This is my summary of the work of a large number of people, some whose names I did not catch (some people were working virtually) but there is a few names on our note pad (http://titanpad.com/lkXZuphYpS). I do not speak for the group but merely speak as a voice of the group and have written down my impressions. While I think the data we found was interesting, this report is by no means a good case for any policy, yet it may be an on ramp for another individual or organization to look further. So in the spirit of the Hackathon and Open Data, here is the summary, for what it's worth (stay tuned for upcoming post "Open Data Hackathon: For what it's worth").

Disclaimer : None of the calculations here have been peer reviewed or double checked. Do not quote this work as fact unless you plan on double checking the calculations yourself.

Update 1 : I've been working on tracking down our group members. I'll keep posting the names as they come in.
R.J. Steinert
Albert Chao
Dominic DiFranzo
Diane Hatz
Ann Middleton
Harlan Harris
Aurie Ben-Ezri-Raven

Update 2 : New version of the 'cow chart' with sources, cc logo, and farm bill hack logo. Also found that our data was from 2009, not 2010 (but published in 2010 ;) )!

Click to see the full version

The question

Do our Farm Bill policies foster a healthy lending environment for young farms?

Why we were concerned

I updated an ancient side project of mine today, OnlineWordProcessors.com. I went through quickly to see which of the contenders had folded, and it turned out only ONE had. Formerly known as Ajax Write is now home to a not so nice landing page that I won't even link to. On the other hand, there is a new contender on the block, Microsoft Office 365, which if you haven't noticed, is running advertisements like crazy (which is probably why I remembered to update the list on OnlineWordProcessors.com).

Info and links are scattered a bit so I'm placing these here for both my own reference and anyone else who finds them.

Links

• blog entry from NYFC http://www.youngfarmers.org/practical/farm-hack/
• blog entry from food and tech connect (Danielle Gould) http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2011/11/09/visualizing-farm-bill-...
• eventbrite signup page http://farmbillhack.eventbrite.com/
• Farm Bill Hack wiki http://farmbillhack.wikispaces.com/About
• Project Ideas http://farmbillhack.wikispaces.com/Project+Ideas
• the umbrella event "Open Data Day" http://www.opendataday.org/
• event from last year? http://www.foodandtechconnect.com/site/2010/12/07/hacking-social-good-op...

When and Where

Cookstr
86 Chambers Street
7th Floor
New York, NY

Saturday, December 3, 2011 from 8:30 AM to 8:30 PM (ET)

Last weekend I had a great time at the FarmHack NH talking about smart farm technology and my experience with Wireless Sensor Networks. The first day was a tour of a local farm, dinner, and some late night bonfire discussions which I was not able to attend. The second day we met up early at the Grange Hall (interesting history behind these buildings) in Lee, NH and split off into working groups. I joined the "Smart Farm" group which consisted of about 8 people discussing various creative ways that technologies like Arduino (http://www.arduino.cc) have been used to solve problems on farms. There was a lot of energy directed towards finding a project to work on together so we settled on tackling alerts for greenhouses. We have a grant application due on December 1 and we're still discussing exactly what kind of set up we're going to go for.

This past weekend over a dozen Drupal people came out to the Pirate Ship and the N.E.R.D. center for a three day long sprint for the Snowball Initiative. It was a great learning experience for me to work with such a large group who had so many great ideas. I think the direction the group ended up going has a lot of potential. Thank you to all who came! Below is a brief summary of what I think we accomplished and where I think the Snowball Initiative is going.

Starting at the BoFs of DrupalCon Chicago focused on "Paying for the Plumbing", I had been involved in discussions revolving around how we might be able to do a better job of getting developers the resources they need to do the work they want, and ultimately, grow a healthier open source community. We discussed things like "tip jars on project pages" to a Kickstarter-for-Drupal website. We all agreed that we needed to make it easier for those who have resources to give those resources to developers, but from all of the ideas we had, something was missing... So I called out on the community for the first Snowball Sprint.

