Feet First
Week Note 1 Discovery Fund
Why are we here?
Wylye Coyotes applied to this fund because they wanted to explore technical aspects of the problem of developing a local food supply chain for a Not for Profit school meals service. Our motivations were
- Social — to encourage a healthy food culture and provide children with a positive experience of eating together.
- Economic — to protect the school and parents from unnecessary costs, to pay our staff and suppliers at fair rates and to redirect public money into the local economy.
- Environmental — to reduce waste and carbon production and make more efficient use of locally produced ingredients, and
Shock of the new
Joining up with the programme was a surprisingly intense experience. Community tech is a new area for me and picking up new tools and finding my way on new platforms was a little disorientating. I usually find definitions a useful way to pick up the threads of a project but this from the programme notes,
“The term “community tech” means any hardware or software that delivers benefit to a community group, and which that community group has the authority to influence or control. A community group may create a piece of technology for their own use or use by other groups, or to be governed or adapted by other groups.”
caused me to check in with the idea we had chosen to explore. In some ways our direct community of benefit (the children) are not the user community and it is initially difficult to see how they could have authority, influence or control. Stepping back though our “food system users” include the children, their parents, the school, our own catering staff and our suppliers. Separate but connected communities who will influence the design in different ways. The school, catering staff, parents and children have already exercised their choice in being involved with the service and their feedback is already influencing the meals being served. Perhaps the important thing is that users need to be able to influence their experience of their individual touch-point in the system. The user research tools offered as part of the programme will be a real help in structuring these conversations.
The work
The Discovery programme is well named — the team is very clear that we are not here to reinvent the wheel. So an important part of the work will be to research existing tools — commercial and open. As each of the twenty participants joined the somewhat unfamiliar environment of the project’s Discord server, the benefits of such a network were immediately apparent. As we described our projects and background, recommendations and resources started to be passed around. The breadth of applications of community tech was fascinating and I’m afraid I was immediately distracted into conversations about altogether different projects. I need to refrain from that — focus, focus.
Findings so far include the community e-commerce site Open Food Network, (thank you Sara) where you can read the encouraging results of an experimental local food hub and also find technical assistance and platform integration services at very reasonable cost. OFN also provided links to discussions on the challenge of data interoperability in food procurement and the work of https://fooddatacollaboration.org.uk/about/ which reminded me of similar work in cultural heritage data integration.
Meanwhile, in real life, during a chance meeting at a local food festival I heard from the Catering Manager of our local NHS hospital about their journey towards local and organic food procurement and waste reduction. We have an open invitation to call in for coffee and see the systems they use. We need to find a lot more folk like this before we can really understand what lies ahead.
