A site to watch: Farm 2 Local

I just ran across Farm2Local, another budding start-up that aims to make it easier for farmers to find buyers and consumers to find fresh, local produce. Perhaps we can learn from them.

Featured Directory: The .Coop Directory

Cooperatives are one of the few types of businesses to have their own Top-Level Domain suffix, .coop. The organization that grants these domain names has been improving its directory of listed organizations, as a service to domain holders and in an effort to popularize the .coop suffix.
Features that they are advertising:

• .coop domain holders can Claim and Customize their listings
• listings are geo-tagged, so you can search by geography
• multimedia: you can add a photo, video and logo to your listing; you can also upgrade (pay?) to add more photos and videos, or a custom map or directory
• sharing widgets to point people to the directory, such as via Facebook and Myspace

These seem like fairly good ideas. It will be fun to see if they want to become a Data Sharing Organization someday.

UPDATE: The .coop Directory uses a company's software to display the directory listings on a map. We're a little disappointed at the closed and proprietary nature of the software. Coops can do better!

Retailer-Supplier Data-sharing

I don't know if the Data Commons will ever get this specific. Here's a story we were alerted to about how a retailer (Food Lion) is working with a lot of its suppliers to exchange real-time (or nearly) data on sales, inventory, etc. This helps get a clearer idea of what the stores have, what customers are buying, when a product is out-of-stock, and so on. This kind of data may not be our primary focus at the moment, but who knows where we'll end up?

A Shared Directory of Local Food

While browsing the Food Routes website, which is dedicated to promoting local food buying, I ran across this description of their database:

In collaboration with eatwellguide.org, FoodRoutes brings you an online map that can help you find locally-produced food near you. This map combines multiple directories from organizations around the nation into one powerful database. In the directory, you'll find descriptions, phone numbers, addresses, web sites, crop lists, and directions all to make local food purchasing that much easier.

I would love to know how they combine all those directories and keep them up to date, and whether the Data Commons Project can help them do that better.

An Example of a Shared Repository

I just ran across the Fedora Commons, "the home of the unique Fedora open source software, a robust integrated repository-centered platform that enables the storage, access and management of virtually any kind of digital content." The Commons is a non-profit organization "whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage." It continues the mission of the Fedora Project, which evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science. It looks like what they do for libraries, etc. is very similar to what we want to do with directories. Paul has some specific ideas about why the way in which they do it is not the way in which we want to do it, but I'll let him explain.

I'm interested in their funding sources. Two years ago, they got a 4-year, $4.9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. "The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation’s Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields." Could we learn something from Fedora's application for the grant?

Products and Services

In a previous post, I mentioned that we are looking for "early adopters" to provide feedback on our proposed products and services. Here is a quick description of what the Data Commons Project is and what are these products and services I'm talking about:
The DCP has grown out of previous projects, including the Grassroots Economic Organizing "Economy of Hope" directory and the Regional Index of Cooperation (www.find.coop). The idea initially was simply to build an open, shared, comprehensive and accurate catalogue of the (small-c) cooperative economy -- including coops and credit unions, but also land trusts, local currencies, employee-owned companies, community-supported agriculture, and so on. This effort is linking up with similar efforts worldwide of cataloguing the cooperative/solidarity/social economy. (There are different terms, none of which is completely satisfactory -- we've been playing with using the term "rooted" economy. More on that later.)
What we would like to build is:
1. a big repository of data: a database with names of companies, organizations, and individuals, contact info, descriptions of their products/services, etc.
2. a website that is one of many clients* of the big repository, that would display the info, permit searches, display results on an interactive map, maybe provide more value-added reports for a fee, etc.
3. a set of tools & protocols that allow fast, efficient, relatively easy merging and cleaning of data to and from the repository.

* Other clients would be members of the Data Commons Cooperative, and as such, subscribers to periodic updates from the repository, as well as suppliers of their own updates back to the repository (somewhat in the style of the AP news story cooperative, where members both contribute and use stories, and also non-members can sign up to just be users for a fee).

The idea here is that if an organization changes its contact info, say, or has an announcement, then it would be great if that change were picked up in one place and broadcast out to all
the places that have an interest in it, instead of piecemeal as each place goes through and updates their database, or that organization having to somehow contact everyone to tell them about their changes.

For example, a new worker coop formed in Western Mass. would be of interest to at least the Valley Alliance of Worker Coops, the ECWD, the USFWC, NCBA, NASCO, CFNE, SEN, GEO, MASSEIO, any industry or sector-specific networks that it might belong to, etc. etc., not to mention potential clients or suppliers. So, without getting too long-winded about all the possibilities, that's what we'd like to create, in a way that actually creates value for our users and would be financially sustainable.