Open Food Network

Background and Objectives

Open Food Network (aka OFN) is an open source software that serves people globally who want to have a community-led, local supply chain food available to local populations. The project is built on FLOSS technologies such as Spree. The Open Food Network maintains a core version of the OSS that is then forked by local instances across the globe and developed in both a local and global way. The dependancies proccesses for local instances and global OSS was at time, difficult to reconcile but ultimately led to a community inclusive and consenting way of building OSS tools for the common good. The design processes I developed there made groundbreaking attempts to introduce design into OSS processes that typically don’t include users and design. Many of these processes were hugely successful in my time at OFN.

Impact

OFN was a particularly challeging project as the global team worked tirelessly to include the forked instances of the OFN OSS tool and the balancing of needs was a democratic and collaborative process.

Outputs

I worked as the designer at The Open Food Network for a 1 year long contract. Working alongside other community members, product managers, volunteer design contributors and developers I lead the design effort for a contract of a year. In that time I worked on:

• Worked on automated email designs, reporting designs, UX imporvements of the checkout processes, mobile shopping experience usability testing, small issue design feedback, admin/backend user interface UI improvements, building out a design system and accessibility improvements.
• Critical foundational user research into the core user of a Managed Community Food Enterprise, what they need, how they use the OFN OSS globally and the differences across instances per country.
• Adhoc usertesting for feature ideas, design and accessibility improvements.
• Processes to streamline the user centred design input for features and core work to the global platform. This included working across various teams, timezones and developers.
• Managed a team of 5-10 designer contributors across various projects to increase the OSS capacity beyond funded roles.

New skills

At the Open Food Network I got to put into practice a larger scale open source designer volunteer program to support the varied and ongoing work at The Open Food Network. I also got to learn and develop my knowledge about international payment methods, UX and UI design from Middle East, India, Austraila and Turkey. My knowledge of sustainable food systems and how small, medium and large farming enterprises use techonlogy to support themselves is robust.