LiteFarm is a free and open-source farm management tool made for current and aspiring sustainable farms, built by farmers and researchers coordinated by the University of British Columbia in Canada to address the many challenges of farm management and data collection (see www.litefarm.org). We have co-developed the project incubated by the university in collaboration with global movements for agroecology, food sovereignty, and data justice.

More than 10,000 LiteFarm users are now active in more than 170 countries (see https://construyendocaminos.cepagro.org.br/). Universities have long been engines of public-goods innovation: the Internet, processing chips, and CRISPR are all examples of widely-used innovations that first emerged from university research labs. Yet whether those breakthroughs diffuse into society or stall in a tech-transfer office depends on the intellectual property rules the institution sets. Four decades of experience show that permissive, open-source–friendly policies catalyze entrepreneurship and knowledge spill-over, while restrictive, university-owned regimes can slow both.

The LiteFarm Community has an opportunity to co-create a novel governance model as part of a university exit built around the concepts of distributed governance, community and network collaboration, shared futures, and shared goals and values for food sovereignty. This governance structure must respect the multi-faceted stakeholders present in an open source research project while enabling a mission to meet farmers where they are and equip them with the tools they need to make informed and responsible decisions about the health of their farm, their livelihood, their community, and the planet.

These stakeholders include but are not limited to:
• Users: find utility in the product, and thus have a vested interest in supporting the evolution and flourishing of the community and ecosystem. This in turn benefits the broader agricultural and research communities in building the evidence base for agroecological transitions.
• Contributors: who build the product - becoming part-owners of the codebase - and have a stake in the success of the product and the health of the community as an accommodating, fun, and welcoming place to volunteer their time and skills.
• Farmers groups: who want to better support their membership and need tools such as LiteFarm to be successful in this.
• Researchers: who need access to datasets created in LiteFarm to support research into agroecology and have an interest in guiding the roadmap of LiteFarm to better support their future research questions.
• Open source partners: who integrate with and support the LiteFarm ecosystem in various ways based on shared mission alignment and desire for shared impact. .
• Funders: Groups looking to transform capital into social or scientific impact.
• Mission aligned service providers (e.g. non-profits, governments, and others) who see LiteFarm as a valuable channel for providing a service that community members would benefit from.

Given the diversity within this community, this workshop aims to explore a set of future governance pathways for an open-source exit to Community, using the LiteFarm 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.

Governance Archetypes
The Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic, in collaboration with the Berkman Klein Center, identified five common governance archetypes found in open-source software projects. These archetypes describe different ways decision-making power, accountability, and community participation evolve and are structured as projects mature. We will discuss these as reference models for understanding LiteFarm’s current governance and possible future trajectories and steps towards becoming a sustainable organization while maintaining its core mission as a digital public good.

Exit Pathways & Implementation Scenarios
We then discuss potential exit pathways and their potential alignment a mission oriented to food and data sovereignty, socio-ecological justice, and long-term operational sustainability. Each pathway includes precedents, trade-offs, and concrete implementation considerations to guide decision-making. These options can be combined or sequenced over time (e.g. retaining university anchoring while transferring IP to a neutral foundation, or layering a mission-aligned enterprise within a nonprofit structure). We will propose a checklist and welcome feedback on this to check goal alignment and guide understanding of trade-offs. This current checklist includes: Mission Alignment ; IP Ownership Clarity ; Legal Liability ; Governance Structure ; Funding Flexibility ; Administrative Burden ; Contributor Ecosystem Health ; Transparency & Public Accountability ; Scalability of Structure.

We then will workshop in small groups a set of seven proposed pathways (institutional, non-profit, cooperatives, commercial etc) for an Exit to Community and invite Discussion on recommendations and ideas from participants, who are also encouraged to share their own project's challenges and experiences.