Informatics for Community Food Resilience

1. Links

This Meeting notes document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12NNlySn9y9XPCcH6PgfalSjUy3DXWXhxnSf_5xfdv9k/edit?usp=sharing 

Website: 

https://resilientfood.org/ 

GOAT forum discussion: http://forum.goatech.org/t/informatics-for-community-food-resilience-in-times-of-pandemic-and-beyond/833 

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2. Notes

Agenda for today includes updates on:

• Project Refresh
• Status Update

• Qualitative Research
• Software for Local Food Systems
• Mapping Community Food Pathways

• Opportunities for Design: Call to Action
• Next Community Call: First Wednesday of the Month: August 5 @ 3pm ET.
• Open time for community discussion

This call has a recorded presentation followed by unrecorded open discussion.

Notes on the presentation:

Project Updates:

• We’ve moved to monthly Community Calls
• We’ve made significant progress on Phase 1 of the project
• Qualitative research study has engaged in six interviews in month 1

• Farmer interviews will start in the coming weeks

• End of August we’ll kick off community mapping pilot and assemble a design team
• Our long-term goal is to develop local food tool kits

What we’ve been learning in interviews:

• Effects of covid on local food systems
• Mapping information follows and technology landscape
• Will be synthesizing these for preliminary results

Software for local foods:

• We have 52 tools in our library, and will be evaluating a subset of these to track how information is flowing from farm to fork.

Mapping community food pathways:

• Most recent group to start, and so earliest in the process.

Opportunities for Design

• “I wish I had ordered these from farm to fork, but it goes beyond that”
• Food equity - this has become an incredibly apparent issue in our society not only with the continued pandemic that we hoped would end, but also with the current amplification of the Black Lives Matter movement and is something that needs to be considered and addressed in this project.
• Food processing - technology is likely not going to solve the processing facilities bottleneck problem itself, but can assist
• There are not five discreet ways to sell food in a community, and most technologies are not designed to capture that nuance, so how do we design five discrete tools that can serve a community’s many nuanced ways of selling food?

Open Discussion:

• Introduction from Ana Grace, who is representing from UC Merced
• Who is eligible for an interview? For farm supporters, anybody in the country. For farmers we’re targeting the Mid-West.
• Opportunities for Design:

• Andrew says he doesn’t seen anything that is future oriented in the opportunities for design
• Ankita just realized there is nothing for on farm specifically; Andrew says that makes sense because we haven’t interviewed farmers yet.
• Erik says there is a need for sales forecasting models for markets, basically farmers capturing data and sales to create a cheap or free forecasting tool would be amazing! This could inform their crop selection for upcoming years. (i.e., connect point of sales systems to crop planning systems).

• Market operators can benefit by way of curating the participation of farmers in the markets.
• Data sharing among farmers so they can know what their competitors are doing in an anonymous sense. Helps price discovery. Could be facilitated by the market manager.

• Jeannie says that Harvie says what more a farmer could be selling from the quantity of crops he had. It helped farmers understand what he was growing, how much he was selling and how much he wasn’t selling that he was growing.
• Jamie wonders who opportunities for design we envision for food policy:

• It can help understand the landscape of the local community and thus provide information that can inform and bolster argument for policy change
• Effects of food policy on tools. E.g., Cottage Law in Minnesota prevents food producers that don’t cook in commercial kitchens from selling online using a third party online sales platform.
• Recording of a local grocer that has been able to participate in onlin snap, digital pin, usda requirements, person identity verification, large scale food markets like walmart have the time investment to take that on. Retailers granting access versus farmers markets/farmers/alternative grocers from being able to address the technological challenges.

• TotalPay tried to get access for online snap transactions.

Candidates for Pilot Projects? Should be about a 3 month project. Can be completed without funding. Ideally helpful for farmers and consumers?

• Incorporate SNAP/EBT into an open source online sales platform

• Probably longer than 3 months.

• Forecasting

• Longer than 3 months.
• Impacts food access and equity

• Money votes for food, what happens to the local food system?

• Untracked local impacts.

• Potential research project!

• Open food network + Farm OS integration

• Early discussions, not clearly a candidate yet.

Ankita’s Notes from the Presentation:

Future-planning oriented?

How do I take what I’m looking at and plan for my supply chain and production. Production scheduling.

Cheap or free forecasting models. For markets? For farmers? Connecting sales (POS-sys) with planning system.

