About the Open Food Network
Founded in 2012, we’re a group of not-for-profit organisations and cooperatives focused on building a new food system that is fair, local, and transparent. We believe a sustainable and resilient food system needs to reconnect producers and consumers. We aim to empower people and communities and give them the tools and knowledge to develop the food systems they need for their community.
Our flagship product is
an open source software platform that makes it easy for farmers, producers, farmers markets, and other value-aligned enterprises to sell their products online. People have used the software to create farmer food collectives, manage food hubs, to take their farmers’ market online, and more. Our vision is to revolutionise the food supply network, and build a world in which short, sustainable distributed food systems thrive.
We are a global network of people and organisations working together to develop open and shared resources, knowledge, and software to support local food enterprises
all over the world. We know that good food can transform our planet and our society. We also know that making values-driven food enterprises work takes commitment, perseverance, partnerships and support.
Working with us
Everyone at OFN shares a dedication to doing good in the world and we take pride in our work. We are farmers, software developers, house builders, asylum seekers, gardeners, herbal lore novices, climbers, bakers, weight lifters, capoeira trainers, dog, cat and chicken keepers, partners, parents, carers, and most importantly, we’re good people. We are definitely a workplace where you bring your whole self to work.
You will be working on a totally open source project that embraces the idea at all project levels: knowledge sharing, open discussions, public code, etc. Among others, we encourage and take great care of contributors, successfully participate in Hacktoberfest and organize hackathons. As the rest of the dev team you’ll be participating in the development process from inception to release: from the product discussions, implementation, code review and to the actual release and deployment.
Our app is built with Ruby on Rails on the backend plus AngularJS on the frontend, which we have decided to evolve to Reactive Rails. We have a good automated acceptance tests suite backed up by unit and integration tests that run on our CI system. We have weekly releases with automated deployments.
When we recruit for paid roles we intend for them to be long term, though this is always funding dependent. You would be part of our team, supported and in it for what we hope, is the long term. As you grow in skills and knowledge you will have the opportunity to take on more responsibility, and to evolve the role as new opportunities arise.
Key Responsibilities - You will work with our global delivery team to build features and maintain our application. Our work is prioritised based on input from our community of users, our developers, our designers, our testers and our product team.
Location - Ideally, the role will be based aligning with timezones in which we already have team members who work on the product. This may mean somewhere within or close to the European, African, Middle-East, Americas or Australian time zones.
Contact hours - In general we ask our paid contributors to commit 30hours a week on the project. However we understand that many with other paid and caring commitments would prefer part time commitments and we are always open to discussions. Our goal is to create a flexible working environment that celebrates the complexity of navigating this world.
Given the global nature of the product, there will sometimes be the need to work outside of normal business hours. The commitment changes at different times of year as global daylight savings time shifts. We strive to work to everyone’s needs, but for everyone this often includes some early mornings and late evenings. We’re a super flexible workplace, other than time zone accommodation there’s no set expected contact hours. You define when you work, and fit in sessions with others when convenient for all involved.
Package - We have a transparent salary policy, where the team working on the product are paid based on their level of experience, their geographical location and their personal need. Most of the global team is contracted on a self-employed basis, meaning you are responsible for your tax and other requirements. Some OFN Instances can offer employment contracts, including France, the UK and Australia. The current version of the salary table is in the
OFN contributor handbook, and is usually organised as a freelance contract where individuals invoice for the hours done. We encourage everyone to take a needs based approach to calculate your hourly rate.
Our Stack
- The application is written in Ruby and built on Ruby on Rails.
- The original app was extended from Spree Commerce, and much legacy code still exists.
- Frontend currently includes AngularJS, we are switching to Reactive Rails using StimulusReflex
- We use a PostgreSQL database
- Our deployment is managed through Ansible scripts
- Builds are hosted on Semaphore
- We use Github for version control, issue tracking and development pipeline management
- Our community uses Discourse and Slack for discussion and deliberation
About you
- You have at least one year experience working in Ruby on Rails.
- You’ll probably be familiar with at least some of our stack. While our community is very supportive we don’t have the capacity to teach people how to code or to teach new languages/frameworks. It’ll be a pretty steep learning curve if the whole stack is new to you.
- You’ll enjoy working with us if you are the kind of person that takes initiatives and gets stuff done.
- We love working with people who are values-driven, empathetic, proactive, and imaginative.
- You’ll need your own computer, phone and internet connection - we’re all in the same boat as you on this, and while it’s something we’d love to change it’s not something we’ve ever prioritised spending money on.
- And most importantly, you deeply believe in our mission of building a better food system by empowering community food enterprises.