The Growstuff Project

Originally published at Growstuff Blog. You can comment here or there.

Here’s a roundup of what’s been happening in the world of Growstuff over the last week or so.

Our new advisory board

In case you missed it, the other day we announced Growstuff’s new advisory board, made up of experts in innovation, social enterprise, open data, and more.

Read more about Growstuff’s new advisors on our team page.

Do you, like, like likes?

We’ve been talking for ages about letting people “like” photos and posts on Growstuff, and how we could use that to surface more useful information, better pictures for crops, and so on.

This week we’ve been discussing “liking” posts and pics and especially whether adding tags like “Helpful”, “Funny”, or “Informative” to a like can help us show better information to our members and visitors.

Got an opinion? Weigh in on Growstuff Talk.

Development news

First up, congrats to Maco, who became a committer this week. This means she can merge other people’s code into the main Growstuff project. Stop by the discussion forum and congratulate her :)

We’re working towards Release 8 which means we’ll be updating the Growstuff website with a bunch of new features, bugfixes, and backend improvements toward the end of the week.

We need help testing new features! If you’ve got some time to spare this week, join our testing team and try out some of our new features, including:

• Tracking more information about your seed collection, including whether your seeds are heirloom or hybrid, organic, and how many days the seed packet says it’ll be until harvest.
• The ability to search crops by their scientific and alternate names (including in the autosuggest when you’re planting, harvesting, etc)
• Photos of your garden as a whole (not just individual plantings and harvests)
• A massively improved “request new crops” process
• A new content management system (CMS) making it easier for us to update the various pages linked in the site’s footer

Growstuff gatherings

Last Wednesday several of us were at Open Knowledge Workshop in Melbourne, Australia, where Alex gave a talk about Growstuff and open food data. Here are a few tweets to give you a taste of the event:

tonight's @OKFNau meetup's 1st time I've come across @growstufforg, which is exactly my kind of thing. Reinforces why I participate in @OKFN

— Cobi Smith (@cobismith) February 4, 2015

Remember: #opendata doesn't always mean open government data (PSI) or scientific research data – citizen collected data counts too!

— Open Knowledge Aus (@OKFNau) February 4, 2015

Fascinating use of open data as it applies to #openfood on http://t.co/6bCGu5K1ds These are the UI wireframe dreams http://t.co/rsZj8eJgnZ

— datakid23 (@datakid23) February 4, 2015

This week (and every 2nd Tuesday of the month) we’ll be at Melbourne’s Ruby Hack Night. Drop by and say hi!

From around the web

• Real Food Media Contest: watch 10 short films about food, and vote by Feb 27th
• Top reasons to grow your own food (Little Mountain Haven)
• Developing a thirst for urban agriculture (Sourceable) “The Australian dream of a quarter-acre block is now becoming a distant memory.”
• Sustainable agriculture on one of the world’s remotest islands: Hidden Garden Sustainable Farm, Christmas Island (PIP Magazine)
• 5 Native Tribal Organizations Reviving the Sustainable Agriculture Tradition (Sustainable Cities Collective)

We’re looking for a volunteer to regularly curate “This week in Growstuff”. Check out the job description and drop us a line if you’re interested!