What if the people closest to a problem could decide how to solve it? What if communities determined where resources flow? Through participatory funding rounds, communities can democratically allocate resources in a more equitable and effective manner.

In a world of institutional collapse and climate chaos, local resilience, collective action, and distributed power matter more than ever. We need tools that match this shift. Hylo’s governance toolkit is expanding to meet this moment, offering communities new ways to work together and make decisions collectively. Participatory funding rounds are a key part of this toolkit, transforming how communities allocate resources and set priorities together.

Funding Rounds Now on Hylo

Hylo’s participatory grantmaking / budgeting tool, Funding Rounds, was made possible through a grant from the 11th Hour Project, a program of the Schmidt Family Foundation. We are grateful and honored to work with a foundation with such strong values alignment, and celebrate their profound contributions to renewable energy, resilient food systems, healthy oceans and the protection of human rights.

For this project, we joined 11th Hour and Raft Foundation in supporting Float, the Funding Lab for Open Agroecological Technologies. Float is experimenting with new models for codeveloping and funding technology that advances food sovereignty. The team at Float served as our real-world co-design partner, guiding the creation of the Funding Rounds requirements to meet their goal of having a cohort farmers, technologists, researchers, and civil society organizations from around the world co-develop shared technology proposals and decide together on which to resource.

After months of development and collaboration, we’re thrilled to now officially launch Funding Rounds. This powerful new toolkit enables communities to run democratic funding processes from start to finish — from proposal submission to community discussion to collective voting and allocation.

We’re proud to share that Float has completed two successful funding rounds so far, involving 50+ community members in distributing nearly $700,000 USD.

Creating Funding Rounds

Watch how to create and manage democratic funding processes on Hylo.

Moving Towards Distributed Decision-Making

Traditional philanthropy usually involves a small group of decision-makers that allocate grants in a top-down manner. With direct participatory and democratic funding, every stakeholder gets a voice in deciding what matters. Community members submit proposals, discuss and vet the options together, and collectively vote on how resources should be allocated. This results in decisions that genuinely reflect community values, needs, and experiences.

Participatory grantmaking distributes power from the center to the edges, where true innovation often occurs unacknowledged and unseen, except by peers. The community members closest to challenges often understand them best. By inviting these community members into the decision making process, resources have a better chance of going to projects that are most deserving and impactful.

By adding Funding Rounds to Hylo’s existing community collaboration tools, we have created a totally unique coordination space. Handling money as a group is advanced collaboration, and Hylo now provides the pathways to grow relationships and trust needed to succeed in these complex collaborations, as well as the tools to carry them out. With this expanding stewardship toolkit, Hylo aims to help communities build the infrastructure for more resilient, democratic, and self-determined futures.

Ready to bring participatory decision-making to your community? Learn more about how Hylo’s participatory rounds can transform how your organization makes resource allocation decisions.

Reshaping Community Decision-Making: Participatory Funding on Hylo was originally published in Terran Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hylo is a community-led, prosocial coordination platform for purpose-driven groups. Hylo is open-source, non-profit, and driven by participatory design with real-world groups at the forefront of regenerative agriculture, community resilience, peer learning, equity, inclusive capital, and place-based organizing.

Hylo is more than a codebase; we are community leaders and prosocial facilitators that guide our member groups on best practices in community stewardship. We are learning together alongside our ecosystem of friends and partners, and we know that successful coordination takes more than technology — it requires deep trust, strong relationships, and a lot of human care.

About the Role

The Hylo Community Steward will act as an ambassador for Hylo, responsible for nurturing vibrant online spaces for the Hylo community and representing Hylo to the broader world. This role entails the cultivation and stewardship of the community around Hylo, coordinating virtual events, offering support to Hylo users, and driving community expansion. They will actively engage in traditional social media management tasks, effectively functioning as an Online Community Manager. Additionally, they will nurture connections with Hylo stakeholders across various platforms, participating in relevant conversations on LinkedIn, Medium, Mastodon and others, in order to foster relationships across our open-source ecosystem.

