Much of the conversation was abstract, philosophical and only of tertiary relevance, but I did manage to go into the meeting with a list of ten questions and scribble notes while the answers were given. Only seven questions and answers are listed here as some answers applied to more than one question. It would perhaps have been helpful for me to record a video of the meeting. I make it a matter of policy not to record introductory meetings, doing so adds an extra burden to the participants and reduces the freedom to speak plainly and be authentic. Or perhaps I just forgot
Note that what follows is a summary, I wasn't transcribing the actual wording used. I'm sure I've left out some things that might have been useful, if I remember them I'll post them below. If anyone has any comments, observations or other input then please speak up. If you have any further questions for Nick I'll be happy to forward them to him.
Q: OFN already provides support for groups wishing to use it's platform, such as mentoring and "phone buddies". Naturally it also advocates the use of it's platform. Given that one of the proposed major roles of our group is support and advocacy where do we and OFN overlap? In this context where exactly is the area of interface between OFN and our group?
A: OFN doesn't provide the phone buddy service directly, instead it helps foster the self-organisation of the network's participants to provide this and other similar services itself. This seems to be the modal in general in OFN, that they steer people in the right direction but it is preferred that the network provides the actual support. They have observed that mutual support and assistance tends to spontaneously emerge among the network's participants anyway, they need only foster this natural tendency. I got the feeling that what we propose is a little unusual (but viewed positively) in that we are setting up the support system from outwith an existing network, the network will grow from the support rather than the support growing from the network. Either way our plans fit very well with OFN, and they stand ready to assist us with them, though the less assistance we need the more other saving-the-world they will have time to do.
Q: It would be useful to have a sandbox in which to explore and learn the OFN software, does such a facility exist? I also mentioned the problems I had in setting up a server using the provided installation scripts.
A: The most common way to play with the OFN software is to set up an enterprise on their system and keep it hidden. By default new enterprises are hidden while they configure their account, set up products and so on. There are however limitations with this method, while it would give us the freedom to play with the options hubs would use we couldn't conduct dummy transactions with other (hidden testing) entities such as producers and customers. Once we were finished with our exploration of the software the OFN technical people would be happy to delete our test account.
Another option would be to give us access to the OFN-UK staging server which they use to test modifications to their system before they are deployed on the main server. We would be able to have full freedom to create entities, transactions and so on. The drawback would be that this server is wiped and re-installed frequently (not regularly, it happens when they are in the process of doing new things). We would lose all our test data when that happened and we wouldn't have control over when that happens.
Regarding the problems I had installing the software, I got the impression this isn't surprising. The developers are very busy with adding features and maintaining the running instances of the software, the installation scripts are rarely used and would take a few valuable days to bring up to date. It's on the TODO list, but not near the top. Given the national nature of deployments they don't happen often enough to spend time keeping the installer current.
Q: Would it be possible for you to arrange meetings with people already involved in food hubs so we can gather a range of relevant information and experiences from them? Perhaps we could talk to one a week to give us time to reflect on the insights gleaned and incorporate them into our plans.
A: Yes, but people running food hubs tend to be very busy and it would be somewhat of an imposition to make such a request. There are weekly webinars on Facebook that most likely contain much of what we seek from such meetings, these are also posted on YouTube.
Q: Here in the Highlands the local produce is not diverse and would not provide a balanced diet. There's lots of sheep and cows but not a proportionate quantity of vegetables or even grains. Do food hubs in other areas have similar problems and if so what are the solutions?
A: This is in part a chicken and egg problem, it must be demonstrated that there is a viable local market for produce not generally grown locally before it's worth the investment of local producers in providing a supply. Partly this is a result of our economic system, which disincentivises farmers who wish to grow things that the land isn't ideally suited for and disproportionally rewards economies of scale. Market garden scale growing often struggles financially, particularly in locations where conditions are already challenging. One partial solution is to encourage small scale growers, gardeners and community gardens, to engage with their local food hub as a producer.
Q: There are cash, card and bank transfer payment options available. Are there any plans to support alternative currencies such as cryptocurrencies or LETS?
A: There has been a long standing desire to support cryptocurrencies, although investigation has revealed this to be challenging from a technical and security standpoint. One of the developers has proposed that OFN start it's own cryptocurrency: Open Food Coin. In most cases local currencies can be supported by using the "cash" option as their value is linked to the host nation's currency. There is a long term aspiration to amalgamate the national OFN systems into a European or even worldwide system. This would require that multi-currency support be added to the software.
Q: We have identified logistics as a significant issue that needs addressing, both transport of the food from the producer to the hubs and delivering the food to the customers. There are financial, convenience and environmental overheads associated with this. Are there any plans to integrate logistics into the software, for example assisting customers to pick up neighbours' orders when they pick up their own, or combining transport from producers to the hub? What are the solutions that existing hubs have employed.
A: Logistics is certainly one of the major issues hubs have to contend with. It's probably best for hubs to start with pick ups only, and where delivery is an option to carefully limit the radius within which orders are delivered. As for logistics, this is currently not supported by the OFN software, if it were to be implemented at the future it would most likely involve integration with existing online route planning using an integration solution such as Zapier. There would most likely be privacy and regulatory issues with implementing logistics management on the customer side of OFN. To an extent customer side logistics rationalisation happens already due to the spontaneous self-organisation that humans are good at. Neighbours will already pick up orders for each other by coordinating via other means.
On the supply side it has been noted that sometimes producers are reluctant for the frequency of the order cycle to increase. Taking time out of a busy day to deliver food to the hub once a week is one thing, but if that same time needs to be spent twice or three times a week it can quickly become a problem. There are instances of producers cooperating on transportation with other nearby producers, and to an extent this is supported by the OFN platform. The party providing the transportation service can add a charge for transportation.
Q: However likely it may or may not be, it is possible that Scotland will become independent of the UK in coming years. If so it would have a different currency, tax structure and regulatory framework than the UK. How would OFN-UK deal with this and what would it mean for Scottish members of the network?
A: While this isn't an eventuality that OFN-UK have discussed formally it is expected that an OFN instance would be set up to cover Scotland in the same way that Ireland has a separate OFN instance. Members of the OFN-UK network could then be transparently migrated to the new OFN-Scot network. If a European or worldwide OFN instance was to supersede the existing collection of national networks then managing Scottish independence would be even easier, requiring the addition of the new nation state to the OFN system and the assignation of Scottish network members to that new state.