I am not a developer, just a graphic designer, with an idea for an app that won’t let me sleep at night and I’d love some feedback on.
Through the shared general worry about basic survival in a halted economy, I have been thinking lots about community gardening and how to make it as easy and accessible as possible. That is also combined with ideas to move from our current speculation-based economics to smarter, community-driven ones that actually meets human needs. Anyway, the app idea is:
A system that where a group of neighbors can input:
How much produce they consume per week (see the flow)
How many hours they are available to work at a garden, and
How much gardening space they have among them.
The output would then be:
How much of their produce needs can be met given the space they have (30% each, for example. I guess this would require a database of how much space each crop requires, what is the average yield per plant, etc).
A list of seeds/materials to get them going
A combined schedule distributing everyone’s available hours to cover maintenance
A shift sign-up system with individual reminders and a check-off method that creates some accountability.
That’s it! Certain parts might be overly-complicated and ultimately unnecessary, but I am jazzed about the idea of creating better tools for organizing and feeding ourselves better.
Any thoughts on how to move this forward would be greatly appreciated.
Great to see the enthusiasm ! I think you might find value working with HoloREA for your food/human/resources flows and Sacred Capital if you want to give access to food/land/seeds… based on reputation (or other reputation-based system).
Maybe check them out both if you haven’t (they should show up in expectable places), you can contact users pospi and sidsthalekar if you have specific questions about these.
Hey! many thanks! I’ve read superficially about REA, so I might need to do some more homework on it. I like a lot the idea of including Sacred Capital!
What I’d love some more input on from the programming perspective is if structuring an app in this manner would make sense, or if it would be a development nightmare that needs some re-thinking.
I’m also curious as to what it would take to develop something like this labor-wise and resource-wise (maybe I’m getting ahead of the game but starting to think about kickstarters/grant applications/local government submissions, etc)
Hi @MonaP,
I’ve been working on a plant care IoT thing for some time. Sort of related but without any social context. Anyway have been looking into the holochain development landscape and seems it will take a few months for the recent update to RSA to settle in and the tutorials to be updated and such. Lots of parts to this puzzle outside of Rust code however, like UI or perhaps the scope not of a minimum viable product but like a minimum viable gardening community?
I love the idea of defining a minimum viable gardening community. A good first step might be to write up the concept, perhaps expanding on the functions of the app in a way that makes sense. I’ll see if I can get something jotted down on the next few days and perhaps expand from there?
Ok, I need to check in here more often. Well the last 2 weeks have been weird. I think a minimum viable gardening community as a topic of focus leads to lots of interesting stuff.
Cool, you do outline a number of things in opening this thread. Perhaps though at that point not from a context of minimalism. Being a backyard gardener, not a farmer with a tractor I think this could be as much about a local community as it is about bowls of arugula. It takes a lot of garden to keep a person in arugula. Well a person who likes arugula anyway. One thing I start to think about is how to get something put together that is real enough to pitch to a person or an organization in order to actually get space to garden in.
I’ve just been reading a bit elsewhere on this forum and recognizing how deep the philosophy goes. I have yet to really jump in on hApp development but smells to me like for those like me who are not geniuses better to wait till the development platform matures a touch on the new version before jumping in. Anyway at risk of going to far down the product development methodology, to prototype a minimum viable gardening community I think could be done with data in a google spreadsheet and the UI on something more mature and simple for concept testing. The point is we might test the concept and debug the concept until it does have viability before migrating it to rust code syntax in an hApp. Or perhaps until an hApp genius jumps in. Or until a garden plot is obtained.
Hey! Agreed. I used to get the feeling all I could do for now was twiddle my thumbs while the geniuses figure things out, but I keep finding work to be done in developing concepts, UI, UX. At least experimenting with it, which is how I arrived at this ridiculous name and friendly-looking splash screen
Nice !
Trying to wrap my head around what gardening for a new era means. Might be socially distanced gardening? How times change.
Sort of related was thinking that the app could define like an editable grow workflow schedule and plug participants into the schedule and nag them or get others to fill in or … and based on actually participation logged in to the grow workflow attempts to allocate the yield, but the actual yield would be a hard thing to calculate. Hmmm.
Just curious, what part of the world are you in?
Woah! Time flew while I got caught in a project. Sorry sorry.
“Gardening for a New Era” came up before the pandemic, thinking about new ways of coordinating and hoping it extends into other areas of life… yet open to interpretation and subject to the historical context, of course.
“the app could define like an editable grow workflow schedule and plug participants into the schedule and nag them or get others to fill in or … and based on actually participation logged in to the grow workflow attempts to allocate the yield”
Hi Mona,
I’ve been thinking about another micro / baby greens desktop growing rig. Have gone through this cycle a number of times each more refined. A friend just sent me a NYTimes article on grow at home mushroom kits. Rolling this around with your
“Gardening for a New Era” came up before the pandemic, thinking about new ways of coordinating and hoping it extends into other areas of life …
Got me to consider a different angle. I’d been thinking of “Community Gardening” as a central shared location where people garden. Another angle might be folks, call them micro farmers gardening micro greens, mushrooms, potatoes, victory gardens, honey and other specialties. Micro farmers produce at some times of the year more than they can use but not enough to rent a booth at the local farmers market. An app could help micro farmers trade and share the product among themselves and the larger gardening community.
Yea, I complicate things. Sometimes however the variations can coalesce into something better. trouble is that can take awhile.
I see this case as helpful complexity rather than confusing complication
I really like the take on micro-farming, definitely better targeted to urban settings with smaller incomes and spaces. Great particularly now as we might have a summer ahead of plenty of indoor time. This actually works quite well with the activities at St Sabina Gardens here in Chicago. These guys had a learning garden where they would teach kids and adults to grow food, but since their activities were suspended with the pandemic, they switched to creating indoor growing kids with home lesson plans. Pretty cool! https://www.sabinagardens.org/
Anyway, I regress. since the purpose of this second app set up you mention sounds slightly different than the first app (distributing individual production, rather than coordinating shared labor on a common garden), I could see it running as a separate app with the option of integrating with Togharden if a community happened to be using both.
Visual design could be helpful in establishing a bridge between both apps by giving them similar UI treatments and styles. Something along these lines:
(Yes, I do have a knack for cheap, cryptic, magnetic marketing taglines :P)
Very nice graphics.
I’m thinking that growing edibles in a shared space and growing edibles in a personal micro farm has a lot of overlap. Certainly regarding the individual mechanics of the growing and harvesting. The harvest might be shared within a community in both cases. The difference is more around if the grow bed and the tasks around it are shared or not. Might be able to focus on the overlap then work out how to handle the differences.
So I guess for now I can read Community Gardening as both a community gardening together and or micro farmers sharing harvest in a community.
The gardening part seems far more straight forward than the community part of it.
Is it possible to visually represent a community forming to garden? Actually your last graphic certainly does lean in that direction.
Then if one builds a happ to empower a gardening community does that germinate and grow a gardening community or does the gardening community need to germinate otherwise and then grow empowered by a happ?
Hello All, I am a developer and I have been developing the beginnings of an app that is designed to allow gardeners to track their production. Our intent in the longer term an information sharing app that allows gardeners to share information to help maximise productivity. Having a look at your idea there is no reason why we couldn’t include an area with “excess produce”. If you are interested in the app, you can access it at planyourpatchapp.com
