Call for Submissions of Open Agricultural Advisory Services

The Digital Public Goods Alliance’s Food Security Community of Practice, co-chaired by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO), are collaborating to identify open source software, data, and content collections that provide real-time, actionable advice for farmers to support them in their agricultural activities.

Throughout 2022, the Digital Public Goods Alliance has been working closely with alliance members FAO and Norad to co-manage a community of practice on food security. Acknowledging the compounding complexity that climate change and conflict have had on already fragile global food systems, the community of practice believes that digital public goods can address the critical need for farmers to have access to reliable, data-driven advisory services. These services can help provide real-time, actionable advice that supports them in their agricultural activities.

Why advisory services?

Globally, farmers serve as the backbone of healthy societies and economies. Unforeseen climate events, disease outbreaks, and pests can lead to spikes in food insecurity and poverty. Farmers need reliable data-driven guidance to help them adapt to these new, changing conditions. Advisory services can help inform farmers with the knowledge they need to adequately prepare for challenges and equip them with critical information to ensure they can make effective decisions to better respond and implement the most tailored changes.

The Food Security Community of Practice is exploring multiple ways digital public goods can help address these needs by identifying:

1. Open source platforms that provide advisory messages to farmers. An example of this is the digital public good, VIPS, a digital pest prediction platform.
2. Data sets & models that if made openly available could help deliver information that becomes effective advisory messages for farmers. For example, FAO’s Crop Calendar service offers
   reliable weather forecasts alongside an alert system that allows farmers to adjust their schedule and production activities based on meteorological data. Another successful example is WaPOR, the FAO portal to monitor water productivity through open access of remotely sensed derived data.
3. Open content that translates data into advice for farmers. Existing open examples include the open content agriculture platform Sprout and the Advisory Key Messages API of the FAO Digital Services

Why make a submission?

The Food Security Community of Practice is committed to ensuring that open software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content with the potential to become digital public goods are better known in order to help foster better adoption, and support for building those tools up. For this reason, an open call is being made to nominate relevant solutions that can be featured in a report co-authored by the DPGA, Norad and FAO highlighting digital public goods and will be featured on the DPG Registry.

Submission Criteria

Individuals can nominate open source licensed software, content, or data relevant to the following criteria:

1. Software providing farmers with real-time, actionable advice that supports them in their agricultural activities.
2. Content that is being used or could be used to provide farmers with advice that supports them in their agricultural activities.
3. Data sets that are being used or could be used to help farmers make decisions that are critical to their agricultural success.

Nominated solutions do not have to meet all requirements of the DPG Standard before submission, however, all solutions will be required to become DPGs before being highlighted. The DPGA’s technical team will work with solutions on this process and inform accordingly after a submission is made.