I’m working with a makers space, the future forge in Silver City, and starting to try to adapt farmos for managing the space.
I’m interested in any feedback or advice on this subject.
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Does this makerspace have an agricultural theme? I’m curious why you might choose farmOS over building a Drupal site from scratch or even using another distribution? But having said that it wouldn’t be very hard to add custom asset/log types to make farmOS manage anything.
Tell us more about what you plan on managing in the maker space and how much modification you are willing to attempt, with custom modules you can pretty much achieve anything.
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I think this would be a great thing to experiment with @barton! I’ve always imagined that the underlying architecture of farmOS (assets and logs, movement/location logic, etc) could be useful outside of a farming context. “LifeOS” anyone? 
I agree with @Farmer-Ed that it might just be a matter of making a simple custom module that provides some new asset and log types to fit your particular record keeping needs.
The only other thing might be replacing the “farmOS” logo with the logo of your makerspace. That can be done in the Gin theme settings pretty easily - and some groups are already doing this as a way to “white label” farmOS.
Other than that, there may be some other bits that are somewhat “farm specific” - but maybe if you identify them we can think about ways to smooth that over too. I see no reason not to make it possible to use farmOS outside of ag use-cases, even if we won’t explicitly support or develop it as part of the core project. Generalization is always on the table.
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PS: Here are the relevant docs…
- Starting a custom module:farmOS module development | farmOS
- Defining custom asset/log types in the module: Entity types | farmOS
(Lots more in the /development/module section of farmOS.org for other stuff too. Check it out!)
The Future Forge is in the process of developing a public park food forest and teaching area adjacent to the main building. We will be developing and creating regenerative technology for the surrounding community.
The more I worked with farmos on my permaculture projects while working with Future Forge, as they developed the management side of the process, the more obvious it became that mostly what needed to be changed was the labels. Adding a more robust membership module, that will allow for controlling permissions to use equipment would be a necessary step.
This week I will begin working with an intern from Aldo Leopold School, who is one of those computer whizz kids, and seeing where we can take this thing.
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That’s great @barton!
Adding a more robust membership module, that will allow for controlling permissions to use equipment would be a necessary step.
Would love to see more experimentation with this kind of thing. I did a little work recently for a USDA deployment of PODS that adds some custom access control logic by overriding the asset entity access handler. Lots of possibilities!
A related initiative would be the “multi-farm” module (eg: GitHub - mstenta/farm_multifarm: Manage multiple farms in farmOS. PROOF OF CONCEPT - DO NOT USE WITH REAL DATA), which would allow for multiple farms to have records in a single farmOS instance, with separate access on a per-farm basis.
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Thanks Mike. Jeffrey, the intern I am working, with here at the makers space, got the farmos developers environment installed on his laptop. I pointed him at the discourse group, so you may be getting some questions from him.
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