Deciding on the future of Phito at its annual Phito general assembly Early October, the Phito team came together for a few days of intensive meeting and decision making. After a full year of regular (almost daily) meetings, it was so refreshing to see each others as real, existing human, and discussing where we are in the project. It is nice to have a project of this size, with so many people involved, but making sure all are on the same page remains a challenge.
So, there we went, by train and plane, the Moldavian Plateau, near the far eastern borders of Europe.
Field visits
Phito is born from the field. Good to re-understand the position from the farmer.
Apart from that, we try to give an answer to ‘the needs of the European farmer’. Romania has many..
High level meetings on the ground
After a year of limitless meetings, we needed to sit together to make decisions. I highly enjoy these days of discussions, great food, meetings with farmers, where sometimes important decisions are made just in the corridor from the toilet, and the most dreamy next feature of the app materializes in a brainstorm session in the late afternoon.
You need examples, I know. I will give you some:
Practical
Which project tools to work with? How to merge requests from the three work packages who want to have a say in development? Who is working on the back-end, who decides on the front-end? I have to think of a key moment these days, where Wouter (Smartfarming), Dani (ÖMKI), and me, all of a sudden, came to a practical solution of division for the development of the app for the coming years. In hindsight this was an important moment, quickly distracted from the great tour at the vineyards of Cotnari. In this light setting we had a moment of shared vision and we could convert this into a clear approach for the next phase of the project.
Ownership
Phito is innovation-driven, meaning several parties are investing in the project in cash and/or in kind. These ‘innovation partners’ do this because they believe in the longer term continuity of the project: Phito will not die after the project. But how to arrange this? How to deal with Intellectual Property? Who governs Phito after the project. When should this start? In what legal entity form?
What do farmers need?
We know the requests by all type of farmers. But whom to listen to? How can we serve those we actually want to serve? How do we make sure we include the minorities among them?
How to spread the word?
We are super glad to have the support from our ‘Food System partners’, our eyes and ears in the field in Europe. How can we enable their insights from the field, and convert this into action? Do we start with smaller communities, or go live in all of Europe at the same time?
Phito Stories: Water management and the role of farmers
To make our travel even more interesting, we added a few days of recording for the next season of Phito Stories. For these stories we promise to minimise our travel, which is why we try to plan it around our yearly general assemblies. So, we had no choice: we dived into the landscape around Iasi in Romania. We did this on a (actually not so) traditional way of transport: on a horse and cart.
The story is a beautiful one with the most magnificent landscapes – will be released only in 2027. To tease you a bit, we recorded a Phito Radio Show just before our dinner at a sheep farm near Iasi. Ready for some nice anecdotes, and stories about water management in the region, climate change effects, and the role of humans and farmers in this? See below!
Together with the consortium we went on another journey, to make decisions on the future of PHITO, building a strong base of collaboration.