Responsibilities

Steward key Hylo communities including Building Hylo, Hylo Community Organizers, and the Hylo Alliance

• This includes leading conversation, creating content, and responding to comments to nurture the Hylo community.
• Provide support to community members by answering questions or addressing feedback.
• Guide Hylo members both in using the Hylo platform specifically, and in best practices for stewarding their communities in general.
• Act as a bridge between the community and Hylo platform developers by ensuring bugs and product input are transmitted through proper channels.

Organize and lead monthly calls with Hylo stakeholders to grow the community and communicate about product updates and other important news relevant to what the Hylo team is working on

• These could be online meetings, webinars, workshops, or other interactive experiences where there is a facilitated space for conversation and relationship-building as well as sharing information.
• 1 call every month with the Building Hylo community and the broader ecosystem
• 1 call every two months with Hylo Community Organizers focused on exchanging information about best practices for community stewardship

Attend virtual Hylo team meetings at a cadence TBD by mutual agreement with the candidate and current team.

Bonus: Participate in relevant conversations on other social channels such as Linkedin, Medium, Mastodon, and others

Bonus: Create posts or blogs, and share content to keep stakeholders informed about upcoming events and important announcements.

About you

• Experience stewarding groups online and/or IRL
• Strong written and verbal communication skills in English
• Experience and confidence facilitating group conversations and running an online event
• High emotional intelligence and capacity to nurture a caring and collaborative culture
• Familiar with various social media platforms and confident learning new digital tools (beyond Hylo, we use Google Docs, Miro, Zoom, Gitbook, and Github)
• Passion for open-source technology, regeneration, community resilience etc
• Excitement for collaboration technology as a key tool to create a world that works for all
• Experience working in tech a plus — especially roles in customer success and online community management

Reciprocity & Details

• This is a part-time role with a 20–25 hours per month commitment, for which we can offer $1000 USD in compensation.
• The role is fully remote with opportunities to join quarterly in-person team retreats or other events. Candidates in US time zones preferred as most of our team is based in Pacific Time.

Process

Submission: To apply for the role, please complete this application form.

First Interview: After screening all applications, we will select candidates for Round 1 interviews with Hylo’s Community Lead and Director of Product.

Second Interview: Selected candidates will proceed to Round 2 interviews with additional members of the Hylo core team.

Reference Check: At this stage we will ask candidates for contact information for 3 professional references who we will contact to learn more about the candidate.

Offer: We will extend an offer to the candidate who best aligns with the role. All other candidates will be notified when the hiring process is complete.

***

We are open to applications from anyone passionate about creating a world that works for all, and especially want to encourage folks from backgrounds underrepresented in tech, as we believe in fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace that thrives on a multitude of perspectives.

To apply for this position, please fill out this form. Thank you!

Catalyze Connection on Hylo was originally published in Terran Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are excited to announce that Zebras Unite has moved its community onto Hylo! Zebras Unite is a cooperative of founders, investors, and allies creating a more inclusive economy by helping each other balance profit and purpose. They made a huge splash a few years back when they declared “Zebras Fix What Unicorns Break,” offering a resounding critique of venture capital and making the point that business can be both profitable and good for society. They’ve been growing and doing great work ever since, and today ZU is a global movement, catalyzing the community, capital, and culture for people building businesses that are better for the world.

Zebras and Hylo

Terran Collective core steward Tibet Sprague began collaborating with advocates at Zebras Unite through his work stewarding the Collaborative Technology Alliance, as well as through the Exit To Community (E2C) movement.

Since 2018, Zebras Unite has hosted their community on Mighty Networks. That platform hasn’t met their need for an interconnected group architecture that reflects the complex and global landscape of their organizing efforts across the community, the co-op, and its catalytic programs, including the Inclusive Capital Collective, a growing network of community fund managers and entrepreneur support organizations designing and developing shared technical and financial infrastructure for aggregating and deploying financial capital and other resources to entrepreneurs and communities of color in the US.

