, attendees worked to align approaches and support collective efforts, including those emerging from Dweb and Pie Ranch. This included developing a shared understanding of who the "we" is, who is resourcing the efforts, and who is making the decisions.

There was a positive overlap between the GOAT community and participants of the previous convenings, and the gathering offered a space for initiatives that had emerged at NADAWG, Pie Ranch and D:food/web to showcase their work with the broader ag tech ecosystem. Several workshops that stand out are:

• Building the Future, Together: Enterprise utility team program update and open dialogue. This session, led by the Enterprise Team (ExCUE), which emerged from Dweb, shared their vision, process, and welcomed new involvement. It included shared language, value alignment, 'Community of Organizations' Inventory, and Innovation Accounting (IA). This group has since published a shared roadmap of their work.

• How to make technology equitable. This workshop challenged developers to think about how to create equitable and accessible technology for small-scale farmers, particularly those with low technology literacy. It drew on "Principles for Appropriate Technology" developed by the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UCANR) and the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF). Participants self-assessed their technologies against these principles and discuss implementation.

• Connecting Farms & Markets: An open-source data integration for a sustainable food system This session outlined a plan to integrate the LiteFarm farm management system with the Open Food Network (OFN) and Market.organics online marketplaces. This effort grew out of the Pie Ranch convening and D:food/web.

• MetaGOAT Workshops: A series of workshops that aimed to codevelop a sustainable organizing plan for GOAT’s future, including governance models and how to broaden community participation. Feedback from past GOAT participants indicates a strong desire for action, coordination, and mechanisms to work together on larger-scale projects. Through a series of exercises, participants worked to identify concrete actions for the future of shared GOAT projects.

• Exploring Community-Governed Organizations (CGOs): This session simulated a participatory resource allocation to illuminate the importance of value structures, community norms, and communication patterns. It involved a proposal and voting process, demonstrating how different voting structures impact outcomes. Following this demo, facilitators shared updates on the CGO toolkit, which originated from Pie Ranch. 

GOAT provided an invaluable opportunity to share emerging ideas from previous convenings with the broader community, bringing in new perspectives, refinement and feedback, allowing these intitiatives to continue to evolve collectively.

—-> Learn more about GOAT here