10 ways to get involved in Growstuff right now

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As you probably know, Growstuff is in a state of soft launch right now while we implement a few more features and iron out some wrinkles before we invite the whole world to come see what we’re doing.

We’re delighted that so many people have been interested in the project so far — we’ve seen a good number of signups and lots of people using the site. If you’re not involved yet, or want to get more involved, here are some things you can do:

  1. Sign up for a Growstuff account. Just having people on the site, logging in and exploring it, helps us see how the software performs.
  2. Plant something. Tell us what you’re growing, and help build our database.
  3. Don’t see what you want to plant? Request a new crop in our forums.
  4. See what our other members have posted, and help them out if you happen to have some tips or ideas to answer their questions. You can even subscribe to the RSS feed for recent posts, if you want to keep up that way.
  5. Join our Discuss mailing list, where we are planning and discussing how to build Growstuff’s new features.
  6. Volunteer to test the software before we deploy it to the live site — see the call for customers emails on the discussion list.
  7. Interested in coding? Sign up as a coder — see the call for coders email that goes out every 2 weeks to our discussion email list. We’re looking for people of all levels of experience, and can offer mentoring/training if you’re new to developing Rails apps. We work in pairs.
  8. If you already know your way around Rails, we always need people to review our pull requests.
  9. Take an early sneak preview of our nascent API and start thinking about developing apps. (Note that the API is very much subject to change at present!)
  10. Finally and most importantly, let your friends know about Growstuff, and that we’re looking for people to get involved. Point them at the Growstuff site or at @growstufforg on Twitter.

Thanks!

Newsletter: Watch Growstuff Grow!

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Since our soft launch a few weeks ago, we’ve started to see how the site is shaping up and how people use it. We’d like to welcome our 100+ early members who have signed up so far. If you’d like to join them, you can sign up for Growstuff here.

New features

This newsletter, we’re going to switch from listing features that we’ve recently developed and are in testing, to ones we’ve actually pushed out to our production site. We’ll mention what’s in progress below.

So, without further ado, here’s a list of some of Growstuff’s most significant new features since the last newsletter:

  • Shiny new logged-out homepage: if you visit the homepage when you are signed out, you will now see a more dynamic page with community content on it, rather than the static page that was previously there.
  • Improved date picker for plantings: The date now defaults to “today”, and there’s a friendlier calendar picker rather than having to manipulate three different dropdowns. The calendar picker is keyboard-navigable. You can also simply type in the date in YYYY-MM-DD format if you prefer not to use it.
  • sun/shade metadata on plantings: when you plant something, you can now fill in whether you planted it in sun, shade, or semi-shade; this data will shortly be aggregated on the crops page to provide more information who are interested in growing the crop.
  • Email notifications: when someone comments on one of your posts, you’ll now get an email notification as well as it appearing in your Inbox. You can turn off email notifications in your settings
  • Private messages: you can now send a private message to another member (there’s a button on their profile page for this)
  • Analytics tracking: this should be invisible to most of you, unless you review your cookies manually. We’ve installed some analytics/tracking code so we can keep track of how many people are visiting Growstuff, where they’re coming from, and what they’re doing on the site. This helps us improve Growstuff based on actual usage, rather than guesswork. We are using Clicky which is an independent analytics product not linked to any advertisers or anything like that. Their privacy terms are strong (see their terms of service for details) and furthermore, we have configured our tracking not to track individual IP addresses. We think this is the best option we could find to balance our operational needs and our members’ and visitors’ privacy.

We’ve also made a number of smaller changes and bugfixes. You can read more in our release notes from March 28th and April 3rd.

Coming up

Our coders have recently created a “search for nearby members” page which is being tested on our staging server at present. We’re also working on connecting your Growstuff account to Twitter, and on paid memberships (including “seed” accounts, which will give you permanent paid account status and let you support Growstuff in its early days).

Growstuff is an open source project. If you’d like to get involved as a developer, tester, or in some other role, you can find out more on our wiki. You might also like to join our join our discussion mailing list or come hang out with us on IRC.

Crops, crops, and more crops

We’ve added a heap of new crops to our database thanks to suggestions from our members.

