Open Food Facts Days 2023: celebrating community
Highlight of the year
Our community weekend took place last weekend (21 & 22 October) – and it was a truly memorable time!
In the heart of Paris
We were fortunate to meet once again at the Académie du Climat in Paris. This year, the Hall of Festivities (la Salle des Fêtes) was made available for us, allowing us to welcome even more visitors ! A special thank you to the City of Paris for this fantastic opportunity.
SATURDAY
Thunder & Lightning
Saturday kicked off with Lightning talks from community members. Each one spoke about their area of expertise. Because there are many activities taking place within the Open Food Facts ecosystem, it’s an opportunity for the community to learn more about what one’s neighbour is doing, or how the data gets reused for various solutions, and get a more holistic view of the project.
Barcamp workshops
After being inspired by these talks, we already began to have ideas bubbling up! So it was time to do some imagining: like last year, we first suggested various topics for workshops, in barcamp* mode. We then split into several groups and began brainstorming workshops on various topics.
(* BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences primarily focused on technology and the web. They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. Source: Wikipedia)
The geography of a community
In the afternoon, we had the pleasure of listening to Christian Quest, an open-data fellow, founding member & spokesperson of OpenStreetMap – a map of the world, created by people like us and free to use under an open licence. Because of the similar nature of our projects, it was very insightful to learn from the experience of OSM. (video soon to come !)
A few coffees down, we were ready to continue our workshops, imagining solutions, new or ones that would improve Open Food Facts in order to transform the food system.
Celebrating the people
Before listening to more lighting talks from our community, a surprise awaited some of the contributors. To celebrate their effort & contribution over the years, a few of them received some trophies 🏆 ! It was really special to thank Arnaud, Benoit, John, Léonore & Sébastien (as well as Thomas who couldn’t be there) for their valuable contributions in the different areas of the project’s life. Of course it was just a way to also give a big thanks to every contributor of Open Food Facts.
Yes We Scan !
The celebrations didn’t stop there, as we went on to take part in a big Apéro Scan Party! Stéphane had sourced a large variety of spreadables for the occasion, and we entered these products on the database before we enjoyed them. Yum !
(For some, the fun continued late into the night at the rugby world cup semi-final match 🇿🇦vs. 🏴.)
Open Up
This year’s addition: our event was open to the public. Throughout the day, people could discover the work of Open Food Facts through three stands, presenting:
- our Tackling Packaging operation,
- the educational game “How Much Sugar In?” based on the Open Food Facts data
- along with various open data projects, such as OpenStreetMap or Wikipedia.
Almost everyone we spoke with showed much enthusiasm for the project & was pleasantly surprised to see the community so actively at work !
SUNDAY
On our 2nd day of our annual event, Charles shared with us the various news of the project (completed collaborations, future plans, challenges and successes).
Local communities
Gala introduced the Community Grants, a new resource designed to support the creation of local Open Food Fact communities in various countries. If you are interested to know more, head over to this wiki page.
Let’s do this
Taking on-board the feedback from last year’s participants, we decided to make the second day mostly operational. The groups from the brainstorming workshops of the previous day reunited to begin working on actual tools and implement concrete changes in the “Doers” workshops.
Farewell & until next time!
What a beautiful thing to witness, when a community comes together. Thank you to everyone who joined these two days, some traveling from other cities in France and in Europe to be part of it, some who have just recently discovered Open Food Facts, and others who have been part of it for 10 years. We hope you enjoyed it & found it useful, motivating, inspiring & fun.
Don’t hesitate to share your experience of it through:
- a testimony (short or long) to share with the rest of the community,
- a private feedback (contact@openfoodfacts.org) to the permanent team, in order to improve the experience next year !
Couldn’t make it in person ? 📺
Thanks to the amazing organisation & skill of Edouard, you’ll soon be able to enjoy the recorded sessions of these two days.
