2026-07-09 –, The Seedbed
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.
The Community of Organizations
This session is brought by the Community of Organizations (CoO): a voluntary coalition of values-aligned agricultural technology providers united by a shared mission to build technology that enables food and data sovereignty in ways that are open, collaborative, and rooted in the interests of the communities we serve.
Our four founding member organizations each bring a distinct vantage point to the coalition. Open Food Network is a globally distributed nonprofit and open source software provider powering food hubs, cooperatives, and direct-market farmers in more than eleven countries. LiteFarm, a free and open source farm management application developed at the University of British Columbia, provides over 10,000 agroecological producers and diversified growers with tooling scoped around their needs. C-Group Cooperative is scaling its federation of food and producer cooperatives, facilitating coop-to-coop exchange from coast to coast across the United States. OurSci is a social enterprise building open source solutions rooted in the needs of producer communities and the collaborative epistemology of distributed citizen science.
The CoO began as a vision sketched with markers and post-it notes under canopies at DWeb Camp 2024. In the two years since, it has become something more concrete. We have designed a simple, bottom-up governance framework that enables inter-organizational collaboration without creating bureaucratic bottlenecks or centralizing control. We have aligned on decentralized standards and protocols, connecting farm management software with ecommerce platforms and bricks-and-mortar cooperative wholesale stores. Significant food cooperative revenue is now being transitioned onto open source, cooperatively owned infrastructure, and the rudiments of a decentralized seed-to-sale ecosystem are beginning to take shape.
Progress aside, we remain keenly aware that our accomplishments to date fall well short of the scale of our ambition. We return to DWeb with real momentum and unresolved strategic questions in equal measure. What are we, exactly? A cooperative? A consultancy? A public-interest R&D lab? A venture studio? The honest answer is probably some combination, and the shape of that answer has significant consequences for how we finance our work, how we recruit partners, and what we build next.
Our panel session is designed to stage these questions, quandaries, and opportunities before a DWeb audience that has hard-won expertise to bring to bear on exactly this terrain: in platform cooperativism, in open protocol governance, in digital public goods infrastructure. But to understand why we think these questions merit the attention we ask others to bring to them, it helps to understand the context we are operating in, and the opening we believe we have sensed.
Our hypothesis: a unique historical moment
For decades, the dominant playbook in digital agricultural technology has followed a familiar logic: aggregate data, extract value, consolidate market power. Smallholder and agroecological producers - the farmers doing the most consequential work for food sovereignty, soil health, and community resilience - have been consistent losers in this dynamic. Not for lack of available technology, but for lack of technology designed to work for them. As digital infrastructure becomes as critical as physical infrastructure for agricultural success and market access, producers find themselves increasingly dependent on closed platforms that extract their data and siphon off revenue without returning proportional value.
Meanwhile, AI is refiguring the rules of software development in real time. For incumbents, this new suite of development tools promises to accelerate the consolidation playbook: faster expansion, deeper entrenchment, all built on proprietary data streams no challenger can easily replicate. The deepening alignment between AI firms and national governments (exemplified by Palantir's new $300M USDA contract) opens new fronts of enclosure over food systems and farmer data.
But can this new generation of AI dev tools be turned to other ends? We sense that open source agricultural technologies, long a curiosity in a sector dominated by proprietary solutions, have at least one structural advantage that proprietary systems cannot easily replicate. While proprietary corporate incumbents like John Deere must carefully govern what code they expose, transparent open codebases automatically give AI coding agents the context to build interoperability and cross-platform functionality quickly. We think this asymmetry can create genuine opportunities for a decentralized open ag-tech ecosystem committed to scaling by confederation rather than conglomeration. Provided, that is, that it can learn to move at pace.
Our hypothesis rests on one central insight: What corporate incumbents like John Deere ultimately own isn't features or even data. It's access to networks: the web of preestablished connections between farm management software, input suppliers, grain buyers, lenders, and logistics providers that can make switching platforms tantamount to rebuilding an entire ecosystem from scratch. A federated development strategy grounded in open source, open standards, and AI tooling has the potential to undercut this system of enclosure directly. If independent platforms share common data standards and open APIs, a farmer's data becomes portable and their connections reproducible on any compliant platform. The incumbent no longer controls the network. The network belongs to whoever implements the standard.
This is precisely the logic the decentralized web movement has brought to bear on data ownership, identity, and economic coordination; and it is the same logic that could make open agricultural technology a genuine contender rather than a principled also-ran. Seen in this light, interoperability and performant cross-platform workflows are not technical niceties. They are the mechanisms by which federation achieves scale without centralization, and by which the value of network effects flows to the network rather than to whoever happens to control the bottleneck.