They include bok choy, choy sum, loquat, Vietnamese mint, blueberry, bilberry, tatsoi, rapini, nettle, pot marigold, black mint (aka haucatay), Mexican tarragon (aka Mexican marigold), elecampane, lady’s bedstraw, and squash (we have no idea why we didn’t have that already).

If you’d like to suggest crops we don’t yet have, you can do so in the Requests for new crops thread in our Feedback & Support forum.

Interested in a Growstuff Working Bee?

We’re looking at planning a working bee — a day when Growstuff members get together to work on Growstuff — in Melbourne, Australia sometime in the next couple of months. (Originally we were going to do it on short notice this coming weekend, but it was just too short notice, so we’re postponing until we have more time to plan). You can read more about our plans on the wiki. If you’re interested in taking part, or have ideas for things to work on or ways to make the day a roaring success, drop us an email.

We’d also love to run working bees in other locations. If you have a cluster of Growstuff folks in a certain city or area, and would like to run a working bee, let us know and we’ll do everything we can to help you!

That’s all for now

Once again, thanks enormously to everyone who’s signed up to try out the site so far, and to all our marvelous volunteers. Please feel free to forward this email to anyone you know who might be interested in Growstuff, and help us grow!

Growstuff Newsletter: Join now and get a preview of growstuff.org

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Did you know that almost every gardening website sends out its newsletter on Friday? We try not to do that. Usually we send ours out around Tuesday, but this week we’re running a little late. Our reason? Well, we’ve been busy launching our site!

It’s what we call a “soft launch”, which we explained in this blog post:

There is definitely a tipping point between “ready for friends and supporters to take a look” and “hiring a sky-writer to write GROWSTUFF above the Superbowl” (or, more realistically, “blast out announcements to every social media venue and gardening group we can find”). We’re expecting to pass that tipping point in a month or two — we’ve been saying “May, ish” — and when that happens we’ll do what we call our “public launch”: the one where we actually do a heap of publicity, as opposed to just writing a blog post like this one for our existing supporters.

So, in the meantime, here’s what we’d love from you: sign up, explore, tell us what you think. Invite some friends. Point them at this blog post, so they know what to expect. Start tracking your food garden, and explore our crops database. Take a look at our forums, and post any suggestions or feedback you might have. Keep an eye on this blog (or Twitter) for announcements and news as we continue to improve the site. If you’re really keen, take a look at our tracker where we list features we’re working on and planning, and check out our wiki where you can find out how to get involved in helping us build this thing.

So yeah, that’s been keeping us busy.

We’d love it if you signed up for Growstuff and took a look around. The more members we have right now, the better it is for us in testing how the site performs in real-world conditions.

What’s new

Here are some of the new features we’ve built in the last couple of weeks:

  • Friendlier signup emails: We want to make sure that the first email you get from us is useful and welcoming.
  • Crop wrangling: we’ve started to build the infrastructure for a team of volunteers to look after our crops database. Since our soft launch, only these “crop wranglers” are able to edit crops, but if you see something’s missing you can request new crops in our support forum.
  • Delete gardens: it might sound like a small thing, but we had to to make sure that when you delete a garden, it deletes everything planted in that garden.
  • Lots of documentation: we had to write a bunch of policies and a support FAQ. These have now all been posted on the public site.
  • Various improvements to the posting page: we added some help, fixed some bugs, and generally cleaned up this page a bit.
  • Pagination: rather than show all our crops, members, or posts on one page, we now split them over multiple pages. This makes the page load quicker and places less load on our servers.
  • Changes to login names: we limited login names to a reasonable length and to just letters, numbers and underscores. We also made sure that the case of your login name is maintained (that is, if you sign up as “Mandy” it doesn’t get changed to “mandy”).
  • Lots of infrastructure work: We had a heap of stuff to do to roll everything out to the production website, from arranging database backups to setting up our webserver to answer more requests concurrently to tweaking the code so our developers can clearly see when they’re on the production site vs. their own development systems.
  • Yet another Rails upgrade: another security upgrade to 3.2.13. Supposedly there are some performance problems with this release, but we did it anyway and haven’t noticed anything bad so far. (Admittedly, our traffic is still very low.)

