3.3 The Gathering of Open Ag-Tech (GOAT)
The Gathering for Open Ag Tech (GOAT) is a community of practice (Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology, 2025). We focus on improving the resilience of our food system by coordinating technology design and development. To improve coordination, we connect diverse people and foster difficult conversations. In this section, we, the co-authors, write from our position as people that helped co-create GOAT, serve as organizers, and continue to work within the community today.
GOAT is a tapestry of people and their communities, each bringing their lived experiences and expertise to bear on the shared meaning we pursue. Collectively, we ask: what does it mean to responsibly co-create open works, including open ag-tech, for resilient agriculture and food systems?
Digital technologies have been historically designed for well-resourced food system actors (often agri-food corporations, industrial farms, and people in power), resulting in a lack of access to technologies designed for a more diverse food system with a diverse community of workers. Our hypothesis is that a just and resilient food system (1) demands open source technologies and open access data that (2) support a new generation of farmers and food workers as they (3) improve integrated ecosystems and human communities. Through GOAT, we seek to bootstrap the intellectual sovereignty of food system stakeholders not considered or under represented in the existing global food system and corporate ag-tech sector: small farms, diversified farms, the regenerative agriculture community, peasant farmers, decentralized food markets, and other “alternative” food and agricultural stakeholders and systems.
3.3.1. A Gathering of GOATs
“Goats are also persistent, plodding, but will eventually (inevitably) eat all things. Kind of like what this movement needs to be to be successful” – (GOAT Organizers, 2018)
In 2017, a small group of volunteers, with common problems, met via the Internet, shared knowledge, co-created a plan, and worked together. The GOAT community started like many across the FOSS movement. However, we also have roots in agroecology, participatory science, commons and cooperatives, and grassroots innovation, including members from the organizations that emerged in the early open ag-tech movement described in Section 2.2. Like many FOSS initiatives, this first group of contributors remixed ideas and ways of being from their previous experiences in other value and/or mission-aligned initiatives, culminating, eventually, in the creation of the GOAT conference and community.
One of the first GOAT organizers, Dan Kittredge, an organic farmer and advocate for community food nutrition science, had started a community food science non-profit, the Bionutrient Food Association (BFA) (2021). Dan and co-author Greg Austic had been collaborating on an open science hardware concept, “The Bionutrient Meter”, which was a “hand-held, non-invasive consumer-priced spectrometer that can be used to get relative nutritional scores off of food”(Bionutrient Food Association, 2021). Their collaborative development effort exemplified the type of partnerships that were forming across the open ag-tech landscape, and the BFA provided seed funding to host a conference to nurture connections that support grassroots innovation in open ag-tech.
In a concept paper, this small group outlined a practical approach to seed an open ag development collaborative: “Our first step must be to convene the community around a shared recognition of the problem. The goal of this gathering is to establish meaningful connections, identify a shared vision statement, and let the next steps emerge based on our shared priorities. While this document lays out our personal intentions as organizers, only a community driven structure can we build lasting, meaningful connections” (GOATech, 2018: Open Ag Development Collaborative-Concept 2 pager). The initial concept of GOAT was simple, we sought to:
- Host a physical gathering to build community.
- Maintain digital gathering spaces to retain connection.
- Pursue shared projects and identify shared resources to do so.
Our GOAT website still states: “The technologies that produce our food and the data about our food system should be public, and enable control by the farms and farmers that produce it. Together, we can collectively address the problems which prevent the creation of advanced, high quality open technology and its adoption.” (Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology, 2025). The goals of GOAT today continue to build on the initial concepts laid out in 2018, shown in Figure 5.
Figure 5. The Goals of the GOAT community.
3.3.2 Holding Space through GOAT
“If there were forks in the road and each time there was a fork, the right decision was made, then you get to a goat rodeo.” – Yo Yo Ma (New York Public Radio, 2011)
Laurie Wayne, a GOAT 2022 conference organizer, envisioned the GOAT community as an “[a]ntidote to loneliness that happens in small projects”, as a space for “[t]rust, community, safety, nurturing, belonging” (GOATech Forum, 2022: GOAT Manifesto Session doc). Figure 6 depicts the live documentation of a session discussion on how to create actionable roads for new and beginning technology users to get involved and eventually contribute to the collaborative development of open ag-tech space.
Figure 6. Community documentation during a GOAT 2022 conference session on paths to participation in open ag-tech, highlighting the multiple modes of possible contributions.
The concept of “holding space” in communities of practice research represents intentional creation of social environments to foster engagement, collective identity, and co-creation of knowledge (Wenger, 2000). The way we hold space at GOAT is through our physical 3-5 day gathering. However we also hold space community calls and other virtual meetings, a chat room, a forum, and a couple of “GOAT Boxes” that travel to conference and event exhibitions. The physical gatherings act as a point of entry for newcomers and catalyst for co-creation; the virtual spaces sustain practice; the conference exhibit reaches farmers to let them know we’re building open source tools for them.
The GOAT conference is an entry point for newcomers and catalyst for co-creation. Creating space for newcomers is essential for sustaining communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). The conference integrates newcomers by building (1) a sense of safety to foster trust and shared identity, (2) a sense of belonging and shared ownership to encourage voluntary contribution to governance and mission, and (3) a sense of opportunity for action to spark new partnerships and projects that lead to co-creation.
The GOAT conference begins building a sense of safety before the event even begins, by requesting that ALL interested potential attendees apply to the conference, regardless of eventual ticket type (which includes reduced-cost, at-cost, and no-cost tickets). This screening allows organizers to get to know the folks who are interested in joining and for the applicants to better understand the goals and intentions of the physical gathering. At the conference, we continue building a sense of safety by opening with the GOAT Rodeo Sessions (Stuart Duncan et al., 2011), music that grounds in the spirit of folk knowledge and culture and asking participants to take off their institutional hats; to arrive as themselves.
