Open Food Network: �How do we work now?

Photo by Heather Gill

Who are the people ?

The global team

Myriam

Onboarding, Strategy and Product

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Lynne

Strategy and Product

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Rachel

UX and Test

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Matt

Developer

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Maikel

Developer

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Luis

Developer

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Pau

Developer

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Nick

Onboarding and Community

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Theresa

Community

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Dani

Product

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Serenity

Strategy and Finance

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Kirsten

Strategy and Product

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Who we are and how we work together is as important as what we create

• All tools and resources are free and open source
• Not-for-profit, independent, self-determined and self-organising - a successful distributed collaboration getting stuff done
• Working on collation and further development of our knowledge resources
• Aspiration to livelihoods’ and fairness in pay

Ultimately, we are networks of people, collaborating to build new food system together

Taking time and creating structure to build relationships

• Communication: clear, non-violent, constant
• Structured and unstructured: monthly hangout, fortnightly ‘delivery train’, many other regular online meetings
• Attention to the human: check-in and check-out, touchpoints with rest of life, #heart-channel
• Lots of emojis and gifs – humour
• Constant refinement of collaborative processes
• Annual Global Gathering – intense time together ‘in real life’

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Where is Open Food Network?

Started in Australia (2012)

The Open Food Foundation is a non-profit, registered charity established in October 2012, to develop and protect a commons of open source knowledge, code, applications and platforms for fair and sustainable food systems. While established in Australia, we support global collaboration on open projects for food system transformation.

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We want to build and support communities to create and share open knowledge, as we believe this is critical to fair, sustainable and resilient future.

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Moved to Distributed Management of the Global Commons

Open Food Foundation

Non-profit

Australia 2012

Open Food Network platform

Open Food Network UK�Community Interest Company

UK 2013 (?)

Kandu South Africa

2013 (?)

• New ‘local instances’ signed MoU with Australian non-profit organisation
• New instances established technical / software development teams BUT most work done in Australia
• $$ transferred to Australia

Phase 1: Australia-centric

Phase 2: Distributed (2015-16)

Phase 1: Spaghetti

Phase 2: Global coordination via decentralised and self-organising network

We have worked hard to remove this Australian bottleneck and now have a completely de-centralised and self-organising network. All nodes are independent and interdependent. There is no central decision-making organisation.

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The Pot

The Pledge

The Pipe

The Pledge (Responsibilities)

• Affiliates (15) - a recognised and branded instance of the Open Food Network platform in their region

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• Associates (2?) - those drawing upon and contributing to the Commons e.g. by running a white-labelled instance of Open Food Network

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• Service Providers - those drawing upon and contributing to the Commons to provide services as a web agency / developer / freelancer / marketing consultant / or selling Open Food Network-based services to clients

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• Other - not connected with or contributing to the community

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“Contribution” - different ways to contribute . .

Affiliates - independent local instances driven by local need

All local instances of Open Food Network are created by people working locally to support diverse local, context-specific food enterprises, networks and organisations in our own communities and countries.

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The Pledge (‘Rights’ of Affiliates?)

• Branded instance - use of branding etc

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• Sys Admin pool - currently global sys admin manages some Affiliate instances, not others

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• Instance support - with set-up, configuration, learning to use, customer support

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• Access to ‘private’ channels and communications - mostly around budget management; fundraising opportunities; some sys admin / admin; sometimes discussions about how to manage tricky situations

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• What’s going to get built - what the priorities are - who gets a say?
• In theory
• In practice . .

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How do we manage platform improvements?

How we manage platform improvements from idea through to launch

What we’ll cover in this part of the session

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• Choosing what to improve: the bigger things
• Choosing what to improve: small enhancements
• Handling bugs 🐛
• The delivery pipe: the place where all the changes come to life 🚂
• Managing releases
• Technical process
• Go to market activities

Choosing what to improve: the bigger things

Identify a local problem to be solved

Create a software improvement topic about the problem and discuss with the community

Product team completes discovery on priority wishlist topics and identifies the preferred feature candidates

Assigned Product Owner and Tech Owner incept the feature candidate

Feature Delivery

Did it solve the problem?

Close the wishlist topic

DONE!