Thanks as usual to our volunteer developers and coaches, who included Joseph, Cesy, Miles, Jared, and Ricky, and our volunteer customers who provided feedback on our work, including Jenny, Fe, Amy, Marion and Juliet. We couldn’t do this without them/you!

Upcoming events

For once we’ve got a quiet few weeks ahead of us, but we are planning a hack day/sprint for anyone who’d like to spend a day writing code for Growstuff. We’ll offer training/mentoring, so newbies are welcome! Stay tuned for details.

Apart from that, if you run a tech meetup or conference or a sustainability/food/gardening group and would like us to come and talk about what we’re doing, we’d love to do that. Just drop us a line at info@growstuff.org.

That’s all for now

In conclusion: sign up for Growstuff now and take a look at our work in progress. We can’t wait to see you there!

A soft launch.

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If you follow us on Twitter you might have seen that we’ve quietly launched our live website. It’s what we’re calling a “soft launch”. What’s that mean, though?

Basically, we’ve launched a public version of our website, on the URL where it will live for the rest of its life: http://growstuff.org/. (That URL formerly pointed to our wiki, which you can now find at http://wiki.growstuff.org/.) The website is still a work in progress, but we’ve made it public so you can see what we’re doing.

You can sign up right now for an account, and take a look around. We don’t believe in closed betas and all that nonsense (“closed” is not our favourite word), so you don’t have to beg for an invitation or wait in a queue. Just come on in, plant some things, read our forums, see who else is around, and watch as Growstuff, uh, grows.

So what’s the difference between a soft launch and a “hard” launch, then?

The main difference is in how we’re promoting it. We’re telling friends and family — and obviously the people who are already following the project via the blog, newsletter, and Twitter — but we’re not exactly shouting it from rooftops.

If you sign up and look around, you’ll notice that there are still some blank spots where features need to be — image placeholders, for instance, where you’ll soon be able to post pictures of your own garden and what you’re planting. There are a lot of other things we’re still working on, too. In fact, we’ll always be working on new features; we don’t want to be one of those sites that launches and then hardly ever improves anything.

Another reason for this soft launch is so that we can track the site’s performance and see how it behaves with real live humans using it. We’re watching closely as people sign up and start to do things on the site, and tweaking our code and configuration in response. While we don’t expect the site to suffer badly from the load, we want to have some time to get used to running a real live site, and make sure all our infrastructure and processes are working as they should be.

There is definitely a tipping point between “ready for friends and supporters to take a look” and “hiring a sky-writer to write GROWSTUFF above the Superbowl” (or, more realistically, “blast out announcements to every social media venue and gardening group we can find”). We’re expecting to pass that tipping point in a month or two — we’ve been saying “May, ish” — and when that happens we’ll do what we call our “public launch”: the one where we actually do a heap of publicity, as opposed to just writing a blog post like this one for our existing supporters.

So, in the meantime, here’s what we’d love from you: sign up, explore, tell us what you think. Invite some friends. Point them at this blog post, so they know what to expect. Start tracking your food garden, and explore our crops database. Take a look at our forums, and post any suggestions or feedback you might have. Keep an eye on this blog (or Twitter) for announcements and news as we continue to improve the site. If you’re really keen, take a look at our tracker where we list features we’re working on and planning, and check out our wiki where you can find out how to get involved in helping us build this thing.

It’s time for me to get back to coding, but enormous thanks to the volunteers who’ve helped us get this far, and to all those who have signed up since we tweeted about our soft launch yesterday. We look forward to meeting many more of you soon!

We’re in business! Growstuff News for March 13th, 2013

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We’re in business!

We’re well on track for our launch. Our biggest news is that as of the 28th of February, Growstuff is now incorporated. (We’re an Australian proprietary limited company, if you want to read up about what that is on Wikipedia.)

Of course that’s just the beginning of our paperwork… we’re more or less buried under a pile of forms and financial sheets, but when we dig our way out from under them we’ll be ready to open the doors and let everyone take a look at what we’re building.

