community

http://farmhack.org/wiki/farm-hack-culture

This is a new section to Farm Hack - the Culture page. Intended to make a place for diving into the "why" of Farm Hack: why do we hack? what are our principles and values? what are other relevant conversations?

Check it out - What do you think? Where would you like a Farm Hack Culture conversation to go?

Prototyping can be a painful (and expensive) experience! The first Farm Hack event I attended at MIT had a focus (at least as I remember it) of trying to get farmers and engineers together to develop new technology. The conversation since then has shifted primarily to farmers documenting their projects. It can be helpful to suggest when writing a grant that you will document your project on Farm Hack, in the sense that the institution with the funding is looking for the greatest possible return on their investment.

A component of the Farm Hack events since the project's start has been the Design Charrette - a small group brainstorming/design process, around a specific tool or topic. As we hold more events and think about the needs that Farm Hack events can best serve, there has been discussion within the Farm Hack core group about what use this activity serves, and how we can improve it. Here we want to invite comments and reflection from other Farm Hackers, whether you have attended an event and participated in the charrette or not.

We have talked about a sketchup library, but I thought I would make sure that this GrabCad was included in the discussion - Here is a link to a recent Wired article.
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/10/grabcad/

I see Farm Hack operating as a similar community with a very particular utilitarian focus.

Hey guys,

I attended the Open-Source Hardware Summit (OSHWS) last week in NYC. It was basically a full day of back-to-back-to-back speakers who talked anything from their experiences giving/taking from OSHW or running an OSHW business to more meta-questions about the ethos of OSHW. I think a lot of it ties into what we're doing in this Farm Hack community. Once I find the slides and videos of the presentations become available, I'll be sure to link them here but until then, I'll share some initial notes of mine.

I think it would be a good idea to add a new topic to document the best practices for posts including things like:

Meaningful titles

Posting to proper forums

linking to existing content on the forum etc....