GOAT Review Process

We have applications to ensure there is a fair and equitable process to select which applicants will attend GOAT and/or receive funding, and to ensure good representation of the diversity of stakeholders working at this intersection. The role of this application form is to learn more about who you are, why you want to attend, and your vision for open ag tech below! This application should take between 15 to 30 minutes. Your responses don’t need to be long, but it matters that you are thoughtful and consider how your work intersects with the open ag tech movement, both within the existing GOAT community and ideally, beyond!

Please carefully review the review rubric below; we publish it because we want to avoid passing on applicants that are a good fit just because their application did not elaborate on the review criteria.

The number of attendees at each GOAT primarily depends on host-location and funding availability to support attendees. This year we have space for 100 attendees. Depending on the timeliness of registering and space available, attendees can arrange to bring family.

As the GOAT conference has grown legs and moved around the continent, its topical focus has been increasingly situated in the host location. We acknowledge, however, that many topics are global in scope and are working to create a global ambassador program that enables us to thoughtfully expand the scope of GOAT. We welcome people from all locations to apply, but due to funding constraints, we can only provide travel support for North American participants.

We seek applicants who are actively engaged in open hardware and software for agriculture, including at the intersection of traditional indigenous knowledge and community organizing, and who can contribute to growing the community and movement. This event is for people working in or with all different forms of agricultural technology (ag tech), from farmers and food coordinators, hackers and food system activists, to those involved in academic research and industrial R&D.

We have a small team of volunteers review incoming applications and rank them across four criteria, with space for comments / additional context. We meet as a group, average the scores from each reviewer, discuss places where decisions needed to be made, and sort applicants based on those scores. We then send out rolling approvals or requests for more information.

To ensure that there isn’t any unfair advantage to applicants, we review ALL applications using the same rubric, regardless of ticket type or funding request. GOAT 2026 applications are evaluated on the following qualities:

• Personal Voice: Reveals who they are as a human in addition to as a professional.
• Skills, Experience, & Interest: Demonstrates skills and/or experience relevant to Open Ag Tech
• Commitment to Open Source, Knowledge Sharing, and Community Development: Engages in the topic of or demonstrates a commitment to open source or related concepts and values
• Uniqueness: Engages is relevant, novel, or underrepresented subject matters

The email you received is a template email that is sent to all applicants that we want to know more about in order for the reviewers to be able to evaluate using our common review criteria. If you received this email, it means we would like to accept your application but want to ensure we understand your interests and background to ensure a good fit for GOAT and help inform the agenda. We have limited spaces, and your application is our window into who you are, how and why you can be part of the open source agricultural technology community. Specifically we want to avoid passing on applicants that are a good fit just because their application did not elaborate on the review criteria. Give us a chance to get to know you!

GOAT is not a company, not a formal organization, not an entity. We are a loosely connected group of people with some shared visions for the future; that’s it. Reviewers are volunteers from a range of professions and organizations, but are typically on that year’s organizing committee. While the reviewers are a subset of the GOAT organizing committee, the entire group works together to ensure that diverse perspectives are brought together, and to consider how to engage in deliberate community stewardship as our community itself is not a defined, fixed group.

This is the fifth GOAT, and each year we ask for feedback on the application and registration processes as well as the event itself. We review and incorporate that feedback before the next conference. We also welcome in-time feedback, and often will make adjustments immediately. If you have any feedback regarding your experience so far this year that you’d like to see incorporated immediately, please contact us at [email protected].