What’s new

These last two weeks, most of our development work has been around improving the look of our website. (All this has been released on our development site. If you’d like a sneak peek at our work in progress, see below for how to get involved.)

  • Signed in homepage: Previously, the homepage looked the same whether you were signed in to your account or signed out. Now when you sign in, you’ll see a page full of information targeted to you, instead of the general homepage that casual visitors see.
  • Planting page improvements: the page that shows what you’ve planted got a lot of love, adding information about the crop you’ve planted and placeholders for where you’ll (eventually) upload pics.
  • Improved post display: we include more handy links on posts, showing comments, permalinks, and so on.
  • Look and feel: We’re moving away from the “out of the box” look that our website had, so this iteration we started to work toward our own colours and branding.

We’ve also started in on the work for our production deployment: the servers, backups, performance monitoring, and all the other things we’ll need to actually serve up a website to — hopefully! — thousands of real, live food growers.

Thanks to our volunteer coders, coaches, and customers including Miles, Amy, Jared, Florian, Joseph, Jenny, Ilyena, and Jo!

If you’d like to get involved in Growstuff right now — yes, before our launch — as a coder or a customer (which means, any gardener who’d like to use our site and has opinions about what it should do), your first port of call would be to sign up to our discussion list, where most of the action takes place. More info, as always, is available on the Growstuff wiki.

Got a late-summer zucchini glut? Or are you only just starting to plant them?

One thing we hear time and time again from gardeners is that they’re tired of books and websites that don’t understand their local climate. Some people’s zucchini need careful tending and watering twice a day, while others find that the zucchini spread across the garden like triffids and produce so copiously that they can’t get rid of them. For those of us in the southern hemisphere, our zucchini season’s just ending, while many of our northern friends are just starting to plan their spring planting.

Young woman cradling four giant zucchini in her arms.

CC-BY-SA icrontic.com on Flickr

Last week on our blog we posted about some of our experiences with trying to find gardening information that’s relevant to our own climate and locality.

When we surveyed people interested in Growstuff a couple of months ago, one of the things we heard over and over again was that people wanted local gardening information. Nobody in a dry climate wants to be told that zucchini don’t need watering; nobody wants to get newsletters from the wrong hemisphere talking about “spring planting” in autumn; nobody wants to spend hours researching the best and most delicious heirloom fruit varieties only to find that they don’t work in their local climate or aren’t available from local nurseries.

That’s why we’re building location into Growstuff as one of its key features. We want to help you find locally relevant information, and we also want to help connect you with local food-growers so you can share your experiences directly.

Read more on the Growstuff blog.

Upcoming events

Courtney and Alex will be at a couple of events in Melbourne, Australia over the next couple of weeks.

First up, the EcoCity Food Forum on Friday 22nd March. This is a one-day forum/unconference co-hosted by Doing Something Good and the City of Melbourne. We’re hoping to run a session about Growstuff, talking about our open source development and collaborative community processes.

The very next day, on Saturday 23rd March, we’ll be sharing an information stall at the CERES Harvest Festival with the folks from Open Food Web. If you’re going to be at the festival, drop by for a cool drink and a chat — we’d love to hear your ideas and thoughts about Growstuff and how we can help you grow more food.

Spread the word!

This newsletter’s one of our main ways of keeping people in the loop as we head towards our launch. If you know anyone who might be interested in joining Growstuff when we open the doors, please forward them this newsletter and invite them to subscribe.

According to my Canadian friends, I have no friends: the perils of international gardening

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I’m Australian. A decade or so back, I was living in Ottawa, Canada, and my friends there told me some jokes that went like this:

How do you tell someone’s got no friends? They have to BUY zucchini in summer!

And:

Did you hear about the guy who left his brand new car unlocked overnight? He came back the next morning and found the back seat full of zucchini.

I was bewildered. It was clear that vegie-growing Canadians suffered a near-constant zucchini glut, but I didn’t understand why. “If you don’t want that many zucchini,” I asked, “then why did you plant them?”

“Plant them?” said my Canadian friends incredulously, “You don’t plant zucchini. Zucchini are an act of God. They just show up in your compost heap, or anywhere else if you don’t watch out.”

Young woman cradling four giant zucchini in her arms.

