Her experiences with open source innovation include software, data and hardware projects. Although she didn't get into specific projects in our conversation, she did plant some seeds about how to best approach Farm Hack as an open source community.
Currently, a lot of open source food projects are about creating transparency for consumers about where their food comes from, there are also proprietary organizations that are releasing data for the public's benefit. This is breaking down barriers - the food industry that has typically released as little information as possible.
That's great, but wildly different from farmers hoping to share designs for tools and other information about farming techniques. Farm Hack participants are farmers or design professionals rather than consumers in general and the medium in question is hardware rather than data or software. Designs for a manure spreader have a potential to be posted on a wiki, but you cannot physically give someone a manure spreader over the internet like you can with software or data.
This dictates that the Farm Hack community will need to do business differently from software developers. Danielle mentioned that an interesting example of open source thinking with a hardware product is Windowfarms. Customers may buy vertical hydroponic garden kits intended for the windowsills of urbanites or they can access the plans for these systems, build them from scratch and participate in online forums. Windowfarmers derive value from both buying products and the customer service that is available.
On the Farm Hack forum someone mentioned quirky.com as having an interesting model for potentially monetizing Farm Hack projects. A person submits their idea for a product and pays ten dollars to put it on quirky.com, the online quirky community discusses it, changes it and if it has gotten enough buzz after a certain period of time it goes into a more serious R&D phase and the design is finalized. If enough of the product is sold in a presale, the product is manufactured and sold through social sales, direct sales and retail. The person who submits the idea gets paid based on the amount of product sold, as do people who played an important role in shaping the product in the community and quirky takes a cut too.
Both the quirky model and the Windowfarms business plans seem like things that Farm Hack could learn from to start becoming an income generating organization that could fund or partially fund its own activities. Right now the Farm Hack community interacts through it blog, forum and stand alone events, but I think there needs to something more to get Farm Hack to gain traction.
Danielle and I also dicussed hackathons events like the Farm Bill Hackathon and Farm Hack's events. One of their major limitations is time - these are typically one or two day events maximum and are ideal for accomplishing small goals in one shot - like graphics that describe the Farm Bill. They also provide an excellent opportunity to get people from different groups to meet each other and get involved in issues they would not ordinarily encounter like software developers and the Farm Bill or environmental engineers and gravity-fed irrigation systems.
In order to produce prototypes and readily replicable designs for farm implements Farm Hack participants will need to meet in person over a period of time to collaborate. Perhaps this could be something that farmers and designers submit ideas for and apply to be part of a team that creates a design and prototypes that are made publicly available. Manufacturing seems outside the scope of Farm Hack, but perhaps in the future employees or interns could help farmers trouble shoot projects on site by appointment - sort of a specialized handyman or mechanic? Maybe more along the lines of Seed and Cycle?
I'm definitely curious what the future of Farm Hack will look like.
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