Zebras Unite made the transition from Mighty Networks to Hylo to offer their community a more supportive environment for peer-to-peer learning, sharing resources, and coordinating to build models and frameworks for ethical and inclusive entrepreneurship and finance.

“Hylo deeply serves the needs of our global community — to create connection, share knowledge, and catalyze action in support of businesses that are better for the world,” said ZU Managing Director Madelynn Martiniere. “Their platform is purpose-designed to increase collaboration, coordination, and cooperation, and we’re delighted to have the support of the Hylo team and ecosystem as we enter this next chapter. “

Hylo is an ideal collaboration platform for the ZU community because it is designed to build relationships and enhance trust among distributed groups. ZU needed a more robust and effective way for their community to connect and discover other zebra organizations. Enhancing trust and transparency between members at all levels is an essential need for the ZU network to continue growing and taking collective action.

Through this partnership, Zebras Unite and Hylo will work together to co-develop new features on the platform to serve their needs as a global movement. Hylo will offer in-depth community management support through our new Community Stewardship support program.

New Features from this Partnership

In terms of co-development of Hylo, the features we’re building with ZU have been long sought after by our stakeholders and our own team. We strongly feel that this phase of development is going to take Hylo to the next level and support communities on Hylo in a whole new way. Here’s what we’re working on together this winter:

Extended API Functionality and Zapier Integration

Hylo is extending API support for the ability to connect seamlessly with Zebras Unite Co-Op’s membership database system of record (Knack), to enable the flow of information between their community directory system and Hylo. This is an exciting feature as it lays the foundation for integrating Hylo with a multiplicity of other tools via Zapier!

Custom Admin Tags/Member Categories

Zebras Unite Co-op members are categorized in different ways, and we are building the functionality for administrators to create and display custom tags for members related to their function and engagement with the program. These tags will be visible to all on members’ Hylo profiles, and folks will be able to search the member directory by these tags. These tags have the potential to become the basis for “Roles” in Hylo groups that go beyond the single role of moderator that currently exists.

Internationalization & Multi-Language Support

The Zebras Unite community is international and there are chapters all over the world. As such, there is a need for Hylo to support multiple languages and allow users to choose which language in which to view Hylo. The first language we will offer is Spanish, and we are calling on our open source community to let us know which other languages are important for your communities. We are also seeking contributions of translations for the interface, which is a cool way to contribute to an open source technology without needing to know how to code!. We are thrilled that this is in the works, and excited to better support the global community in collaborating on Hylo.

Membership Engagement Analytics

Visibility into member participation is a key need for groups to understand the level of collaboration and impact happening in their group. Together with Zebras Unite, we will co-design simple analytics for groups in a way that honors our values for Hylo member privacy and sovereignty. These analytics will form the basis of a Community Dashboard that will eventually make these data points transparent and available to all members of a community.

This work is under the stewardship of Zebras Unite Co-Op in partnership with Zebras Unite nonprofit and Second Muse Foundation, with support from the Economic Development Administration for Cultural Innovation.

Serving Zebras Unite and the Cooperative Movement on Hylo was originally published in Terran Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The meal is spread over five special courses, each honoring a milestone we’ve passed as a global community. Every course begins with a bell is associated with a different ritual. Here is how we celebrated Inheritance Day 2171 last year on December 12 2021 in Oakland California, with a small gathering of housemates, neighbors, family, and friends:

Bell 1

Bell 1 is dedicated to care & nurturance: for each other and the land.

We started this bell with a land acknowledgement, highlighting that in 2171 all land was returned to Indigenous-led stewardship. This bell celebrates a shift toward a culture of responsibility, with everyone recognizing our duty to care for our communities.