Cooperative movements have seized comparable openings before. In the early twentieth century, Canadian prairie wheat pools broke grain elevator oligopolies by building federated infrastructure that neutralized incumbent chokepoints. In the New Deal era, rural electric co-ops across the United States achieved continental scale through shared generation and transmission networks, not consolidation. In the postwar Basque country, Mondragon defeated vertically integrated industrial capital by building a parallel financial system. The decisive move, in each case, was the same: don't compete on the incumbent's terms. Build the shared infrastructure that makes their chokepoints irrelevant.
What this session will offer
Four organizations - a non-profit (Open Food Network), a university lab project (LiteFarm at UBC), a social enterprise (Our Sci), and a cooperative (C-Group Cooperative) - walk into a bar. They don't agree on everything. A university project with a public-goods mandate and a cooperative have genuinely different relationships to questions like: Who owns the infrastructure long-term? What does it mean to achieve impact at scale? How do you price shared services without extracting from the communities you exist to serve? The tension between our operating models is real. We make every effort to navigate with care, and the diversity of perspectives and operating conditions is at least part of what makes this coalition interesting.
This is a panel discussion and moderated dialogue: part progress report, part open strategic conversation, part coalition-building session. A ten-minute framing from David Thomas (Open Food Network) will lay out the big picture: what federated food systems technology is, why it matters, and why (seen through a glass darkly) the conditions for building it at scale may be more favorable now than they have ever been. Each founding CoO partner will then take five minutes to speak to their own experience, goals, and hard-won lessons: what it has meant in practice to build toward federation across organizational difference, across sectors, and across continents. Speakers include Colin Stewart (C-Group Cooperative), Kevin Cussen (Our Sci), and Hannah Wittman and Divya Chayanam (LiteFarm, University of British Columbia).
The majority of the session - thirty minutes - is reserved for moderated dialogue with participants. We arrive with genuine open questions, not scripted answers. We want to think in public with the people in the room.
Why DWeb Camp, why Berlin, why now
DWeb Camp is one of the only gatherings in the world where commitments to open and decentralized technologies, cooperative governance, and food sovereignty land in the same room. The CoO has been building quietly for two years. DWeb Berlin is the moment we stop building quietly and start testing our vision against the scrutiny and contribution of our peers: sharpening our message, broadening our coalition, and co-designing a five-year strategic framework ambitious enough to match the scale of the problem and grounded enough in what we have already built to be credible.
We also hope to use the gathering to deepen relationships with organizations that share our values but are not yet CoO members - including the DECENT Alliance, GrownBy, the Food Data Collaboration, farmOS, and Origins Co-op - toward substantive strategic alignment and movement expansion.
The farmers, food hubs, and agroecological communities that depend on this infrastructure deserve tools built by people who are as serious about the long game as they are. Federation in the digital age does not entail centralization. It means coordination across community-owned layers of the stack - from data standards to farm management systems to marketplaces - in ways that enfranchise farmers as owners of the digital infrastructure they depend upon, rather than as subjects of it.
Farmers and DWebbers of the world, unite. We have a world to win!
David Thomas spent the first decade of his career as an academic literary critic studying climate change and speculative fiction, then decided he wanted to work on the problem more directly. Drawn to the food sovereignty and agroecology movements and to the open source values of Open Food Network, he joined OFN Canada in 2020. Since then he has been working on a problem familiar to most DWeb Camp participants: how do you build digital infrastructure that generates value for the communities it serves rather than extracting it from them, and how do you keep it that way as it scales? That work has taken him into decentralized web standards, federated community governance, and the painstaking organizational work of convening coalitions whose members owe each other nothing beyond commitment to a shared vision. His organizing conviction is that cooperative federation is the only proven means to achieve economies of scale while ensuring that prosperity and decision-making remain anchored in grassroots producer communities. He co-founded the Community of Organizations to test that conviction in practice. It has been two years in the making, and DWeb Berlin is its first real public reckoning.
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.
(Colin to fill out)
Kevin Cussen is an advisor and active contributor to numerous open source communities. He’s held an odd collection of roles throughout his career, from Peace Corps volunteer, to software engineer, to founder and CEO of a West African biogas-as-a-service company. He's held roles at a mix of private, public, and non-profit entities, including leading roles on two open source projects - OpenLMIS and LiteFarm. Kevin has an MBA from the University of Washington and BS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas. In his spare time, Kevin likes spending time with his family, reading about history and economic theory, and long distance backpacking trips.