A New Way to Build AgTech Together

Over the past year, we’ve made exciting progress in our shared effort to imagine and implement a future for open agricultural technology.

What began as a conversation at DWeb Camp 2024 has grown into something much bigger—the Community of Organizations (CoO). The CoO is a new alliance of open-source, public-good ag-tech projects working together to build cooperative digital infrastructure for agroecology.

Open Food Network is proud to be part of this mission-driven group, collaborating to solve real challenges in building open, community-owned technology for farmers and food system innovators.

A New Model for Collaboration

Instead of each organization working in isolation or depending on short-term project-based funding cycles, the CoO is creating a more sustainable and flexible way to collaborate—pooling resources, talent, and knowledge to create resilient, community-owned systems that serve farmers, cooperatives, and food system innovators.

Rather than a top-down consortium, CoO is designed as a bottom-up confederation. Each member organization remains independent while benefitting from:

• Shared talent pools (outreach, engineering, design, fundraising, strategy).
• Common technology stacks, open source libraries, and open standards.
• Coordinated fundraising and referral networks.

Over the past several months, CoO members have co-developed foundational governance documents (mission, MOU, SOPs, roadmap) and launched our first major collaborative pilot.

Collaborative Interop Pilot: Connecting Farms and Markets

This pilot is a first step in building shared digital infrastructure to connect agroecological producers with values-aligned buyers, consumers, and communities. It links farm management tools, marketplaces, co-ops, and certification systems so data can move seamlessly across platforms and organizations while staying farmer-controlled.

• Claims Verification: Enter once, publish everywhere—verified profiles syndicated across multiple directories and marketplaces.
• Real-World Impact: Piloting with co-ops and hubs to connect discovery platforms with cooperative brokerage and distribution, expanding market access, and enabling fairer terms and forward contracts.

Open Standards & Development: Using open standards and co-developed APIs and open source libraries to ensure interoperability, sovereignty, and reusable infrastructure for the agroecology movement at large.

Highlights from Roadmap & Reports

• Shared Infrastructure: Collective investment in open source code and standards.
• Federated Governance: Bottom-up frameworks that keep decision-making close to producers and their communities while linking organizations globally.
• Scaling Strategy: Pathways from fragile project-based funding toward diversified and cooperative revenue streams.
• Replicable Pilots: Early implementations and documentation designed as case studies to model what scalable, community-owned agri-tech can look like in practice.

We’re documenting our process, sharing what we learn, and inviting others to join or learn from our model. If you’re interested in open, collaborative ag-tech that puts communities first, we invite you to explore our work in depth.