Some celebrated achievements over the past 150 years include the 2028 Concord of Care, an agreement in the US to abundantly compensate all care work (childcare, elder care, and land care) as part of a movement to align our society in service to life. By 2040, the US had released the dollar and adopted a currency tied to the thriving health of our people and land. By 2050, bioregional currencies have emerged that localize this concept, with value pegged to the thriving of specific landscapes and communities.

To celebrate this bell, each of us thought of an ancestor who cared for us, and voiced their name to call them into the room with us. We nourished ourselves with the Salad of Nurturance: baby kale, pumpkin and pomegranate seeds.

Bell 2

Bell 2 is devoted to justice, healing, and reparations.

We remember when our world family stood in solidarity to renounce all forms of oppression, reclaiming the humanity of all living beings and recognizing universal human rights. We paid homage to those who paved the way for this collective healing and celebrated the reparations that have taken place over the past 150 years.

We remember in 2030 when reparations were paid to the descendants of enslaved people all over the world and the mass redistribution of wealth in 2035. Prisons were abolished in 2051 and systems of transformational justice were put in place. By 2060, wealth gaps were non-existent and everyone had access to abundance, as their birthright.

To honor this bell, we shared a grief ritual by drinking fire cider and reflecting on our own ancestral trauma and the injustices faced by our brothers and sisters all over the world. We remembered the trauma of divisiveness, suffering, and abuse that scarred our history for many years. Afterwards, we sipped spiced golden milk to wash away the taste of bitterness and to savor the sweetness of human kindness and compassion.

Bell 3

Bell 3 honors the equitable distribution of resources, the shift to embracing abundance and the universal rights of all beings to thrive.

We remember in 2030 when universal basic income started to spread across the globe, and countries everywhere began to provide access to integrative healthcare, free education, and other public services to ensure everyone had their material and nonmaterial needs satisfied. By 2060, we formally entered the global era of abundance with mass parades through the streets of all cities throughout the world chanting, “We have enough! We have enough!” We enacted the “Concord of Harmony in 2062” which enumerated the pact of all people living together in peace without exploitation and the ability to live a safe, secure, happy and fulfilled lives.

As always, we honored this bell by dancing in “A-bun-dance”, shaking our booties in joy and celebration. We then feasted on platters of abundance, overflowing with delectibles from all the food groups, representing our needs for sustenance being met.

This is the only bell in our ceremony that was led by a male bodied person. He wore a suit to represent the old patriarchal capitalist ways, which he then took off during the a-bun-dance to represent the radical shedding of old ways and embrace of a life-giving economy.

Bell 4

Bell 4 celebrates harmonious ecology, where we rekindled our kinship with the natural world and honored Gaia and all living beings, as we would our human brethren.

We, as a human species, remembered that we are not only embedded in nature, but an integral part of the whole. and At the forefront of this transformation, we dismantled Capitalistic systems in 2055, which had abused earth for centuries to obtain natural resources.

We enacted the Mothership bill in 2040, which acknowledged the richness of biodiversity on our planet and the Rights of Nature, which described the inherent rights of nature and ecosystems to flourish. There were mass movements of ecological regeneration by 2045, with the banning of industrial agriculture of pesticide use, oil and coal production. By 2048, we were carbon neutral and implemented carbon sequestering practices worldwide, going below 300 ppm of Co2 by 2052.

We celebrated this bell with a breath practice symbolizing our interconnectedness with trees, breathing in the oxygen they provide for us and breathing out carbon dioxide to provide for them, while exhaling deeper than our inhalation. We meditated on our reciprocal relationship with nature and gave gratitude for the abundance the natural world provides. We then feasted on rice balls cooked with black sesame (representing coal), topped with a finishing oil, all while remembering the transition to clean energy.

Bell 5

Bell 5 is in honor of global peace and unity, where we celebrate our interconnectedness with all living beings.

We remember when we moved to a world colored with cooperation, sharing, empathy, and reciprocity. We reminisced on the Unity movement of the 2060’s which ended all wars and the dismantling of borders in 2063.

