Farm Hack organises a series of events:
| Name of the event | Farm Hack Dinner – An Evening of Collaboration & Innovation |
| Organizer(s) | Farm Hack |
| Place | Tuckaway Farm, New Hampshire |
| Date(s) | May 16–17, 2025 |
| Purpose | To convene farmers, engineers, researchers, and community organizers for an evening of shared food, dialogue, and collaboration, exploring Farm Hack’s evolving role in agricultural innovation and digital public infrastructure. The theme was Collaborative Technology and Commons-Enabling Infrastructure. |
| GIAA organization(s) involved | Grassroots Innovation Assembly for Agroecology (GIAA), OpenTEAM, Farm Hack |
| Short writeup of activities and outcomes | The inaugural Farm Hack Dinner at Tuckaway Farm brought together a diverse group of practitioners and thinkers to reimagine collaborative agricultural innovation through open-source and commons frameworks. Participants co-prepared a communal meal, engaged in structured dialogues about the future of Farm Hack and its role in the broader ecosystem of agroecological innovation, and generated ideas for future gatherings and collaborative projects. The weekend continued with a broader Farm Hack Gathering featuring tool demonstrations, skill-building sessions, and opportunities for networking and co-creation. The event successfully rekindled the Farm Hack community’s momentum and set the tone for a new series of participatory, commons-oriented convenings. |
| Name of the event | Farm Hack Gathering & Meal at the Schumacher Center | |
| Organizer(s) | Farm Hack, Schumacher Center for New Economics | |
| Place | Schumacher Center for a New Economics, Great Barrington, Massachusetts | |
| Date(s) | September 28, 2025 | |
| Purpose | To host the third in a series of Farm Hack gatherings designed to connect farmers, engineers, researchers, and community organizers in participatory dialogue about open-source agricultural innovation and community resilience. The gathering aimed to deepen collaboration, reflect on a decade of Farm Hack experience, and co-create pathways for future work aligned with regional and global agroecological movements. | |
| GIAA organization(s) involved | Farm Hack (core member of GIAA), OpenTEAM, Schumacher Center for a New Economics, and broader GIAA-affiliated networks | |
| Short writeup of activities and outcomes | The Farm Hack Gathering at the Schumacher Center offered a day of reflection, shared learning, and co-creation among long-standing and new collaborators in the open-source ag tech and agroecology movements. Participants explored key community questions—how they define, love, and sustain their agricultural communities, their challenges, and sources of hope—through facilitated discussions and a communal meal prepared by chef Hannah Black using Hudson Valley farm ingredients. The setting of the Schumacher Library, rich with the intellectual heritage of ethical economics, fostered thoughtful dialogue about the intersections of technology, community, and commons-based innovation. The event strengthened cross-institutional relationships and identified actionable collaborations for the next phase of Farm Hack’s evolution. | |
| Name of the event | Open Futures: Growing the Commons – Pathways for Building & Resourcing Common Infrastructure | |
| Organizer(s) | Open Futures Coalition (OFC) in collaboration with the Open Futures Forum (OFF) and New York Climate Week 2025 | |
| Place | New York City, New York (NYCW25) | |
| Date(s) | September 24, 2025 | |
| Purpose | This workshop, part of the Open Futures program at New York Climate Week, aimed to explore how shared tools, platforms, and cooperative infrastructures can support collective action and long-term resilience in the face of global challenges. Participants examined how to resource and sustain the social, technical, and financial systems that enable community-led innovation. | |
| Short writeup of activities and outcomes | The “Growing the Commons” workshop gathered funders, practitioners, and innovators engaged in building interoperable commons infrastructure across scales. Presentations by leaders from Nia Tero, Regen Network, OpenTEAM, Milken Institute, Nature Tech Collective, and Cerulean Ventures highlighted practical pathways toward shared governance and financing models for digital and ecological commons. Through breakout discussions, participants proposed strategies for ensuring interoperability, accessibility, and long-term resilience of community infrastructures. The workshop advanced a shared vocabulary and cross-sector collaboration for commons-enabling infrastructure, setting the stage for ongoing coordination among allied networks. | |
| Name of the event | Rooted in Vision, Growing into Action: Advancing Regional Food System Transformation |
| Organizer(s) | University of Vermont Institute for Agroecology (IFA) |
| Place | Knoll Farm, Waitsfield, Vermont |
| Date(s) | August 12–14, 2025 |
| Purpose | The second annual IFA Regional Food Systems Gathering, “Rooted in Vision, Growing into Action,” aimed to deepen regional collaboration in building just, equitable, and sustainable food systems. The event convened farmers, researchers, advocates, and educators to collectively envision transformative futures for the New England food system. |
| GIAA organization(s) involved | FarmHack/OpenTEAM and network collaborators |
