Many ideas, connections and promising directions emerged from the Symposium. The workshop on Saturday, March 26th was a great opportunity to synthesize some key takeaways, priorities and next steps with a core group of collaborators while they were still fresh in our minds. Writing this retrospective has likewise been an opportunity to sit with these ideas, continue conversations with some of the attendees, and do further research into a few “high signal” areas which came up over and over throughout the Symposium. In this section, we capture what we see as the key next steps to carry this work forward.
We believe in “learning in public” and returning knowledge that was convened at the March events to the commons. While a final retrospective report will eventually be published, we hope that we can begin to mobilize knowledge in other ways throughout the process of developing this retrospective.
One idea is to do a Wikipedia edit-a-thon with event attendees and retrospective collaborators, to publish insights and knowledge gained on a public platform. Similarly, we hope to publish short articles on specific topics on other public or sector-wide platforms, such as Medium and on the BCCA/ACCA blog sites. Some of our partners and attendees will also be publishing content about the events, for which we hope that this summary will be helpful resource.
Building from here, we will likely convene in-depth conversations and engagement around some of the themes which surfaced during the events to inform more specific strategies. This Notion will be a space for ideating and coordinating future knowledge mobilization activities that might stem from this early work.
If we view this Symposium as a kind of intelligence generating process, then it follows that our next steps are to better define priority areas for co-operative sector action and conduct further research into specific problem spaces. This is best done collaboratively, perhaps by sharing this retrospective back to event participants and circulating it to a larger audience (including primary producers) to see which problems resonate most.
During the workshop, one table group suggested doing a “pain points” assessment to map out what exactly the problems are, where in the ecosystem/value chain they occur, who they impact, and how they are felt. This could be done as an interview or survey process with a variety of key informants in the ag data ecosystem - primary producers, aggregators, regulators, etc. - as a way of gathering first-hand input into what really matters. This would help us avoid the creation of “solutions in search of problems”, in the words of Ian Glassford, chair of the Co-operative Intelligence Unit.
We already have some empirical insight into what some real problem spaces might be based on topics that were frequently discussed throughout Symposium presentations and conversations. These “high signal areas” include:
Data Literacy
Leveraging Data
Climate Data
Carbon markets
Collective Bargaining
Further research into each of these areas will be necessary to determine the extent of the problem and it’s salience to producers and other key players in the ag data ecosystem.
Once the problem spaces above (and potentially other problem spaces) have been thoroughly researched and the need for co-operative action determined, the next step is to convene key partners in a participatory design process to inform co-operative solutions and implementation strategies. It will be essential to include a variety of stakeholders in this process, including primary producers, producer associations, government actors, and existing service providers and initiatives involved in agrotechnology or parallel spaces.
The Symposium attendees represent a microcosm of the agrotechnology space and we can see many of the participating individuals and organizations becoming key partners in designing, seeking funding for, developing, testing and implementing solutions at scale.
Consider this Retrospective as a living snapshot of our most current thinking and knowledge around the challenges of the agriculture data space and opportunities for co-operative solutions. We have laid the foundation for an ongoing conversation and there is much room for enhancement.
For example, we can continue to build out our repository of notes on sessions, speakers and initiatives. We can start pages for collecting research about certain problem spaces and brainstorming solutions. We can add photos, videos, links, word art and even emojis to supplement the text.
Practicing networked thinking is how we prototype networked doing!