CC-BY-SA icrontic.com on Flickr

“So just don’t water them,” I said. After all, zucchini not watered for a couple of days will generally wither and die, as I’d discovered over several antipodean Christmases when I went away to visit the family for a couple of days.

“… Water them?” asked the Canadians. “We don’t water them.”

That’s when I realised. Ottawa, Canada is not only situated on top of the Canadian Shield where water basically settles in puddles all over the place, but they have rainy, humid summers, as compared to my home of Melbourne, Australia, where our summers are dry and scorching. In my world, zucchini need a good watering every day, and sometimes twice when it really heats up. In Ottawa, zucchini get all the water they need from rain and what’s left of the snowmelt and, okay, perhaps the occasional sprinkle with a garden hose. Or so it seemed to me, otherwise why all the jokes about unlocked cars and friendless zucchini-buyers?

When we surveyed people interested in Growstuff a couple of months ago, one of the things we heard over and over again was that people wanted local gardening information. Nobody in a dry climate wants to be told that zucchini don’t need watering; nobody wants to get newsletters from the wrong hemisphere talking about “spring planting” in autumn; nobody wants to spend hours researching the best and most delicious heirloom fruit varieties only to find that they don’t work in their local climate or aren’t available from local nurseries.

That’s why we’re building location into Growstuff as one of its key features. We want to help you find locally relevant information, and we also want to help connect you with local food-growers so you can share your experiences directly.

We thought long and hard about how to manage the differences in climate and environment that go with different locations. If you’ve been around many gardening forums, you’ll probably know about the USDA’s “hardiness zones”. These were developed by the US Department of Agriculture to help people understand what they could plant, and when.

USDA hardiness zone map

USDA hardiness zone map, 2012

I always thought the USDA hardiness zones didn’t apply outside the US, but it turns out that they’re based on a measure that can be translated to any part of the world, if you know how it works. They’re simply a measure of the length of winter: the number of days between the average first and last frost of the season. So, in theory, you should be able to apply them anywhere.

But think about the zucchini. Frost dates are the least of my worries. In my part of the world, it’s the scorching heat that’s the problem, not the winter cold. Local seed vendors, like the Digger’s Club, use a “cold zone” (based on the USDA system) and a heat zone as well, based on the number of days each year over 30 degrees celsius. You might think heat’s not that great a factor where you are, but our climate’s changing, so more and more people are going to be caring about it in coming years.

Map showing recent changes in hardiness zones. About half of the US has become one zone hotter.

About half the US has moved to a hotter hardiness zone in recent years.

Is that enough? Well, talking to some Growstuff volunteers from the UK, where they have a relatively mild climate and not much variability in heat and cold, I find that the thing they care about most is the aspect of their gardens: which way they’re facing, relative to the sun. Any UK gardening book will advise you to choose a garden site that faces south, to catch the oblique angle of the sun from their high latitude. Should we build this into Growstuff, asking people which way their gardens face and advising them to choose ones that face south? Well, no; apart from the fact that those in the southern hemisphere would want their gardens to face north, this sort of concern only applies at high latitudes; even at Melbourne’s 37 degrees, it’s not a very big deal for us, and the closer you get to the equator the more the sun tends to be directly overhead.

In the end, we went back to the question of “where do you get advice about gardening?” and found that people usually talk to their friends, family, neighbours, and others in their local area. It’s people near you who can commisserate about the rain or lack of rain, who you can ask about that infestation of little white bugs that seems to be everywhere this spring, or who can share a punnet of seedlings with you if they don’t need to plant more than a couple of zucchini. (Canadians, substitute some other plant that you actually buy and plant on purpose.)

On Growstuff’s website, we ask you for your location as an optional part of your profile information. You can use whatever level of detail suits you, including none at all, but Growstuff will work best if you choose a location that’s reasonably specific, like your city, town, suburb, or neighbourhood. Once you tell us where you are, Growstuff will help you find people nearby who are growing the things you’re growing, offer you suggestions based on your neighbours’ activity, and even build up a database of planting times and tending tips based on the aggregate of what people in your area are doing, whether it’s planting zucchini in April or October, watering them daily or never at all. Of course, you’ll be able to see what people elsewhere in the world are doing too — the diversity and range of experience of gardeners around the world will be fascinating to explore.

