Open Ag Tech Enterprise

This OC Project comes from No Regrets Initiative and 11th Hour Foundation funding (65k total) for a group of ag tech projects / companies which formed in early 2024 and scoped much of the work at DWeb in mid-2024.  Included here is the motivation and basic description, but please find key links to the full proposal and other docs below.

1. Full Proposal
2. The Concept Paper (emerged after DWeb)

--> Motivation and Description from the Full Proposal -->

Motivation

We see a common need to develop an alternative vision for technology development in agriculture focused on non-extractive technology generates public goods, with space and capacity to support not only conventional agriculture but also regenerative ag, communities new to agriculture, and other specialty agricultural needs. This vision is not a monolith and needs refining, but the energy is there.

At DWeb in August, a mixture of OpenTEAM employees and diverse ag tech businesses and projects agreed broadly to the following in support this vision. You can find the document describing this vision from DWeb here. In short it consists of…

A Utility layer (primarily OpenTEAM), built on a values-focused Charter, which aligns ag tech development around common values, surfaces common needs and generates shared outputs like requirements, standards, and reference implementations, and…

An Enterprise layer (primarily the Enterprise email chain folks, though now expanded from DWeb), focused on building a values, technology, market and incentive-aligned Community of Companies delivering scalable services to the ag sector.

These are additive to the existing agricultural and ag tech sector. For example, the Utility Layer will work with partners at AgGateway and ISO, and the Enterprise layer will invite traditional ag tech investors to the table, along with social and impact investors. Our goal is not to replace but to fill in a gap in the current system to better support open source, community owned, and specialty agricultural applications.

These two different but related related work streams will require a lot of well facilitated and supported discussion, testing, and forming to grow and hit the next phase of funding (philanthropic or private).

Proposal

This proposal is focused on the Enterprise Layer. Specifically, we propose to create a plan to establish a "Community of Companies" (CoC) which has shared values, incentives, and clear market and values-based orientation to more successfully scale our collective impact. The resulting alignment and plan will then be used to secure partnerships, CoC members, and investors to then successfully establish and fund the Community of Companies in 2025 or early 2026.