[Linux-aus] Grant Application: Growstuff

[Alex Bayley]

Date: 23rd September, 2014

Project Name: Growstuff

Aim of project: to provide an open source platform and open data for 
food growers worldwide

Person responsible for request: Alex Bayley (skud at growstuff.org)

Request:

I am the founder and lead developer of Growstuff (http://growstuff.org), 
an open source/open data website for people who grow their own food 
(veggie gardeners, etc).  We provide the only usable international 
database of crop information and planting advice that is available under 
a free license (CC-BY-SA).

We have been running for 2 years as an open source project, and launched 
our website (http://growstuff.org/) just over a year ago. Our database 
currently has information about ~400 crops, largely crowdsourced from 
our 1000+ members worldwide.  As an open source project we have had 
around 40-50 code contributors, and are well known as a welcoming 
community, providing mentoring and other support to new developers to 
learn open source skills.

I am based in Ballarat, Victoria, and Growstuff has over a hundred 
members in Australia. About a quarter of our developers to date have 
been Australian, and Growstuff developers participate in local open 
source and free software activities (eg. hack nights run by the 
Melbourne Ruby meetup group).  Growstuff also provides technical and  
open source expertise to 3000 Acres (http://3000acres.org/), a 
Melbourne-based open source non-profit aiming to help locals find vacant 
land to grow food. We have held one "open food hack day" with 3000 Acres 
and Open Food Network (yet another open source project based in 
Melbourne, who I believe received a Linux Australia grant last year), 
and hope to run more of these in future.

I am applying for a grant as part of our current fundraising campaign 
(http://igg.me/at/growstuff) to support the work of two developers to 
improve our open data API.  Overall, we are hoping to raise $20,000 but 
will be able to scale our work to the amount raised (from $10k on up); 
we are seeking $2,000 from Linux Australia which would make Linux 
Australia a "major sponsor" of Growstuff, and means we would include 
your logo in our footer for our year, and promote you as a 
sponsor/supporter of Growstuff through our newsletter/social media/etc.

The funds will go towards work on our open data API, which will include:

* Consulting with developers to determine their needs and preferences 
wrt our API
* Release of a "version 1" API
* Documentation of the version 1 API on our wiki
* Suite of examples and demos to help people use Growstuff's open crop 
data, published on github with documentation
* Weekly blog posts during the project, documenting our work and helping 
people use our open data
* Supporting developers working with our API to build their apps

Work will commence by late October, and continue for 1-3 months 
depending on funds raised.

Links:

Growstuff website: http://growstuff.org/
Github: http://github.com/Growstuff/growstuff
Wiki: http://wiki.growstuff.org/
Community forums: http://talk.growstuff.org
IRC: #growstuff on irc.freenode.net

-- 
Alex "Skud" Bayley
skud at growstuff.org
http://growstuff.org/
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