It’s early days yet, but we’re pleased that we’ve built the first part of the infrastructure for this: the ability to choose your location, and for it to be converted to latitude and longitude on our backend so we can use it to calculate what’s nearby. The next thing you’re likely to see are ways to connect to people in your area, and then, as we all start growing stuff and contributing to Growstuff’s knowledge of what grows where, we’ll start showing suggestions for what to plant and when to plant it. It’ll take at least a year for us to learn about all the various crops in all the places they might be grown, but we hope you’ll stick around for the ride. It’s going to be exciting.

The First Ever Growstuff Newsletter

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Hi! This is our first newsletter, so if you’re getting it by email, please accept our apologies for any strangeness in formatting or style. It may take us a couple of tries to get all the parts of this machine working smoothly together.

Here’s what you can expect from the newsletter: every two weeks we’ll talk a bit about the status of the project, our progress towards public launch, and some other items of interest to our community. Pretty straightforward! And so without further ado…

We have a launch date

… or at least a launch month. It’s looking like we’ll be opening Growstuff up to the general public in May, so stay tuned!

What we’ve been up to

We’ve had a busy and productive two weeks. Some of the major work we’ve done includes:

Forums

We’ve built a forum system where you can discuss growing stuff, sustainability, and other topics. This is a big part of Growstuff’s social infrastructure. We want to make it easy for like-minded food gardeners to find each other and share their stories and tips. Initially, we plan to have just a small set of site-wide forums, but before too long we hope to allow our members to create forums on any topic they like.

Notifications

What good are posts and forums and comments if you don’t know when someone’s replied to you? We’ve rolled out a basic notification system, which tells you when people have commented on your posts via an inbox on the site. In coming weeks, we’ll be hooking this up to email, so you can choose to have notifications sent to you that way too. Don’t worry, we’re adamant about not spamming you nor even annoying you. We want you to really enjoy getting our email notifications, otherwise what’s the point?

Geolocation

When we surveyed potential Growstuff users, one of the things we heard over and over was that people want gardening advice tailored to their local area and climate. We’ve just built the first part of this, which is to let you specify a location in your profile. Because we care about privacy, we don’t pick up your location automatically from your browser (eww!), and we don’t make you give a precise location. Tell us as much as you’re comfortable with, whether it’s at the country, state, town or street level, and we’ll work with it.

Bugfixes, security, and other small improvements

You might have heard that Ruby on Rails has had a spate of security problems lately, resulting in lots of necessary upgrades. So, we had another upgrade, this time to Rails 3.2.12, which went smoothly and with no drama, as well as a security upgrade to our JSON library, which was similarly smooth. We also upgraded to the latest version of Twitter Bootstrap, which is the framework we use for the look and feel of the site, and to make a responsive version of Growstuff for mobile devices. Not for any particular reason, but just because we were falling behind and wanted to keep up with the latest features.

Apart from that, other bugfixes and small changes included:

  • Improvements to the “change password” part of the member settings page, making it easier to use.
  • Prevent people from signing up with the same login name. (They were already prevented from using the same email address.)
  • Remove an extraneous and misleading “New Garden” link from other people’s profile pages if you’re looking at them while logged in.

Thanks to our volunteers!

Our coders this iteration were Miles, Cathy, Jared, Amy, Joseph, Courtney, and Skud.

Acting as customers, to review and comment on our work, were Jo, Vernieda, Jenny, and Fe, in addition to the coders who worked double duty to help us try out new features.

If you’d like to learn more about contributing to Growstuff as a coder, a customer, or in any other capacity, check out the Growstuff Wiki for more information.

Why Growstuff is Open Source

As you may already know, Growstuff is an open source project, which means that you can download, read, modify and redistribute the software that runs our site. Why do we do this? The other day we posted on the Growstuff blog:

When we talk about social enterprises — businesses that hope to achieve a social good through their business activities — we seldom look at their software practices. But the choice of software to use, or decision to develop software under a closed or open model, has a social impact, just as do the choice of environmentally friendly materials for physical manufacturing, or the decision to employ people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We expect social enterprises to follow ethical business practices; why not expect them to follow software practices that support equal access, transparency, and accountability?

