Volunteers helped test geoform for a nonprofit organization

The request for volunteers came from [UN]cultivated in late 2016. Their mission is to preserve indigenous knowledge while cultivating food systems in harmony with nature. They believe that collaboration between indigenous knowledge holders and mainstream scientific research can generate new co-produced knowledge that will enable effective action to cope with climate change while meeting current and future food demands.

In moving forward with achieving their vision, [UN]cultivated has started an initiative to support local food production as a means of mitigating climate change and building resilient food systems. In support of this initiative, [UN]cultivated has created a webmap to show the location of businesses contributing food to their local system, as well as a geoform to allow users to add new contributors to the map.

The purpose of the collaboration with GISCorps was to test the data entry workflow/geoform and get feedback from the global community before launching a campaign to promote the use of the application. Volunteers were expected to input sources of local food (e.g. restaurants, farms, community-supported agriculture, and farmer’s markets) in their community, either from internet based research, or personal knowledge. This data helps people learn where they can go to support all those in their local community who grow, harvest, and process food, including women, family farmers, herders, fisherpeople, forest dwellers, and indigenous peoples.

At the end, 16 volunteers ended up contributing to the project. Volunteers provided feedback and also mapped about 260 locations spread across around 150 cities worldwide. The Uncultivated team was able to add information to the wiki to help clarify several matters and will next be working to make the form shorter to take less time. They also plan to better integrate what3words. They are currently exploring ways to use the Google API to auto-populate some of the fields, especially the hours of operation. They are also considering two different forms, a short “Basic” form without a mapping component, which will provide them with at least a business name and website, and also an “Advanced” form which requires the mapping and filling out longer information.