To celebrate this bell, we all chanted in harmony the mantra “Aum” three times, resonating our voices to signify our universal resonance. We then had a sharing circle, where participants shouted out achievements over the past 150 years. This was a particularly poignant and joyful way to look at how far we have come as a global family.

We feasted on a unity stew, which included a variety of vegetables cooked in a base of coconut milk, symbolizing the richness of our diversity, yet the oneness we share.

Our Yearly Ritual

This inheritance day was extra special as we had elders present at the event to envision this beautiful future with us. This practice of imagining is so meaningful, as it offers perspective on ways we can live in accordance with the change we hope to see.

Here’s to starting a new year inspired by the more just, inclusive, and a world our hearts know is possible.

With gratitude,
Krisha & Terran Collective

Inheritance Day: Imagining ourselves as ancestors was originally published in Terran Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve just launched Hylo 5.0.0! We have exciting new rich content options on Hylo as well as significant UI design improvements on our mobile applications — seriously, go update the Hylo App on your phone right now!

These new developments are brought to you in partnership with our friends at Salmon Nation Trust and The Tribal Resource Center. We are so grateful for these aligned partners who have chosen Hylo as their coordination tool.

Salmon Nation is a bioregion, which extends from Northern California to the North Slope of Alaska, where local cultures are growing movements for resilience.

The Salmon Nation Trust and Terran Collective are partnering to accelerate regenerative projects in the bioregion through The Edge Prize. The Edge Prize will create a peer-to-peer community of local leaders hosted on Hylo.

Video Embedding

With this recent release, we have added Video Embedding. Now Hylo members can share engaging YouTube videos, Vimeo, Soundcloud and more links directly in a post. All the better for community members to showcase their work, post event recordings, and share how-to videos!

Text Formatting

We have also added text formatting in posts and comments for better readability. The text formatting toolbar lives at the top of the Post Editor, and allows authors to use bold, italic, bullet points and lists, indentation, headers, and more. Text formatting is also available in comments via standard keyboard shortcuts.

The Tribal Resource Center (TRC) was formed to promote digital connectivity on Tribal reservations, empowering communities to utilize the benefits of broadband. The TRC is the hub for trusted resources to assist tribes in installing and adopting broadband. We are partnering with them to establish a peer-to-peer network of learning and mutual support for tribal nations on Hylo. Our new resource library and collections feature will support these communities to find and share relevant content in an organized manner.

Post Collections

Post Collections allow group admins to aggregate sets of posts, and highlight them in a custom view accessible from the group’s navigation.

Admins can search for posts to add in the collection, and manually sort/reorder them by dragging and dropping.

Use this for:
- Highlighting important resources or discussions in a group
- Creating an organized library for your community to refer to
- Courses! Create educational modules around specific topics

Search the Post Stream

To allow for better searchability for posts, we’ve also added a post stream search/filter feature. Users can click on the magnifying glass at the top of the stream to enter a search term and filter any view of posts by that text.

Use this for: Searching for relevant content in your community!

Check out other additional features and changes in the Changelog below:

### Added

- CustomViews of type ‘post stream’ can now specify a default view mode and sort but these can be changed by the user when looking at the Custom View.

- Add ‘Abusive’ as reason to flag a post

### Changed

• Navigating from one group to another no longer stays on the same view, (explore, map, member directory…), rather it goes to the new group’s home page (Stream)
• Improvements to general Link Preview retrieval and display
• Link navigating in posts is more consistent
• Topics stream and Projects view now have controls for changing the sort and view mode
• Bold text in a post appears bold
• Correctly show the current context in the navigation drawer

### Fixed

• Fix display of group search menu so it isn’t half covered
• Clicking on # people commented in post card opens the post details
• Fix error message when trying to create an invalid Affiliation

Thank you for your support!

We hope you enjoy the new features and upgraded design. As always, don’t hesitate to reach out with questions, comments, or other feedback.