When it comes to sustainability, it’s about more than changing your light bulbs or using a fancy water bottle. Sustainability’s about developing communities and ways of living and working that can survive and thrive in the long term. Open source is a sustainable way of building software. If a company that writes closed software goes under, the software dies with it, but an open source software project can live long beyond the people or institutions that started it. Since there’s a broad community of people familiar with the software, who know how to read and modify its source code, new developers can step up. An open source project is one that builds community and resilience against all kinds of change: exactly what sustainability is about!

Read more here: Why Growstuff is Open Source

Events

A week or so back, we were at the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne, Australia, where we attended some talks about growing stuff, and met a bunch of people working on projects to promote food gardening and sustainability in general. Next year, perhaps we’ll have a stall of our own!

This coming Thursday, Skud and Courtney will be at the Melbourne Ruby Meetup, talking about Growstuff alongside some other Ruby on Rails projects that work towards social good. Come meet us, and hear about what we’re doing and how you can get involved.

Insert Training Montage Here

We’re hoping that Growstuff can be self-funding, without needing outside investment that might compromise our values. So, towards the goal of self-funding and bootstrapping the business, Courtney and Skud have applied for an Australian government program called the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, or NEIS, which trains and supports people starting small businesses. It’ll pay us while we work on Growstuff full time for a year, and on top of that, we get put through an eight-week course in small business management. Our training starts this week, so we’ll be studying subjects like small business finance, marketing, and writing a formal business plan on top of our usual Growstuff work. Wish us luck!

Help spread the word about Growstuff

This first newsletter is going out to a tiny mailing list, which is probably for the best as we are sure to have a few wrinkles to iron out. Still, our launch date is approaching like some kind of inexorable juggernaut, and by the time it arrives we hope that anyone and everyone who might be interested in signing up for Growstuff is receiving our updates.

Please, take a moment to forward this newsletter to your food-growing friends and family, tell them why Growstuff is awesome, and ask them to subscribe to the newsletter, read our blog, or follow us on Twitter.

Why Growstuff is Open Source

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My background is in open source software, and I’ve been using and producing it for almost twenty years. Sometimes it’s easy to live in the open source bubble, and fail to notice that there are areas where open source software is not common or standard. Over the past few months, working on Growstuff, I’ve attended a number of events for social enterprises and sustainability, and checked out dozens of websites aimed at food gardeners or people trying to live more sustainable lives. Venturing outside my former bubble, I’ve found that open source software is the exception rather than the rule in these areas, so I thought it would be a good idea to talk about why Growstuff is open source, and why we think it’s important.

It’d be traditional at this point to talk about what open source software is, and to give a quick definition. But open source is at least three things, and each needs its own explanation.

First of all, open source is a political movement that aims to change the power balance between software creators and software users. When you use traditional software, you have to take it as-is. If you don’t like it, you have few options. Software makers can change the software any way they like, charge you what they want for it, or withdraw their support for it at any time. You’re locked in an unequal relationship with them, where they hold all the power. Open source software gives power back to the users, letting them — us — understand how it works, use the software how we want, modify it if we need to, and access it regardless of who we are, where we’re from, or how rich we happen to be.

It does this through special software licenses. You’ve probably clicked “Accept” on a lot of software licenses in your time, and open source licenses are just like this, except that they offer you (as a software user) a bunch of rights, where other licenses typically take them away. An open source license says that you have the right to use the software for any purpose whatsoever. It says that you’re allowed to read the source code — the underlying program that makes the software run — and to change it if you need to, to suit your needs. It says that you can share the software freely, passing it on to friends or colleagues without having to pay license fees or worry that the software creator will come after you. In some cases (as in the license Growstuff uses) it says that if you modify the software and share it with others, you must use the same open source license, to make sure that people down the line have the same rights you do, and to share the love as widely as possible.