After much deliberation over about a day and a half, we seemed to have arrived at a consensus that it is not the ability to donate resources to developers that doners lack, or really even who to donate to, but that the missing piece of the puzzle might be that which reduces the amount of effort it takes for doners to know WHICH IDEAS are worth donating to. So after a day and a half of discussions, we set out to design a transparent system that we hope will help facilitate community participation and validation in the realm of hatching ideas. It's something we're calling Community Driven Project Planning.

This is the story of why I changed my primary operating system from Ubuntu Linux to Mac OS X Tiger. Spoiler: I can't afford to not have advanced communication tools that work seamlessly.

This past weekend I lost my Lenovo power adapter and with a three week wait/process/ship time for a replacement from Lenovo, I decided it was time to retire my 4 year old Think Pad. After giving it some thought, I came up with my top 3 ways in which I would like to improve my laptop situation.

Requirement 1 - I need better communication tools.

I work on a distributed team all around the world. I need the kind of communication tools that make it pointless to be sitting in an office with my coworkers.

Requirement 2 - I need to start virtualizing my dev environment.

A sandbox should be completely disposable and easily spawnable. Using Ubuntu as my primary operating system was an easy choice to make after wrangling with wamp, mamp, xamp but over time I've realized I need to separate where I get shit done from where I fuck shit up. I need to be able to have the kind of flexibility where I can smash my server in the face with an ax to see if it runs better that way and not be afraid of it dying.

Requirement 3 - If the hardware breaks can I fix it quickly?

3 weeks is an unacceptable amount of time to wait for replacement parts and I'm not about to start scrounging in the bowels of a dying PC distribution model. I want to buy directly from those who make the hardware and to know they will get me parts quickly and reliably. Part of the reason I feel this way has to do with the fact I work on a small independent team and not for some giant corporation that has tons of spare parts for the computer equipment they standardized on.

Considering Requirement 1:

This past weekend at the 24 hour long Vermont Hackathon, MyWebGrocer opened up their new grocery store API for about a dozen teams to compete for $10,000. Using open source tools I rolled together a system for times of crisis that text messages citizens on the availability of clean water. I made this in the hopes that when people are stuck without power and clean water they would know when it's worth taking a potentially dangerous trip to the store to fetch clean water.

I built the application using the LAMP stack server architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), the Drupal content management system, the Open Layers module to record users' geolocations, the SMS Framework module to send text messages, and some code I wrote utilizing the MyWebGrocer API to monitor the inventory of water near users' locations. I didn't win anything in the competition but it was a blast to see something like this going down in VT and my exeriences will live on with my upcoming planned work on integrating text message alerts with my Sensor Hub platform for the dontflush.me project in Brooklyn, NY.

Cross posted from sensorhub.org.

Last night I set up an Acquia Dev Cloud account for my work on the Sensor Hub project. Some of the recent projects we've used Sensor Hub need more power than just a shared host, as we've found, because importing and parsing large amounts of data takes a lot of horse power. I'm also interested in making my life easier by standardizing more of the technology stack Sensor Hub relies on and Dev Cloud may prove to be a great piece in the stack. In the same vein, I'm also currently rewriting the Sensor Hub module to integrate with the Drupal installation profile Open Atrium to pass off some of the UX and IA Sensor Hub would otherwise have to tackle. I'm also considering the Acquia's Drupal installation profile called Commons as an option for integration with Sensor Hub over Open Atrium considering Acquia's commitment to maintaining Commons may prove to be stronger than Phase II's commitment to maintaining Open Atrium (Acquia's dev speed on Commons has been at mach five for the past few months). There may also be some synergy by using Acquia's Commons on Acquia's Dev Cloud. Either way, integrating Sensor Hub with OA paves the way for a potentially easy port to Commons in the future given that both installation profiles are Organic Groups centric.

Currently my development on Sensor Hub Beta2 has been in my local sandbox but I'll be pushing up my progress to the Dev Cloud this weekend.