With gratitude,
Hylo stewards

Rich Content and Richer Connections on Hylo was originally published in Terran Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Through our partnership with OpenTEAM, Hylo is poised to become the community platform for farmers, ranchers, and producer networks in the regenerative agriculture movement. Almost a year of collaboration went into the launch of Hylo’s farm-specific features to support the needs of land stewards, with the ultimate goal of improving soil health and advancing agriculture’s ability to become a solution to climate change.

We embarked on this partnership with OpenTEAM and Regen Network after identifying a gap in the technology landscape for land stewards — a free, open-source, non-profit tool for producers to help other producers in a peer-to-peer learning network. As a place-based platform, Hylo is particularly suited to support the regenerative movement on the ground across networked communities.

During our Collabathon in Summer and Fall 2021, we embarked on a co-design and development process with land stewards, technologists, and other stakeholders in the OpenTEAM ecosystem to envision the features needed to support producers.

From these sessions, we learned that a collaborative community platform is vital in scaling the regenerative agriculture movement. We learned that producers supporting each other in a distributed, networked manner is essential. Community extends beyond growers — enabling the public to connect with producers and get involved in their local food system is another key need in a platform. Ultimately, we hope that this will foster a deeper connection between humans and their local landscape, bring more awareness to the work of regenerative agriculture, and flow more resources towards these practices.

Hylo’s Land Steward Engagement Program

We heard loud and clear that it’s imperative to include key voices in Hylo’s development process — especially land stewards themselves. To engage this vital part of the community, we organized a Land Steward engagement program where we gathered producers from the regenerative agriculture space in small cohorts to hear about their experiences, desires in a community platform, and feedback on our current platform and future designs.

We recruited our participants from the wider OpenTEAM and Regen Network ecosystems, as well as our own local land steward communities. We met virtually for four weeks in winter 2021 and offered $100/hour per participant in reciprocity for their valuable time and energy.

We selected land stewards from various regions and backgrounds in order to represent a diversity of perspectives. Our cohorts included land stewards, farmers, ranchers, small-holders, commodity croppers, women and non-binary farmers, and BIPOC producers. The distribution of the participants can be seen below.

From this pool of participants, we assembled four cohorts to conduct the feedback sessions: Farmers Interested in Ecosystem Service Payments, Women Ranchers, Black Farmers in California, and Farmers in Northern California.

Participants in the Collabathon let us know that involving land stewards was imperative in order to build trust, and guided us to engage with these folks in ways that were respectful of their time and energy. As such, we designed the four listening sessions to reflect this.

Welcome Session

This was an opportunity for the land stewards in each cohort to get to know each other and the Hylo research team (composed of Clare Politano, Product Lead, Neha Sharma, Partnerships Lead, and Krisha Subramanian, Stakeholder Advocate). We shared the vision of Hylo to support land stewards, and asked the participants how we could best support them in this process.

Listening Session

This session offered space for the land stewards to share their experiences, challenges, and successes, with the lens of how a community platform could address them. We learned about the difficulties faced by land stewards, which informed our feature designs going forward.

Mentorship and Learning

Participants reported that they rely on their communities for mutual support and knowledge sharing in order to thrive. Though we heard over and over again that there are difficulties networking-knowing where and how to connect with other growers. There wasn’t (yet) a space for collaborating, learning from others, and knowledge sharing, with folks relying on word of mouth.

“Knowledge sharing would be a great resource for us. But it’s a challenge because I have to know who to go to, and I don’t know who to ask” — Wenona

“ It’s really hard to find others to learn from” — Christy

“How do I get help from other farmers? There are no meeting spaces to share knowledge.It’s all word of mouth” — Kwayera

Resource Sharing

Another desire we heard from the farmer cohorts is for more resource sharing and borrowing equipment. For smallholders, tool-sharing is essential, as they may not have the capital to make investments in expensive equipment. Borrowing or renting equipment is a way to practice collective action and sharing of resources-as one grower mentioned, ‘returning to (or creating) an agrarian commons.’

