Where the Open Olitor international team comes from - 2017 source
OpenOlitor is Open Source Software under a GPL V3 licence developed for Community Supported Agriculture projects in Europe. The international Open Olitor team envisions to continue software development for CSA's with a community supported programming philosophy, a great example for provisioning as commons.
With OpenOlitor, we want to support existing and, in particular, newly emerging initiatives by breaking down one of the biggest hurdles on the way to a functioning organization: getting an efficient administration.
Open Olitor is used by the Initiative sunu, an international team of like-minded people who seek to adapt the Software to the specific, country-based needs of Community Supported Agriculture Initiatives. 'sunu' cooperates with the Open Olitor association, based in Switzerland, and with programmers from Tegonal html 
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# Aspirational Goals CSA and other types of solidarity or prosuming groups are about to redesign agriculture. Many new projects in Europe acknowledge the advantages of regional networking and cooperation, They appreciate direct contact, transparent negotiations about the production conditions, quality and prices Trade with Price Sovereignty.
An adapted software solution is needed, to manage complex organizational structures while avoiding the risk of unnecessarily increasing administrative work.
# How do they work? The software shall make all aministrative and organizational tasks easier and faster, such as staff and membership management, pooling, delivery planning, and shipment, "share-management" (baskets), payments, product management, task management, tools for self-monitoring, stats, internal communication and much more
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# When did it start?
The idea came from soliTerre html , as they saw the need for sharing open administration tools with similar initiatives. Tegonal GmbH who has provided programming services for soliTerre, in 2015 agreed to collaborate in the development of Open Olitor. The test phase started in January 2017 with 5 CSAs in Germany
# How do they finance their work/commons? As in all commons projects, there is a mix of funding-sources. Open Olitor financing is based on two principles: 1) programming is supposed to be financed by its users, aka: community supported programming 2) financing is tied to concrete tasks of two categories: basics (general tasks and basic development) and optional tasks for additional software-features
The first shall be guaranteed by a budgeting approach (1% on the transactions of subscribors) The latter shall be pooled based on an anonymous bidding round as in some Community Supported Agriculture projects.
- financing works by "phases", the two initial phases (around 150.000 CHF cash each) have been supported in kind by Tegonal GmbH
- the Swiss Federal Agriculture Agency contributed 50% if the other 50% were raised by Open Olitor, governmental contributions came from the Kanton level as well (Bern and Aargau)
- Open Olitor won a yooweedoo idea competition html
- it was supported by the GLS-FutureFoundation Agriculture html and by a Foundation for Sustainable Nutrition
- private donations
- a crowdfunding campaign is planned for 2018
- information concerning financial needs and budgeting is made transparent through the Open Olitor website and, among others, the newsletter of the network of CSAs in Germany, Freihofbrief; see newsletter archive html
Open Olitor's financing guidlines are updates here: html
# See also
# Sources
Open Olitor website html