This forum is here to support ‘communities of practice’ for all those working towards a sustainable and fair food system in Australia. We intend for it to become the online ‘go to’ place to easily connect with, learn from and share knowledge with others in the fair food movement.
It is being set up and supported by the Open Food Network (OFN) and other partners in response to the need identified over and over again!!
To get things started we have suggested broad community of practice ‘categories’, which fit the communities from which the need for this forum has been identified e.g.
- Farming
- Connecting - i.e. community food enterprises working to connect food with people (supported by Thrive Community Food Enterprise funding from the Victorian Department of Health)
- Processors and value-adders
- food justice peeps
- and the rest of you! We can easily adjust / create new categories as we go - suggestions here please.
There is a trading post category and a general discussion section. You can also post announcements about events, training, opportunities, and exciting news that’s relevant to the whole community.
You can choose which conversations to get involved in!
It is important to set up your notifications so that you are only following the content you are interested in, especially in your email! Step by step instructions here
###oh no, why are you trying to make me use a new tool? Can’t we just use facebook / google xx?
At the moment, conversations are often happening in closed, scattered groups rather than in one place. Newcomers can struggle to find the information they need, and experts are asked the same questions repeatedly. Having these conversations in an open, searchable forum should help with some of these problems, encourage peer-to-peer sharing and learning, and generally make it easier to constantly improve the Australian fair food system.
While there is a learning curve associated with any new platform, once you’re through it you’ll find this is a very powerful system. We at OFN use it for our global community and we think it’s ace, which is why we’ve suggested it. This is why:
- You can do it all from email: you need to log in once, but then you can set your notifications to watch and respond to your interest areas directly from your email.
- No flood of irrelevant information Powerful categories and tags to control what you want to see in your email, but you can always go and look at broader info if you want
- You can find it again search, bookmark etc - easy to keep track of conversations and information you want to use again (doesn’t disappear up your stream or get lost in complex, disorganised google drive)
- Wiki pages for working on shared content
- Upload files, copy/paste images, embed google docs etc - it’s all easy
- So much more . . but I’ll save that for later
Also check out our repository of inspirational models, stories and resources at Open Food Network Learn.