Finally, by changing the balance of power between software creators and users, and enshrining that greater equality in a formal document, we open ourselves up to a more collaborative way of working. Software creators and users are able to come together to build the software they need, and users can even contribute directly to the software itself, by modifying the source code and offering their changes back to the original creator. Over the years, open source software developers have learned all kinds of effective ways to work together as distributed, often international teams, and to engage their user communities in developing something that they really want to use and in which they feel a sense of ownership.

So what’s this got to do with social enterprise, sustainability, and Growstuff? In my mind, open source, sustainability, and social enterprise are closely intertwined, to the point where I feel that choosing open source is a vital part of the whole picture.

When we talk about social enterprises — businesses that hope to achieve a social good through their business activities — we seldom look at their software practices. But the choice of software to use, or decision to develop software under a closed or open model, has a social impact, just as do the choice of environmentally friendly materials for physical manufacturing, or the decision to employ people from disadvantaged backgrounds. We expect social enterprises to follow ethical business practices; why not expect them to follow software practices that support equal access, transparency, and accountability?

When it comes to sustainability, it’s about more than changing your light bulbs or using a fancy water bottle. Sustainability’s about developing communities and ways of living and working that can survive and thrive in the long term. Open source is a sustainable way of building software. If a company that writes closed software goes under, the software dies with it, but an open source software project can live long beyond the people or institutions that started it. Since there’s a broad community of people familiar with the software, who know how to read and modify its source code, new developers can step up. An open source project is one that builds community and resilience against all kinds of change: exactly what sustainability is about!

These are the reasons why we think it’s important that Growstuff be open source. We want to work openly and ethically, in collaboration with our members, building a community that feels a sense of ownership and deep involvement in the software that runs our website. We want other projects, especially those working in similar areas, to be able to look at what we’re doing and learn from us, through reading or re-using our source code. We want to know that if something happens to Growstuff itself, a new Growstuff — or a hundred new Growstuffs — could sprout up, and that people could continue to benefit from what we’ve built far into the future.

Two-and-some-fraction months until our public launch! Subscribe to our newsletter to stay in the loop as we count down to the big day.

We have a blog.

It feels like we’ve reached that point in Growstuff’s development where we should have an “official” blog, so here it is. We’ll be posting as regularly as we’re able, and we’re planning to set up a regular newsletter so that those who are interested in how Growstuff’s going can keep up with what’s new.

Now we have somewhere to post it, it seems like a good time to provide an overall Growstuff status update, so here it is:

On the development side, we’re hard at work building features for you to track your food-growing efforts and to help you connect with other food-growers in your area. Our team consists of gardeners who act as “customers” to tell us what they want and make sure we build it right, and coders who turn ideas into features and bug reports into fixes. So far we’ve built the following:

  • account management, so you can sign up, edit your settings, view your profile page, and so on
  • a crops database, currently seeded with over 200 crops
  • gardens, which each member can create and describe (for instance, you might have a balcony garden and an allotment)
  • the ability to track what crops you’ve planted in your gardens (we call these “plantings”)
  • posts and comments, so you can write about what’s happening in your garden, or ask for advice

Some of the stuff we’re working on right now, includes location awareness (so you can find other growers near you, or find advice relevant to your area), forums, and a notification system to keep you informed of what’s happening on Growstuff.

Growstuff is an open source project, and is built mostly by volunteers. If you’d like to join us, you can find out more on the Growstuff wiki.

Meanwhile on the business side, we (Courtney and Alex, Growstuff’s two full-timers) have been accepted into an Australian government program called the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, which helps support new small businesses. This includes free training during March and April, then at the end of that course, we’re expected to officially start running our business. This means that we now have an official — or at least planned — time-frame for our launch: it will be sometime early in May 2013.

When we launch, we’re planning to open up Growstuff to the general public, rather than the smaller crew of developers and volunteers who’ve been working on it so far. You’ll be able to sign up for a free account, or purchase paid accounts at various levels to help support the site and fund its further development. Stay tuned for more news of this… you can bet we’ll be posting about it a lot between now and May.

In the meantime, why not sign up for the Growstuff Newsletter? Our first newsletter will be sent out in a week or two, and along with this blog and our Twitter, will be the best way to keep up with what’s happening as we count down to our public launch — and beyond!