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.
37 Signals is a supersmart little company known for creating easy-to-use web-based project management tools (namely the Basecamp suite), and they have just announced the latest in their product family: Campfire. 
According to their website, “Campfire brings simple group chat to the business setting. Instant messaging is great for quick 1-on-1 chats, but it’s miserable for 3 or 4 or 7 or 15+ people at once. Campfire solves that problem and plenty more. ”
With the release of this simple chatroom platform, I think they’ve just taken one major item off of my personal to-do list.
- Do the dishes
- Fix the front gate
Find a simple, stable, cheap platform for online nonprofit focus groups- Save the world
A little background: By day I work at a university with a nonprofit evaluation team. We work for other nonprofits that are trying (…or are being forced to by their funders) to discover and amplify the best aspects of their program. A major part of our job is finding out what people think works well — so we are typically creating surveys and conducting focus groups or our clients.
Focus groups are a great way to bring together a lot of good people and get a lot of good advice about a program. Among all the fun things we do with nonprofits, they’re my favorite. But in-person focus groups are expensive and difficult to arrange, especially when you are working with busy people. Who has time to sit around and talk about making a program better? You’ve too busy working on the program, dammit!
This problem is what first attracted me to the idea of conducting focus groups online. At the American Evaluation Association’s conference last year in Toronto, I was fortunate to sit in on a session that discussed the existing methods for doing this type of work. All of the evaluators in the room seemed to really get excited about it: online focus groups solve so many of of the distance/time/money problems evaluators face, especially in the nonprofit sector. Some people have already been doing this with telephone surveys, but in many cases (depending on your phone company and country) this can be really expensive — and it’s unlikely to give you a transcript.
And, unfortunately for most of us at the evaluator’s conference, the presenters were from the for-profit world, and their solutions were ridiculously expensive — about $1500 per focus group administration. These are basically managed chat rooms in which invited participants are egged on with questions from a well-trained facilitator. This is why online focus groups have been largely a marketing research arena — big pharma et al don’t need no stinkin’ open source solution.
After the session I raised the issue of reconfiguring WordPress or a more robust CMS (Joomla or Drupal) with a chat feature. If you could just manage to get all of your participants together online at the same time (or over a 3-day period), you could easily solicit lots of feedback. (And you wouldn’t have to transcribe the results). Folks (including focus group guru Richard Kreuger) were excited about the possibility of finding a cheap way to do this: there is a serious need for something way below the $1500 range.
Unfortunately, in my research, I that most server-side free/open source chat software is buggy, poorly designed, and horrible with server resources. I found that people were using hosted solutions like Yahoo discussion groups in a pinch, and having limited success. So, not really able or willing to create a program from scratch, I put the project on hold. The recent release of Campfire brings a number of awesome features to the under-$20 table. Here are my notes on the best features for focus groups with Campfire:
- It’s simple, clean, easy, elegant (all synonyms for “37 signals product”)
- Real time image previewing (for getting reactions, for example, to a chart)
- You get a unique url for your chat, unlike an IM chat, so you can invite people to a web page
- It tracks previous conversations
- It keeps a record of who said what when (the timestamps are just killer)
- You can have secure chats (essential, I would think, for IRB approval …)
- No software other than a web browser is needed.
- Repeat: automatic transcriptions!
So I’m really excited about Campfire and I look forward to trying it out, hopefully with a longer post in the near future about the existing options for online research of this nature. Until then, check it out for yourself if you need to do some group instant messaging, I think the possibilities are amazing if you just have a talented coordinator and some people that have valuable things to say.
I am currently researching a field of design known as “Participatory Design” that has a fascinating history (dealing with Scandinavian labor unions) and a very promising future. In short, PD is about incorporating the user in the design process from day one. The resulting ideas and workflows are, in my mind, incredibly powerful tools for working on any project. My focus is web development.
Most of my interest in this concept comes from my day job at a nonprofit evaluation firm — we do “collaborative evaluation” to help programs develop. The concepts are largely the same, and I’m just trying to apply them to web design and the development of usable, useful online tools.
This process is intimately involved with many of the same user-centered concerns that preoccupy other ICT-development folks, such as the advocates of free and open-source software.
The center of the world for PD is the organization Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. They have a site dedicated to PD resources.