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Launching Live // SARE+Farm Hack Webinars – 3/27 and 3/29

Farm Hack, in partnership with Chris Callahan from UVM and with funding from USDA NE-SARE have recently completed an overhaul of their tool pages.  This work was part of a project aimed at delivering an improved collective innovation, distribution & education, and impact assessment platform for sustainable farm and food innovations such as those accomplished in SARE projects.Shiny New Tool Library at Farmhack.org
As we approach the completion of our SARE project implementation, we have conducted surveys of past SARE PI’s and have just launched a re-designed Tools section of the website. The new version is intended to make both documenting tools and finding the tool you are looking for easier and more effective.

New Tool Section Features:

  • New look!
  • Smartphone and tablet friendly
  • Improved Tool Search functionalities
  • Easier documentation process
  • New “like” and “I have built this” buttons on tool pages
  • New help feature for user troubleshooting

We’ll be hosting a community webinar on two dates to provide a live walk-through of the new Tools Section to help familiarize users with the new features and get your feedback.  We hope you can join us for one of them.  These webinars are free.  No registration is required.  There will be time for Q&A.  The sessions will be recorded and posted on Farm Hack.

Farm Hack Tools Section Webinars

Monday, March 27 11 AM – 12 PM Eastern (DST)
Web: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/894400997
Phone: Dial +1 (571) 317-3122, Access Code: 894-400-997

Wednesday, March 29, 12 – 1 PM Eastern (DST)
Web: https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/978999525
Phone: Dial +1 (408) 650-3123, Access Code: 978-999-525

Happy Hacking,

Chris Callahan
UVM Extension Ag Engineering & SARE Project Leader
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Take a virtual tour of new Farm Hack platform features, courtesy of our SARE grant

As you might remember, Farm Hack in partnership with Chris Callahan, Agricultural Engineer at University of Vermont, received a SARE grant in summer of 2015 to improve the Farm Hack platform for all users, and specifically for the documentation of SARE-funded tool ideas. Hundreds of really interesting design ideas are funded and documented on the SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) website each year, but the lengthy and somewhat hard to navigate pdf database does not facilitate sharing of designs very easily. That’s where the Farm Hack platform came in!

To upgrade the Farm Hack website, we surveyed SARE principal investigators as well as Farm Hack users to glean insight into what features we should improve to add on. In partnership with our software engineer partners we focused on making our growing tool database more easily searchable, and put a lot of work into the tool documentation page to make the process easier and more accessible, and make the resulting tool page more searchable and useful to community members. We also added an “ask an admin” pop up feature to encourage questions and feedback.

We are very excited about this next iteration of the Farm Hack platform, and hope it helps move our community towards further sharing and collaboration of useful, well-designed open source farm technology and tools.

We want your two cents on the site updates! Feel free to leave a comment on this blog post to start the conversation.