Project Vision

[entrotech]

This discussion is for conversation around what the big picture vision is for the Food Oasis project.

The current mission can be found on the about page

The legacy version started at Hack for LA several years ago (2017?) as a static web site using Jekyll and was deployed to the foodoasis.la domain. It was handed off to the Youth Policy Institute for maintenance and enhancement by their members, but the data was not kept up-to-date and became stale. Hack for LA started re-development of Food Oasis in the summer of 2019 to make organization data maintainable by users (rather than requiring a new release every time data needed to be updated). Initially, the scope of the project was fairly expansive, with discussion about what part of the food recycling space we should focus on, but eventually we decided that the initial focus should be on providing a directory of food pantries and meal programs within Los Angeles County.

Even with the reduced focus on meal programs and pantries in Los Angeles, collecting and verifying listings proved a very daunting prospect for our very small team. There are no other reliable and up-to-date sources of meal program and pantry listings from which we could populate our database, and it became clear that the project would need to take responsibility for collecting and verifying the listings. This was a bit more than the team of 6-8 people could take on toward the end of 2019, so the project slowed for a while until the COVID outbreak made the need for a project like Food Oasis more urgent and important.

In March, we undertook designing and building a set of features that allow an administrator to manage a large team of volunteers to help with the verification effort, including features for assigning organizations to volunteers for verification and reviewign their work before listings are approved for inclusion in the public listings.

We released a "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP) version of the re-developed site to foodoasis.la in June 2020, replacing the legacy implementation with a few hundred verfiied listings, and have been refining the "Food Seaker" features and functionality as well as the volunteer management system.

Other regions have expressed an interest in implementing a "version" of Food Oasis for their geographic areas. In response to the wildfires across the western US, Joel Parker Henderson suggested that we create a version of Food Oasis to help people displaced by wildfires as well as the normal food-seekers across California, so we made some cahnges to the application to make it "multi-tenant", meaning that the same application code and production environment could support multliple web sites, each with their own listings for their region. This resulted in the new site ca.foodoasis.net for areas in California outside of Los Angeles County. We are just beginning the process of gathering and validating data across the state for that site.. Likewise, the Code for Hawaii Brigade of Code for America is working on a version for Hawaii in co-operation with Aloha Harvest for hi.foodoasis.net.

There are many directions that the Food Oasis project can expand, both geographically and in scope to support other client populations, and this discussion is intended to be a place where we can discuss and debate how the project should evolve. Please share your thoughts!