The last two days of the conference (Thursday and Friday) are designated for co-working. This time is for attendees to start working on actionable items inspired by the conference or enabled by the conference because we are all co-located! To reduce conflicts, we would like you to let us know in advance if you intend hosting a meeting or activity.
Interested? When you apply, mark that you want to run a Team Session and tell us how many people you’re bringing.
Here’s some activities you could organize –>
Brainstorm Ideas: get other enthusiastic GOAT people to workshop an idea
Design / Feature Reviews: get other tuned-in GOAT people to help with a user journey, community or process you’re struggling with
Launch a thing: use this opportunity to launch a new product or thing!
Have a retreat: a chance for your team to connect IRL.
Figure it out on the fly: you may want to wait until you’ve met other attendees to decide what to focus on – no problem! You can decide when you get there.
Some confirmed Team Day orgs – OpenTEAM, Our Sci, FarmOS, and AXILab (Purdue)
Cost – We ask that your attendees pay the full registration price and encourage you to make an optional donation of $500-$1000, depending on number of days you want to host your meeting and how many people you anticipate attending, to offset the costs associated with meeting space and resource requirements.
We are looking for one year of funding from a diverse group of sponsors to build out the technological, community stewardship, and governance infrastructures that foster long-term community organizing, and host in-person and virtual gatherings.
Large donations (i.e., sponsorships) will be handled differently. Please contact Ankita Raturi (ankita@purdue.edu) if you would like to make a large donation (>$1,000).
Technological and Community Stewardship Infrastructures. We intend to refine our existing technological infrastructure towards more accessible and engaging online presences with the capacity to reach a broader audience and lessen barriers to participate. We will employ community stewards that will work to foster new and more diverse leadership within the community. As super users of GOAT technological infrastructures, the community stewards will facilitate the pathways for new members to get connected, curate and host their own online events and activities, and engage in leadership.
Governance Infrastructure. Attention and intention will be required to transition GOAT from a point-in-time event to an evolving community that supports GOAT’s goals and the people in the community and to sustain the momentum established by the online and in-person conferences. The formative work done this year will result in the identification of a community-agreed upon governance structure that meets the needs and reflects the values of the community. Functions supported by this approach include funding acquisition and distribution, providing a sounding board and venue for new ideas, conflict resolution, strategic planning, and outreach.
Gatherings. The 2022 in-person gathering is scheduled to take place at the Omega Institute in New York. Much of the gathering will have an unconference format so that the topics discussed are derived directly from the values and needs of the attendees, whom will be asked to “take off their institutional hats.” The objectives of structured components of the gathering include completing our community manifesto, introducing the governance structure and begin nominations for the biannual board, creating a curriculum for how to engage in work within the community, and scheduling future hackathons.
Virtual gatherings will both ramp up participation for the in-person event and encourage continued activity after the in-person event. Pre-events include an introduction to GOAT technological infrastructures, a workshop to determine governance structure, a workshop to begin the manifesto, and a social hour. The post-events include a constant fair (e.g.., six-to-twelve-week sprints of building and executing ideas), hackathons, and elections.
Why Sponsor? Your sponsorship will illustrate a strong commitment to Open Ag Tech, and help us achieve our aim of bringing together a diverse group of 100+ researchers, farmers, developers, and policy professionals from the U.S. and beyond.
Benefits of Sponsorship: All sponsors will be acknowledged in the 2022 conference program, acknowledged at the conference, and be listed on our website.
Sponsorship Goals: The sponsorship goals table should be read from the bottom upward, like a sponsorship thermometer. The first $15000 raised will go towards travel stipends for attendees, the next $10,000 will go towards attendance stipends for in-need attendees, and so on. Our total sponsorship goal is $61,000.
Where the funding goes:
Cumulative Sponsorship Goals
Tee-shirts and Merch for all Attendees
$61,000
Materials Expenses and Website Fees
$59,000
Community Steward Stipends (for elections and pre-/post-conference coordination and events)
$58,000
Conference Space
$53,000
Marketing towards improving diversity and inclusivity
If you are not able to donate via Open Collective or you would like to be a sponsor (donating >$1000) please contact Ankita Raturi to set up an alternative mechanism: ankita@purdue.edu
Workadventu.re is the environment in which we are hosting the hackathon.
The goal of a Hack@Organic is to bring together a multidisciplinary cohort of researchers, designers, developers, and agricultural practitioners to develop equitable, open source technical infrastructure that enables research, adoption, and evaluation of organic agricultural practices.