“We had to plant cover crops and we had a very tiny window before the storm that was coming in and we didn’t have the appropriate equipment for it. And through word of mouth, we were able to grab someone else’s equipment. But we were lucky that time. It would be great to know who has what to share” — Shaylan “”I wish we had an organized place to go to rent or borrow or whatever equipment.. we don’t really have that.” — Kwayera

We want to acknowledge that equipment sharing does come with liability risks, but we believe that clear agreements and community-supported insurance policies could address this challenge.

Finding Markets/Buyers

Another significant barrier for growers is the supply chain and access to markets to sell their goods. Costs are going up in agriculture, which makes transitioning to new or regenerative practices a challenge. While there may be markets for regeneratively grown products, it’s not obvious how to find these and build the relationships needed for a robust supply chain.

“Making the investment in Regen Ag is a big leap, you need to have the markets in place.” — Anonymous “If someone’s going to make a transition to… regenerative practices, if they haven’t done that before, it’s a big leap…it sounds really hard to finance or be able to take that risk in an industry where the margins are just razor thin.” — Kwayera

Land Access

Securing access to land was mentioned as a huge barrier preventing new farmers from entering the field. The cost of farmland is so high that it is often impossible for folks to get started without a family connection. Equitable access and financing for new, young, women, Indigenous, and historically disadvantaged farmers is essential. While there are grants and programs working towards this, access to this information is sparse.

‘For beginning farmers, how to access land is actually one of the major barriers. [Being able to share] we’ve got this corner of a field if anyone’s looking for a few acres, that would be helpful’

Design Session

In this session, the Hylo team presented our Farm Profile designs and received feedback on what they liked, sections they would reorient or change, and additional content they’d like to see or be able to share.

One key feature in the Farm Profile is Opportunities to Collaborate, where producers can share the ways they are open to connect. We asked our participants about the types of collaborations they are most likely to invite via their profile.

Wrapup Session

In the final session, we shared our updated feature designs based on the previous sessions for a final round of input. We implemented these designs and they are what you see on Farm Profile pages today.

Hylo as a Solution

Detailed Farm Profiles

We heard a clear need for farmers to find others in their network and build relationships in order to discover opportunities for mutual support. Farm Profile pages are the way for producers to share about themselves in detail-their goals, products, land practices, projects, and needs. Sharing all of this makes it easy for collaborators to find each other for mentorship, mutual support, sharing resources, market access, or other needs.

With Opportunities to Collaborate under Farm Profile pages, producers can share the types of collaborations they are open to. For instance, a producer can share that they are open to equipment sharing. Using this feature, other producers can see this need clearly stated on their profile and send a direct message to learn more.

Beyond relationship building amongst producers, Farm Profiles are also a way to develop community between producers and the public (including purchasers), creating pathways for market access.

Finding Other Producers

The Group Explorer is a directory of public groups on Hylo, with a dedicated tab for Farms. Producers and the general public can use this feature to search by keyword and find relevant Farms with whom to connect.

Users can sort the directory of Farms by their Name, Member Count, and by those Nearest to them and can filter the list of Farms by the Farm Type, Operation, and Land Management techniques. By using this, folks can discover nearby farms to visit, find producers growing specific crops, utilizing a specific land management technique or with relevant skills. Overall, we see this as a way for producers to build relationships with others in their region and offer the public a way to connect and participate in their local food system.

Onboarding a Farm or Farm Network on Hylo

We are in the process of beta testing these features with OpenTEAM and producer networks in their ecosystem. We will continue to iterate on the Farm functionality based on continued feedback from their pilot program.

We are excited to share that we are in conversations with other producer networks globally and supporting their process in adopting Hylo as a coordination tool! If you are a producer/producer network and are interested in exploring Hylo for your ecosystem, please don’t hesitate to reach out! Send a message to krisha@terran.io to connect.

Originally published at https://medium.com on September 6, 2022.

Listening to Land Stewards was originally published in Terran Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.