OpenTEAM <> Hylo

OpenTEAM (Open Technology Ecosystem for Agricultural Management) is currently our primary partner, and we are working together to provide community tools for regenerative agriculture.

We are partnering with OpenTEAM to create a free and open source community platform for farmers, ranchers, and the regenerative agriculture movement on Hylo. Together with the OpenTEAM community and input from Regen Foundation, Hylo is designing new features to extend the platform to support people improving soil health and advancing agriculture’s ability to become a solution to climate change. The long-term goals of this partnership are to activate community among food producers and between producers and the public, to connect people to their bioregions, and to channel a greater flow of resources toward growers who want to engage in ecological regeneration--in order to build resilient local food systems and realize tangible benefits like improved soil health and carbon drawdown. Our initial scope of work with OpenTEAM is available here.

Community Platform Collabathon

The Hylo team led OpenTEAM’s Community Platform Collabathon series August-September 2021, where farmers, technologists, and advocates for equity and rights of nature came together to identify what tools are needed most. The focus is to create ways for food producers to easily connect with similar growing operations for mentorship, collaboration, and even market opportunities in the transition to regenerative practices, through the design of new features on Hylo. Participants included representatives from Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment, Regen Foundation, Regen Network, Terra Ethics, Open Rivers, and the California Farm Demonstration Network.

For the rest of October, the Hylo team will synthesize what we’ve heard and learned. We’ll create a proposal about how we plan to move forward and implement these ideas on Hylo. We’ll cover:

• Synthesis of each session, key takeaways, and emergent themes

• Designs and feature specifications for near-term and longer term implementation of key sets of functionality, especially:

  • SurveyStack integration and user experience journey for automatically setting up accounts on Hylo (or having a representative set up an account)

  • Single-Sign-On with Hylo, so participants can have one digital identity to use across the OpenTEAM ecosystem (including with the Digital Coffee Shop)

  • Farm Profile Pages, with updated designs based on feedback and the complete list of data points we will invite land stewards to share on their profiles

  • Representing land on Hylo, in association with farms (we look forward to having a dedicated convo about this with all of you in part 2 of the collabathon, especially those of you dedicated to Rights of Nature)

  • Tools for collective governance identified in our conversations about Regen Foundation’s Community Staking DAOs

• Land steward engagement: Plans for user testing and pilot experiments with various stakeholders represented by OpenTEAM, California Farm Demonstration Network, and Regen Network & Foundation

• Ideas for onboarding and training digital representatives of these communities to serve as a bridge between the real-world groups and their online spaces

• Suggestions for onboarding the OpenTEAM ecosystem onto Hylo and how to optimize use of the platform, as well as test and experiment with it

• Clear feedback loops for each community and initiative