Next, we facilitate newcomers to develop a sense of belonging and shared ownership by co-creating the program using our own implementation of the un-conference method. Hope Sims, a data analyst working at Carbon A List, described the GOAT 2022 program creation process: “On the first day of the unconference, GOAT goers, or GOATs, were given 10 minutes to answer a handful of questions on sticky notes. We then placed the sticky notes on a wall and reviewed the collection of responses. After doing so, we started a grouping activity, where GOATs collaborated and grouped like responses by themes. Once themes were decided, the GOAT organizers read the themes and the responses aloud and attendees volunteered to fill the roles of facilitator and note-taker for the discussion. At the end of this activity, our sessions were set for the week.”(Sims, 2022)
Finally, we facilitated a sense of opportunity for action by engaging in curated discussions, workshops, lighting talks, and demos. Attendees put on and take off their institutional hats over the course of these activities, enabling folks to identify actionable problems grounded in the farming and open source ag-tech communities (hats off) and creating viable ways for their institutions to collaborate to pursue addressing those problems (hats on). The conference ends with a reflection, a “Post-GOAT Digestion Session”, eliciting feedback from newcomers and returning community members to provide input on the immediate direction of the GOAT Community. Our inaugural conference in 2018 established themes and pathways for the community as described in The GOAT Report. Figure 5 shares a glimpse of the gathering that ensued in 2018, highlighting co-creation of an emergently-structured event and an emphasis on hands-on mutual learning.
There are two years between conferences, and during this time community members are co-creating open ag-tech for agroecological transformation and organizers are grant-writing to expand opportunity for the GOAT community. We sustain our progress and stay connected through active communication and workspaces including: a chat platform for informal communications, the website for public-facing information, a forum for structured discussions, and a virtual office space for active working groups, and a variety of events and gatherings.
By presenting our community and work at conference exhibitions like practitioner conferences like Eco Farm (EcoFarm, 2025), the Indiana Small Farms Conference (Purdue University Extension, 2025), and the Pasa Sustainable Agriculture Conference (Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, 2025), we create a welcoming entry point for farmers and farm advisors who are at the heart of agroecology. These exhibitions in return provide us with an opportunity to receive feedback and new directions from the farming communities we seek to support.
Figure 5. A window into GOAT 2018
3.3.3 The GOAT Governance Challenge & the Pursuit of Shared Meaning
“From oral traditions to almanacs, from textbooks to online videos, farmers have always had plenty of sources from which to learn about agricultural practices. Learning about high technology on the other hand necessarily situates us in the contemporary moment. For those agrarians among us, this can be an uncomfortable space. Farmers are continually innovating (responding to the environment is a full-time job), but their risk-taking is tempered by an awareness that historically agricultural development is a top-down, often exclusive, state of affairs. Exclusion generally has pointed to technology being complicit in agricultural consolidation. The open source movement, as expressed at the GOAT conference, makes an explicit attempt in engaging and collaborating with small-scale, under-resourced farmers in an effort to decentralize and democratize technology.” – (Bliss, 2023)
Through GOAT, we and our co-organizers sought to hold space to build consensus and cultivate relationships across multiple aligned visions for the future. As with many grassroots initiatives, coming to consensus on shared values (i.e., goals that are desirable) (Fleischman and Briske, 2016) and principles (i.e., universal objective reality, not bound by cultures and individuals) (Covey, 2003), reflected in a community vision and mission, and with a roadmap for how to practically enact it, is a process of continuous improvement.
Ethics are “well-founded standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do” (Manuel Velasquez et al., 2010). Forum posts about “values and ethics in GOAT” and a “GOAT Manifesto, drawing on GOAT 2018 and 2022 session discussions, explain: “Ethical consideration is at the core of GOAT. However, not all members of the GOAT communities subscribe to the same value set. The principles of GOAT [should] encourage ethical consideration without prescribing what goals are desirable, worthwhile, or good, particularly in the context of agriculture. The principles of GOAT [should] encourage mindfulness in choices, transparency in decisions made and products produced, and promote debate of what makes good and useful open ag-tech” (GOATech Forum, 2021; GOATech Forum, 2022: Goat Manifesto Session doc).
The themes that continuously emerge at GOAT reflect ideas in the broader open ag-tech movement, the desire for meaningful relationships, shared knowledge, building a commons, maintaining connections, being able to move among different levels of engagement (from local to global), and to experience active empowerment. In a session at GOAT 2022, participants discussed the prompt: What are the core principles you think the GOAT community+ could support? A paper was also passed around and folks wrote:
- “The GOAT community is committed to helping each other and society at large effectively and collaboratively develop and employ open source technologies in support of healthy, equitable , resilient and sustainable food systems.”
- “GOAT should be informed by the deep work of agroecology movements and food sovereignty movements that are led by diverse groups of practitioners that have collectively co-articulated the kinds of futures and worlds they want.”
- “Governing resources to grow food = hardware, software, data, knowledge, practices”
- “The GOAT community understands its place outside of the tech community”
We still do not have a manifesto, but the GOATS continue to gather. In practice, GOAT is an opinionated space for technology, but we are open to a multiplicity of agricultural approaches that have varying levels of agroecological impact. Our community’s values, principles, and cultural norms of how we gather puts teeth behind those opinions, which in turn create a sense of trusted structure that folks can build identity with and belong to. However, we must not over-govern so that we remain inclusive and open to new perspectives and ideas. By limiting our identity to community instead of institution, we balance opinions with open mindedness.
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