I’m just getting started on a new project nicknamed Kestrel.
The basic idea a simple and user-centered web app that helps facilitate ordering, billing and member management for CSA’s. Things are JUST getting started and I am soliciting help in doing some feasibility research as well as a basic evaluation of existing CSA management applications.
A CSA, (for Community Supported Agriculture) is a way for the food buying public to create a relationship with a farm and to receive a weekly basket of produce. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become “members” (or “shareholders,” or “subscribers”) of the CSA. Local Harvest
So far were in stage zero: Over the holidays I was brainstorming with some of my agri-geek friends in North Carolina, notably tes thraves. (I like to say that tes is to poverty + agriculture issues as Jay-Z is to hip-hop — a badass producer who just makes things happen.) :) So far there’s been a lot of excitement about it from both consumers and producers.
- Stage zero is lots of talk over drinks around the New Year’s bonfire, basically. Check.
- Stage one is research about what real CSA’s need.
- Stage two is getting a few CSA’s to pilot test a first iteration for a season.
- The rest is iterating and improving based on real feedback. This is the hard part. And the fun part.
The only real spec so far is an application that is incredibly simple and driven purely by a real understanding of the users’ needs.
There is no timeframe yet. I imagine things could take a year or so; nobody’s getting paid by Kestrel.
Codewise, I’ve done some simple scaffolding of the application, but really I think the requirements for this type of thing are simple — the codebase is not really the issue. Just a few forms, login/out and billing. So I’m not looking for help from coders as much as I am trying to garner some interest from A) the users of the application, farmers and consumers and B) people with experience in user-centered application design and user testing.
The goal is a management tool that would simplify the process of ordering food from your CSA, but also serve as an educational model of CSA best practices.
Right now I’m thinking a hosted solution, almost certainly built in Rails. And of course completely Open and Free.
The basic use case comes from my mom : she doesn’t like very much lettuce in her box. Last year she got six heads of lettuce at a time. So ideally mom could just login and set her preference, pay her bill, update her address, give notice that she’s out of town for a month, etc. The farmer then knows exactly how many heads of lettuce to harvest, and can keep the rest in the ground until going to the market on Saturday.
It’s not a new idea, I know. There are several in San Francisco. I haven’t seen them yet. But I am sure that they’re not as good as they can be and I want to put the users at the front of developing a new open source solution.
CSA’s are great for environmental, social and economic reasons. And they’re really just a lot of freaking fun. So if you are a consumer or producer with opinions about what you’d like to see in this type of software, let me know in the comments or unthinkingly-at-gmail.com.
Recently there has been a lot of discussion among the nonprofit technology geeks about the use (and usefulness) of the tag “nptech”.
When the nptech tag started one of the ideas was to gather enough data to look and see what words people were using to describe, say, open source (open source, floss, foss, open source software) and then use those words to inform a taxonomy. It’s a taken a long time but I bet there’s enough data in the nptech tag on a combination of bookmarking systems to do a little crunching and get at some of those commonly used terms. Sort of an emergent taxonomy… Marnie Webb,
nptech proto-tagger
The nptech tag (on del.icio.us) dates back to December of 2004 and was created by a group of nonprofit technologists that were exploring the potential for social tagging in the community. While I have a “curmudgeonly” eye for Web2.0 gizmos, in addition to a deep distrust of technophilic “progress” … I think that the development of this tag is arguably the single largest reason for the current (thriving I think) state of what is commonly called the “nptech community.” Which means a lot to me.
(A great summary of the current conversation is at Beth Kanter’s blog.)
Opinions abound. Most of us seem to be worked up about the efficiency of the tag. On this note there has been a lot of interesting reaction to a post by Gavin Clabaugh, which was critical of folksonomies. Laura Quinn of Idealware largely agrees with Gavin.
In this context, it seems that generally the consensus has been that 1.) Taxonomies are harder to create than Folksonomies, but they are better in many contexts. And 2.) we need more data about how to make the nptech tag more useful as an “emergent taxonomy”.
So, in the spirit of improving the tag and promoting the nptech community, here’s some data:
- A plain text listing of every word that has been used on del.icio.us in association with nptech. fulltext.xml
- A sorted and ranked list of these tags. nptech-tagged.txt
- All of the tags presented as a scrollable tag-timeline.
- The script that I wrote to gather the data from delicious (in perl): community-tag-robot.txt. (The code is also displayed below with syntax highlighting.)
The script that I wrote crawls the pages of del.icio.us and pulls out all of the tags that were used to describe the same stuff tagged “nptech”. This gives us an idea of how the tag has been used — effectively describing the tagged links, if we assume taggers are using “synonym clouds”. Del.icio.us has a “related tags” feature but it is lame (only 10 are listed), and judging from my initial review of the data it is pretty random. (Not really sure if I broke some terms of use or not with my script, but it’s *our* data, right? And besides, the script is very polite.)
There are a lot of delicious mashupy-type things that show you tagging patterns, but these approaches seem somehow very passive, and not community-oriented. I mean, in general delicious is used very passively — people want to be able *consume* more efficiently, not create some community in which greater action can be taken. Or it is just used for explicitly personal purposes, as a web-based bookmark service.
What I like so much about the nptech tag is that it was intentionally created to support and reflect a community (unlike, say, the tag “nintendo,” which may very well support a community, but it is not active in a self-critical, dialogic way.) And certainly there is a beauty, I think, in using these hyper-technological tools (which have the ability to be very atomizing and consumerist) for the sake of doing things that are explicitly not-for-profit and mission-driven.
And personally I tend to agree with Michelle Murrain that we need to be wary of an “expert” approach to developing our tags and community taxonomies. That line of thinking is what made me want to do this in the first place. (Likewise I need to point out how much I have really been thinking lately about stuff that I have been reading at Ulises Ali Majias’ blog like this.)
Anyway, further experimentation (graphs/charts from excel would be easy using the text files, for instance) would be nice; please let me know if you are doing something interesting with the data. I’m hoping that this will help us, as a community, determine what we want to do with this tag now that we have been using it for more than two years. What patterns do you see in the data? What does the nptech tag mean for our community? I am not going to try to start doing any analysis here, now — but I would really like to hear what people’s reactions to the tag timeline are.
There are still a lot of holes in this data that I could answer with a bit more programming. (i.e., who has been using the tag?) Suggestions for extending the script are welcome. What do we want to know?