For the individual farmer to be able to look at their crop plans vs demand/supply.

Market operators can benefit (<control).  To be able to curate the participation of farmers in markets.

Open data sharing among farmers, perhaps via market managers, to allow (anonymously) things like price discovery.

        In the coming user journey (Jamie), consider the role of forecasting production and demand.

Harvie: In conversation: it told him what more he could be selling from the quantity of crops that he had? What he was growing, how much he needed to grow, and how much he needed to sell. Bottom line report. “This just makes my day having this information!” (ask Jeanne).

Food policy overlap with other areas?

        Identify areas to advocate for e.g., installation of a food processing facility

        Cottage Law, SNAP rules

Recording of a local grocer that has been able to participate in online SNAP (ask Erik) -- digital pin, USDA requirements, person-verification, large scale food markets (e.g., walmarts etc) -> time investment, retailer granting access vs farmers market/farmers/alternative grocers

TotalPay -> GrowNYC -> SNAP

3 years for the grocer to actually get online (Erik’s example)

Shortlist of candidate design projects!

Criteria (3 months)

Forecasting?

        Usefulness to growers.

SNAP?

                Useful to growers and consumers

Not enough commercial incentive to have a solution

                Timel

        Open Food Network + FarmOS integration potential?

                Useful to growers

        Forecasting tools impact on food access and equity?

                Money votes for food, what happens to the local food system?

                Untracked impacts -- research projects?

        Variable weight packaging in sales tools?

How do we evaluate the opportunities for design?

from Ankita Raturi to Everyone:        3:02  PM

Notes will be taken here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xa2NNlySn9y9XPCcH6PgfalSjUy3DXWXhxnSf_5xfdv9k/edit#heading=h.u2jecdpnn3l9

from Dr. Colleen Naughton to Everyone:        3:02  PM

I'll need to leave in 10 minutes, sorry have a funders call that got scheduled.

from Ankita Raturi to Everyone:        3:02  PM

No worries!

from Dr. Colleen Naughton to Everyone:        3:03  PM

A graduate student in my lab should attend soon.

from Juliet Norton to Everyone:        3:03  PM

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12NNlySn9y9XPCcH6PgfalSjUy3DXWXhxnSf_5xfdv9k/edit?usp=sharing

from Dr. Colleen Naughton to Everyone:        3:03  PM

Works for me

from Juliet Norton to Everyone:        3:03  PM

That is the link for notes :)

from Dr. Colleen Naughton to Everyone:        3:12  PM

#zoomlife for real

from Dr. Colleen Naughton to Everyone:        3:13  PM

Sorry for the webinar spam

from Dr. Colleen Naughton to Everyone:        3:13  PM

Anyone welcome to share more with me too :)

from Dr. Colleen Naughton to Everyone:        3:13  PM

Yay!

from Dr. Colleen Naughton to Everyone:        3:13  PM

Grest to see everyone! Hope to be more at the next one. Ana Grace is representing UC Merced.  

from Juliet Norton to Everyone:        3:20  PM

        Thank you! Nice to meet you Ana!

from Ana Grace to Everyone:        3:22  PM

Thank you! Nice to meet you all, I'm looking forward to learning!

from Ankita Raturi to Everyone:        3:29  PM

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HlZVh4LLC1FYb66Gr21PxZY9zTegsBXfQRICY3zkpaY/edit#slide=id.g8b7025fdd5_0_31

from Paul Weidner to Everyone:        3:29  PM

thanks!

from Ankita Raturi to Everyone:        3:30  PM

https://resilientfood.org/index.php/2020/04/27/qualitative-research-study/

from Andrew T Flachs to Everyone:        3:32  PM

come one come all

from Paul Weidner to Everyone:        3:46  PM

USDA Food Access Atlas: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas/

from Paul Weidner to Everyone:        3:46  PM

not sure I see this in the current Tech Resource Library?

from Juliet Norton to Everyone:        3:52  PM

You can submit it if you dont' see it. :)

from Paul Weidner to Everyone:        3:52  PM

Just submitted!

from Paul Weidner to Everyone:        4:04  PM

gtg - thanks for the updates! will try and be on time next time :)

from Ana Grace to Everyone:        4:04  PM

Thank you for letting me join!

from Andrew T Flachs to Everyone:        1:04  PM

thanks!