| Short writeup of activities and outcomes | Hosted by the UVM Institute for Agroecology, this multi-day convening built on over a decade of regional collaboration led by Food Solutions New England and IFA. Participants engaged in sessions on agroforestry, farmland access, cooperative governance, education, and solidarity building. Discussions highlighted pathways toward regional self-determination, equitable land access, and participatory governance. Dorn Cox contributed to dialogues linking agroecology and open-source innovation. The gathering resulted in a synthesis report identifying key strategies for collective action and knowledge mobilization across the region. It strengthened the role of agroecology as both a science and a movement for systemic transformation. |
| Name of the event | Agricultural Knowledge Concordance: Civic Infrastructure & Lending Libraries |
| Organizer(s) | Concordance, Indigidao, OpenTEAM, Farm Hack, Distributed Web (DWeb) community, Internet Archive |
| Place | Internet Archive, San Francisco, California |
| Date(s) | October 24, 2025 |
| Purpose | The inaugural Concordance event will launch the Agricultural Knowledge Concordance series, convening aligned communities from IndigiDao, Code for Science and Society, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Farm Hack, OpenTEAM, and DWeb to explore civic infrastructure, distributed knowledge systems, and the role of lending libraries in sustaining a planetary agricultural knowledge atlas. The gathering will focus on connecting the open knowledge movement to agricultural and ecological commons stewardship through interoperable, decentralized infrastructure. |
| GIAA organization(s) involved | Grassroots Innovation Assembly for Agroecology (GIAA), Farm Hack, OpenTEAM, Internet Archive |
| Short writeup of activities and outcomes | Hosted at the Internet Archive, this convening will mark the first in the Concordance series designed to align open agricultural and civic data communities. Participants will prototype frameworks for cataloging and preserving agricultural knowledge using distributed web technologies, discuss metadata and provenance standards, and build bridges between open-source hardware, lending libraries, and civic institutions. The outcomes will include draft templates for shared data provenance and consent management, early design sketches for the Agricultural Knowledge Atlas interface, and commitments from DWeb, OpenTEAM, and Internet Archive collaborators to co-develop a participatory governance framework for commons-aligned digital public infrastructure. |
| Name of the event | Agricultural Knowledge Concordance: Agricultural Research Data & Knowledge Commons |
| Organizer(s) | OpenTEAM, Raft Foundation, Farm Hack, Tuckaway Farm |
| Place | Tuckaway Farm, Lee, New Hampshire |
| Date(s) | Late November 2025 (exact date TBD) |
| Purpose | The second Concordance convening will focus on aligning agricultural research data, public datasets, and community archives within a federated Agricultural Knowledge Commons. Participants will explore participatory data stewardship, FAIR/CARE-aligned metadata standards, and local-to-global models for consent-based data sharing. |
| GIAA organization(s) involved | OpenTEAM, Farm Hack and aligned research and extension partners |
| Short writeup of activities and outcomes | Set within the working landscape of Tuckaway Farm, this gathering will serve as a hands-on design sprint for the Agricultural Knowledge Atlas. Participants—including researchers, farmers, civic technologists, and data librarians—will map existing field libraries, sensor networks, and public datasets. Sessions will focus on creating data cards, metadata templates, and governance protocols to ensure provenance, consent, and attribution. The event will also pilot the Commons Fellowship program to support open data librarians and test participatory funding mechanisms such as FLOAT. Outcomes will include a prototype metadata and provenance toolkit and a shared roadmap for building the Agricultural Knowledge Atlas as a living, participatory data commons. |
| Name of the event | Agricultural Knowledge Concordance: Enabling Infrastructure & Polycentric Governance |
| Organizer(s) | IndigiDao, IndigiDao, Code for Science and Society, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, OpenTEAM, Farm Hack, Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society |
| Place | Harvard Law School, Berkman Klein Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts |
| Date(s) | Second week of December 2025 |
| Purpose | The third event in the Concordance series will focus on the legal, technical, social, and financial enabling infrastructure required to sustain a federated Agricultural Knowledge Commons. It will convene scholars, legal experts, technologists, and commons practitioners to align frameworks for civic infrastructure, data trusts, and polycentric governance. |
| GIAA organization(s) involved | OpenTEAM,Farm Hack |
| Short writeup of activities and outcomes | The Harvard convening will synthesize the threads from San Francisco and Tuckaway Farm, framing an actionable roadmap for commons-enabling infrastructure across sectors. Participants will explore how civic data institutions—such as libraries, conservation districts, and community research networks—can act as nodes within a distributed agricultural knowledge ecosystem. Panels and working groups will address governance templates, participatory legal frameworks, and the creation of a “Charter for Agricultural Concordance.” Expected outcomes include draft language for data trust charters, a framework for shared financing and accountability mechanisms, and formal alignment with existing open infrastructure initiatives like IOI, Metagov, and Mozilla. This event will lay the groundwork for launching the Agricultural Knowledge Concordance Atlas and Fellowship Program in 2026. |
Farm Hack Dinner – An Evening of Collaboration & Innovation to convene farmers, engineers, researchers, and community organizers for an...