When: Feb 24-26, 2022
Where: Virtual on the Workadventu.re platform. Get familiar with Workadventu.re in our FAQ.
The Gathering for Open Ag Tech (GOAT) is an ad-hoc gathering of technologists and agriculturalists to collaborate, and create a vision for a fully open agricultural future. GOAT members endeavor to support ag-related organizations (including ARS) trying to solve technical problems while keeping it free and open.
The Organic Center’s mission is non-profit research and education organization, that aims“to conduct and convene credible, evidence-based science on the environmental and health effects of organic food and farming and communicate the findings to the public”. They seek to empower people with scientific information on organic food and agriculture.
Collaborations like these are a democratic way to shape the tools that shape us all. With Hack@Organic, we will be growing our collective capacity to build the technologies and relationships needed to care for our communities in the critical years to come.
Sign up for the GOAT Forum and post your project and recruit more team members there. If you’re looking for a project to join, this is where you’ll find them!
Coordinate with your project partners before you turn up. Set a scope that can be completed in 3 days, identify a potential technology stack. You’ll be adding this information to the hackathon repository on the first day.
Identify other skill sets needed on your team so you can recruit last-minute team members on the first day of the hackathon.
Identify work blocks for your team before and/or after the organized hackathon hours (9am-2pm PT).
@GOAT:Hack
Show up and hack away! The organized hackathon hours are 9am-2pm PT.
Attend the Setting the Tone! We have a very special guest to get us in the right mindset.
Present to the community.
Incorporate mentor feedback.
We’re encouraging folks on the Eastern coast or early risers to meet in WorkAdventu.re from 6-9am PT, and folks on the Western coast or night owls to meet in WorkAdventu.re from 2-5pm PT.
Post-GOAT:Hack
Make a plan to continue work with your project partners.
WorkAdventu.re is free to use, so you can create a world and workspace specifically for your team post-hackathon.
Go home happy and accomplished!
FAQ
How can I participate?
Sign up to attend here, describing your interest in agriculture and technology. After that follow the pre-conference instructions on this page.
What is the expected time commitment?
You get what you put in. A compelling project will require commitment from all team members, so be prepared to spend most of your work day working on your project.
Is this mostly hardware, software, or what?
All of the above, but primarily leaning toward the development of information tools. So everything from: new sensors for on-farm data collection, new ways to visualization resource flows, mechanisms to handle data interoperability, to ways to connect existing open source software to support sustainable agricultural practices.
How do teams work?
You should come with an idea and a team (one or many), but it’s completely ok to switch teams, adjust teams, or even adjust whole ideas once you get here. This is a outcome-focused hackathon – we care only that we make the most compelling stuff for the open-agriculture technology community we possibly can! Here is an example hackathon group formation:
Problem owner and/or domain expert
Designer and/or architect
A couple of developers across the stack
Maybe a document writers /slide maker / coordinator
Where do I find out about potential team projects?
We’re asking people with potential project ideas to post their ideas on this GOAT forum post (link is external) so that everyone can start thinking about what teams they’d like to join, and have conversations ahead of time about the ideas. You can also look at the pitch sign-up sheet to see all the titles of projects that will be pitched.
I don’t code — what about me?
It completely depends on your project. The goal here is to create something compelling to the community. It is entirely possible to create a compelling data schema, or build out a compelling front-end design for a common application. While coding certainly helps, it is not required. Though, as stated before, you do need to have an idea coming in!
What if I don’t have a team?
If you want to come but don’t have a team or an idea, you are still welcome to register! You will either join an existing team or form a new one with others, we will help facilitate.
How do I get there – to Work Adventu.re?
We’ll be using Work Adventu.re for the event, a fun (and simple) platform to hang out and work that kind of looks and feels like you’re in a 90’s video game. Here are some tips for using Work Adventure, although it’s pretty intuitive and you’ll probably figure it out on your own within a few minutes:
When you join you’ll be assigned a random avatar. You can modify your avatar (and even add a pet) by clicking the coffee cup symbol in the upper left- hand side of the screen.
Use the arrows to move your avatar around the virtual world.
Access the settings on the upper left-hand side of your screen by clicking the coffee cup (this is also where you can edit your avatar), and click on the envelope icon to chat with people you are near.
When you walk near someone, a video chat will open with them and you can talk directly to one another.
If you enter a room, you’ll automatically be entered into a group video chat with everyone in the room. You can control your speaker/video camera and access the chat in the lower right-hand side of the screen.
If you walk near the computer, an info box will automatically pop up on your screen and you can learn more about Work Adventure.
