I am one of the members from Solikyl (Foodsharing Gothenburg) and we have been using Karrot for quite some time now. Karrot has not only helped us to organize the food pickups much better, but also different events and the communication between the participants.
I am also involved in the Bike Kitchen movement in Gothenburg and over the years i noticed similar challenges when organizing bike pickups, events and the communication.
Lots can be done over email, phone, online docs and the worst of all; Facebook (The Monster).
Luckily some of our members refuse to be pushed into the addiction of feeding the monster and we still have to fall back to email and online docs.
To the point:
I would like to test the Karrot tool for one of our Bike Kitchens here in Gothenburg on the karrot.world instance. To test how it would improve our activity and communication, but also to get feedback from our members. And if we could in the near future host our own instance for the other Bike Kitchen groups and hopefully get more people off the surveillance Monster.
The question:
So would it be OK if i create and test a Bike Kitchen group on the karrot.world instance?
Thanks to everyone behind this amazing project, we hope to contribute to the community beyond just using the tool.
I’m all for working towards this generalization approach and testing Karrot for Bike Kitchens, which is a different case but quite similar in its organizational structure. This would be a kind of proof-of-concept about applying Karrot to other sharing and volunteer-based activities.
We’ll be applying for some funding too and there is a much greater possibility of getting it this time around, since it’s funding destined specifically towards developing and spreading the concept of Bike Kitchens in the city of Gothenburg.
Great @bruno and @tomasz - I really appreciate your efforts there. Bike/cycling related uses also makes a lot of sense personally given most of the currently active karrot contributors are quite active on bikes
Here’s a gratuitous picture of my bike trip where I carried my old bike to be saved for 3 days:
Gives me a bit more motivation to get more active on that task… although my parents visit soon, then I travel for a couple of weeks… but will be happy to hear how your experiments using karrot for the bike kitchen work out.
Thanks for the link to the tech discussion.
The possibility of multisharing on a open source platform was what peaked my interest for the Yunity vision as expressed in the yunity Drawing Story video.
How do i go about to create a new group in Karrot?
I have clicked on all the options in my account, i searched the forum but i cant figure out how to create a new group.
Here in Gothenburg we have a good collaboration between Solikyl (Foodsharing) and Bike Kitchens, we feed then food waste and they help us with bikes and cargo trailers.
It is our long term goal to transport all of the food waste on cargo bikes and trailers.
Also, some of our contributors are active in both the Solikyl project and Bike Kitchen, and by using the same online tool is a win for both.
It will also help to invite new type of groups to the platform and maybe start experimenting with possible multisharing features.
Nice photo btw, seeing bikes with trailers always makes me feel more optimistic.
@tomasz you can create a new group at the “secret” page Karrot - it’s intentionally a bit hidden for now so we have a bit more contact with the groups.
I can see your point about keeping the two aspects on the same platform to make it easier for users.
Thanks for link. I have now created new group for Bike Kitchen Gothenburg.
I will demo this for the board later today and report back any feedback i receive.
Let’s take Karrot to a whole new level.
After some testing with the Bike Kitchen group I can say that they are generally happy with Karrot. Obviously some wishes for change were expressed (besides the basic theme adaptation) and the most prominent one is about having a separate chat for the board of the association (not so much out of a concern for privacy, but generally because of the volume of messages that might be uninteresting for other volunteers). One quick solution would be to create a separate group, but the kind of solution that I think would work best is to enable a chat-wall for the stores/places. I think this would work for the general development of Karrot and would definitely be useful for our foodsaving group in Gothenburg. In addition to that notifications for particular stores could be turned on/off (I’d suggest off by default), or a subscription system to the store/place.
Btw, we’re still awaiting the decision for the funding. A new local city council came to power and they’re not very fond of Bike Kitchens so funding for the next year was cancelled. However there’s still the money from this year’s budget that can be spent, meaning that there’s still a chance of getting it, but now with more competition than we anticipated.
I hope the translation was good enough to get an idea, but I’ll be presenting in more details the background and I hope you can get a better idea of it as we go along working together. Here are some further clarifications:
There are many Bike Kitchens starting up in Gothenburg, and most of them receive or will receive some kind of support from the city. Most (or all?) of the people testing Karrot now are part of the oldest and most established BK in town.
The aim of the project is to adapt Karrot so that it’s useful for any of the volunteer-driven BK and that will also create opportunities for these Bike Kitchens and its volunteers to coordinate and cooperate. (an interesting question we’ll have to explore along the way is how to design Karrot for users that are part of multiple groups, since it will not necessarily be the case that the different BKs will choose to be on the same group, even though that would be the ideal in my opinion)
The main challenge is to offer online tools (Karrot and a website/forum) that will attract more people to volunteer and facilitate their work. However, no digital tool, as perfect as it is, can guarantee that per se. That is why it is part of the project that we’ll be in contact with the different BKs, get their feedback and relaying it back to the developers. Hopefully these initiatives will develop together with Karrot and its adoption (for instance in the process of accepting new member/volunteers).
Before our next online meeting I will draft a Roadmap for this project. Then when we all agree on the tasks, I’d like us to make a preliminary division of tasks and estimate the time we need to spend on them. Time spent on tasks might be a good measurement on how to proceed with payments, but I’ll also write some more on that later. As you know I’d like to proceed on the most democratic way possible, so we’ll decide this together.
I’ll be working on it (and maybe @tomasz?) but I was thinking about bringing Sebastian on board, whom you met at the hackaton, not only to help me out with the website, but also to do some user testing. If any of you are interested on working on that too, you’re more than welcome of course. There are for the moment two websites: cykelkoket.org (the original one, which is connected to the first BK and not well updated) and cykelkok.se (put up by Tomasz, kind of as the first draft to what’s to come). I’d like there to be only one shared by all Bike Kitchens, so we need to bring this discussion up at the board meeting of the first BK which has the .org domain.