Community votes on the topics that are a priority for their instance

Product Curation Team determine each quarter what can be included in the roadmap

Yes

No

1-Wishlist

2-Inception

3-Pipe-ready

4-In-delivery

5-Done

2-Inception

Discovery includes:

✅ Problem statement

✅ Who is affected and how

✅ Size of the impact

✅ How we’ll know it’s solved

✅ Feature candidate selection� (includes sizing + ease/value matrix)

The pipe includes:

✅ Feature candidates

✅ Technical debt

✅ System admin requirements

✅ S1 & S2 bugs�� ✅ Prioritised S3 bugs & papercuts

Software Improvement category: https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/c/software-impovement/21

Choosing what to improve: enhancements (AKA papercuts)

What is a Papercut?

A Papercut is a tiny issue - usually UI or UX - that is never a high priority but causes lots of pain to users. It might be a small bug or a missing bit of UI. It might be issues we tend to always hear about from users but do not have direct implications on the actual functionality and thus never make it into the bug priority list. It might be things that we look at and think “Ergh is this still not fixed?” or “%^&* that is SO ANNOYING”. We might have been looking at it for years.

Where papercuts live: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/projects/28

The process used to submit them: https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/t/papercuts/1765

Bug handling: logging your bugs to be fixed

There is no software without bugs, and they are not all equivalent. Some really prevent the use of the platform and should be addressed as soon as possible, others are small bugs and not really annoying, we can live with them, users may not even have noticed them.

When you discover a bug

• You log it on GitHub
• Use the #bugs channel on Slack to alert the team

Best practise bug logging

• Use the ‘bug template’ in Github
• Remember to choose a the relevant severity level�which helps us to triage the bug
• Provide as many screenshots or screen recordings as you can
• Include detail of the browser and device/OS used

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Understanding the different severity levels: https://github.com/openfoodfoundation/openfoodnetwork/wiki/Bug-severity

Bug handling: prioritising the bugs

Severity 1 bugs

• We drop everything and get onto fixing these bugs. They are IMMEDIATELY FIXED.

Severity 2 bugs

• These bugs are put at the top of the list and are the next thing developers pick up to work on. They are QUICKLY FIXED.

Severity 3 bugs

• These bugs are prioritised by active instances, each choosing one at a time to go through the pipe in a cycle.

Severity 4 and 5 bugs

• These bugs are not prioritised to be fixed. They can either become a papercut, or picked up to be included if a feature relating to it is prioritised to be done.

The process for selecting S3s: https://community.openfoodnetwork.org/t/prioritising-severity-3-bugs-to-be-fixed/1768

Delivering all the prioritised things: The Delivery Pipe

Identify a local problem to be solved

Create a software improvement topic about the problem and discuss with the community

Product team completes discovery on priority wishlist topics and identifies the preferred feature candidates

Assigned Product Owner and Tech Owner incept the feature candidate

Feature Delivery

Did it solve the problem?

Close the wishlist topic

DONE!

Community votes on the topics that are a priority for their instance

Product Curation Team determine each quarter what can be included in the roadmap

Yes

The pipe includes:

✅ Feature candidates

✅ Technical debt

✅ System admin requirements

✅ S1 & S2 bugs� � ✅ Prioritised S3 bugs & papercuts

No

1-Wishlist

2-Inception

3-Pipe-ready

4-In-delivery

5-Done

2-Inception

Discovery includes:

✅ Problem statement

✅ Who is affected and how

✅ Size of the impact

✅ How we’ll know it’s solved

✅ Feature candidate selection� (includes sizing + ease/value matrix)

Managing the work through the delivery pipe

We use Zenhub to manage our delivery pipe: https://app.zenhub.com/workspaces/dev-pipe-54b840c6a249c8781446d4b2/board?repos=6257856,19954737

backlog of items to be delivered

build

test

Managing releases: what the devs do

Managing releases: go to market activities

Show Me the Money - the global ‘Pot’

We have achieved a lot with a small amount of money

Since 2012 we have raised a total of around $1.1 million Australian dollars (€720K) in grant and crowd-funding. We have made these limited resources go a very long way.

We are growing, but we cannot do what we need to while operating in such a resource-constrained environment.

COVID Spike and Tail . .

COVID Spike and Tail . .

1.5% = €25,000

2% = €35,000

The Pot - Current Status

Projected expenditure est. €36,000 per month

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What do we spend money on? People

• 97% of funds contributed to global pot have been spent on design and development of the platform

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• 98% of that on software developers (2% so far on product and design)

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• This is changing (hurrah!)

openfoodfrance.org

facebook.com/openfoodfrance/

twitter.com/OpenFoodNet_Fr

instagram.com/openfoodnetworkaus/

openfoodnetwork.org

Community.openfoodnetwork.org

rachel.arnould@openfoodfrance.org

Photo by LuAnn Hunt