This is a post I made on Growstuff Talk to propose some initial steps towards interoperability for open food projects. If you have comments, probably best to make them on that post. I wanted to post about some concepts from my past open data work which have been very much in my mind when working on Growstuff, but which I’m not sure I’ve ever expressed in a way that helps everyone understand their importance. Just for background: from 2007-2011 I worked on Freebase, a massive Continue reading → Continue reading → You’ve probably heard the tech startup aphorism “do one thing well”, or a variant on it. “Don’t try to do too many things”. “Focus.” Whatever. I’m not very good at following it, as is pretty apparent from what I’m working on. Growstuff has several things it’s trying to do (crops database, garden journal, seed sharing, community building), all interlinked. Every so often someone points me at a website that does just one thing of the set of things we’re trying to do. For instance, the Continue reading → Ravelry API – Wait, what? How did I miss this. Ravelry has an API now, and they’ve been using it internally since Feb 2012, so it isn’t just an unloved add-on. (You probably can’t follow the link, which is to the Rav API forum, unless you’re a member. But anyone who might be interested in this probably is already, so…) Our real first gay president – Newsweek says Obama’s the US’s “first gay president”, ignoring James Buchanan, who was openly gay in the 19th century. Continue reading →