success story
Our Food Future is Guelph-Wellington’s smart cities initiative to create Canada’s first circular food economy: reducing food waste, increasing access to food and creating more sustainable solutions to food systems.
This mission-driven community brings together nutritionists, farmers, businesses, government and citizens by giving them a platform for connecting, collaborating and creating change.
Read Our Food Future’s story below.
“We imagine a food system where everyone can access nutritious food, nothing is wasted, and the impact on our environment is minimal. We imagine a system where food experts and entrepreneurs come together to tackle our most complex food challenges”
– Our Food Future
When Our Food Future launched on Open Social, the organization migrated the project website, as well as its existing online community, to a single platform. This allowed Our Food Future to create a unified and easy-to-managed platform, resulting in a much more cohesive experience of its community members.
An Informational Homepage
Using the flexible Open Social landing page builder, Our Food Future turned their platform homepage into an information-hub where visitors could find information and news about the project.
An Entry-point to Community Engagement
The homepage also offers a seamless entrypoint into the community space called Kitchen Table. Visitors can easily sign-up, while existing members can log in and join Groups, Challenges and Discussions in the Kitchen Table space.
Easy to Manage & Maintain
Open Social’s easy-to-use content creation and management tools simplifies the management and maintenance of the Our Food Future platform.
A Management Dashboard also gives Our Food Future a clear and complete overview of the site content and community activities.
“The transition to the Open Social platform has been simple. It’s easy to create and adjust the homepage to meet our changing needs allowing us to highlight our latest project or draw attention to an area of work that could use community support. For the end user, the overall look is clean, modern and attractive.”
– Alison Springate, Strategic Communications and Program Advisor for City of Guelph
Our Food Future built a town square where stakeholders can connect and start having conversations around sustainable food industries and practices.
Flexible Groups
With the large amount of different stakeholders on the platform, flexible groups offer an opportunity to create dedicated spaces for different members:
Community Areas
Our Food Future lets the community take ownership of the spaces and interact, collaborate and build community organically:
Letting the community take ownership of the platform creates a richer experience for all members.
With an online community, Our Food Future can launch community challenges and driving real impact.
Challenges
Using Open Social’s Crowd Innovation extension, Our Food Future hosts online community Challenges. These challenges allow:
Challenges give members a chance to directly contribute and help get important projects realized.
Reaching beyond Guelph-Wellington
The problem of food waste and lack of sustainability in the food industry is a global issue.
Having an internationally accessible and open online platform allows Our Food Future to involve international stakeholders and organizations in its mission.
An internationally accessible and open platform also allows organizations across the world to get inspired by Our Food Future and replicate it in other countries.
“For this to last and make an impact, we need a much broader community. It needs to go beyond just us. It needs to be a movement. And that is what really brought us to Open Social as a platform.”
– David Messer, Manager, Circular Opportunity Innovation Network at the City of Guelph
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