Funding Proposal: Sponsor an attendee to the Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology (GOAT)

Community
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Funding Proposal

Title: Sponsor an attendee to the Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology (GOAT 2022)
Submitted by: Michael Stenta
OpenCollective account: https://opencollective.com/goatech
Cost: $500

Description

The Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology (aka GOAT) is a sister organization of farmOS, originally started by, and currently organized by, a number of individuals in and close to the farmOS community.

Website: https://twitter.com/GOATech_org
Forum: http://forum.goatech.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GOATech_org

The goals of the organization are outlined on http://goatech.org/

The Goals of GOAT

Coordinate existing development – there are many organizations working on open ag software and hardware today with overlapping interests. Let’s get together! Let’s talk about building software together BEFORE we spend time and money, not after!

Invite new development – Let’s make a place where newcomers can easily find developers and users with overlapping experiences. People evaluating open vs closed ag software/hardware should find a thriving, engaged community which can make their work easier, faster, and better.

Aligning technology and actual users – Finding people to try, test, break, and give feedback on new technology is hard but critically important to making technology relevant and useful. By bringing users and developers together with open lines of communication, we can increase the utility of open technology in ag across the board.

Creating a GOAT Roadmap – If we collectively have a plan, then we can all contribute more effectively. Let’s reduce duplication of efforts, focus on common areas we all need, and put the effort of contributors into a broader context for funders so they can see the big picture.

In 2018, the first in-person Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology was organized in upstate New York, and with support from some key sponsors was able to pay for travel to bring people together from all over the country (and some international). A few other events took place, but the pandemic postponed the big event for the past few years. Now the 2022 In-Person GOAT is being planned for this coming October: GOAT 2022 – GOAT

While the farmOS community’s focus is on our specific software, we benefit greatly from supporting the larger ecosystem, and bringing people together to tackle challenges benefits everyone.

I propose that farmOS put $25 of it’s monthly budget towards supporting GOAT. (updated 2022-07-14 - see below)

I propose that farmOS contribute $500 to GOAT in order to sponsor one attendee for GOAT 2022.

Poll

Do you support funding this proposal?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters
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@mstenta, GOAT looks like a fantastic project I’ve looked through many of the projects in the past, possibly one of the places I came across farmOS first, one thing that I’ve wondered about a few times is the lack of encryption on their discord forum, I find it a little off putting these days to sign up to forums with no SSL certificate I know they probably don’t store too much personal information but still expect it to be the min standard.

It’s still a yes vote from me though.

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I agree. :smile:

For context, the GOAT forum is self-hosted and was set up a while ago by volunteers. I think the plan is to try to move it to official Discourse-hosted servers (like the farmOS one is).

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Didn’t mean to sound too harsh as I very much appreciate that, just think in this day and age it wouldn’t be too hard to find someone to setup some certs from let’s encrypt. Otherwise I can find very little to criticize them for but they could be losing out on lots of potential support.

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All good @Farmer-Ed! And agreed! I’m sure they’d welcome a volunteer to set up Let’s Encrypt. :wink:

Here’s the Matrix chat room if anyone’s interested: https://app.element.io/#/room/#goatech:matrix.org

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I know I’ve asked about this a couple times :slight_smile:, once here. At this point a hosted instance seems like the most sustainable solution, would be great if community funding could support that.

Considering oursci uses the forum for their technical support it would be nice to see some financial support from them.

But +1 to farmOS contributing some here. I think I would vote against much more than $25 (currently 1/8th of our $200/monthly) and encourage others to contribute directly to goatech themselves. But farmOS establishing a recurring contribution to goatech is kinda a precursor to providing visibility to that, so again, :+1: to this proposal from me.

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I chose $25 without any real justification (copied and pasted the Gin proposal). If we want to scale that back a bit, that would be fine too. $20/mo? $15/mo? Open to opinions on what’s reasonable! I agree that contributing SOME amount is the precursor for others to join in - and that’s ultimately what’s needed. :slight_smile:

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I’m going to follow up here once I confirm the cost for a single attendee to come to GOAT, which we discussed might be a better one-time donation to GOAT. I think it will be in the ballpark of $300, though, which is what the proposed amount would be annually.

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Thanks @jgaehring ! I will update this proposal to reflect a one-time donation instead of monthly, once we have that number. I’ll reset the poll as well.

(Context for others: this was the decision we came to on today’s monthly call. It will be more immediately beneficial to sponsor someone’s attendance to GOAT 2022 than contribute monthly donations.)

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Ok, yea, $375 is the base amount, which covers the main cost of one person for full room-and-board during the conference. The general price their asking is $500, which covers additional operating costs and helps offset expenses for those who need financial assistance to attend.

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I’ve updated this proposal to be a one time donation of $500 instead of ongoing $25/month. This will support one attendee to GOAT 2022 on behalf of the farmOS community.

I have reset the poll, so if you have already voted for this please vote again!

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Just want to ping this - applications have been extended to August 5th.

Also, there is financial support - so if you don’t think you can make it apply anyway - we’ll do our best to help make it work.

We’d rather have folks apply who need funding that not apply because they can’t pay… the whole point of this conference is to get folks who normally may not show up for financial or other reasons to come together.

Hope to see you all there!

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Let’s plan to make a final decision on this on the next monthly call. I’ll add it to the agenda.

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14

Approved.

1 Like