Hannah Wittman
At UBC, I lead a Research Excellence Cluster in Diversified Agroecosystems, and served as Academic Director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at UBC Farm. In these roles, I have led interdisciplinary teams of scholars and community-scientists to visualize, synthesize and communicate the integrated social and ecological mechanisms underlying complex agroecosystems and agroecological transitions. These methods aim to inform policy and practices supporting more resilient and sustainable food systems by making the complexity of agroecosystems more legible to stakeholders including consumers, farmers, and policy makers, and more ‘easily translated’ across diverse disciplinary boundaries.
The ultimate aim of my research is to use participatory action and transdisciplinary methodologies to identify pathways towards food sovereignty, agrarian reform, agroecology, and health equity in global contexts.
Sessions
The digital enclosure of agriculture is accelerating, and a voluntary coalition of open-source agrifood system platforms is building the federated infrastructure to fight back. Join Open Food Network, LiteFarm, Our Sci, and C-Group Cooperative for a progress report, a frank airing of unresolved strategic and technical questions, and an open invitation to help shape what comes next.
This workshop will explore a set of future governance pathways for an open-source exit to Community, using the LiteFarm farm management app experience as a case study and ‘test’ case to identify challenges and opportunities for governance and operational models as open-source projects seek to exit from an initial start-up incubator phase and/or institutional home. These pathways explore what a dedicated governance wrapper might look like for safeguarding the technology’s open-source mandate, ensuring financial sustainability, and demonstrating to farmers, external contributors, and institutional adopters that LiteFarm will remain transparent and community-led into the future.