The inaugural PlantVillage post: Part 2

Like David, I’m super excited about PlantVillage. PlantVillage is a simple idea – provide an open access system to connect people, helping each other to grow food. It seems easy enough, and in 2013, you would think that such a system exists. We looked at some of the systems out there, and we didn’t like what we saw, so we decided that we’d like to build a better system. The features that we built into PlantVillage – ease of use, open access, community driven– are not earth shattering per se. But put together, they provide a powerful platform. So let me take a moment to talk about these features. Ease of use: You’ll find that PlantVillage is easy to use, and information is easy to find. The community will evaluate contributions by others, and good content will automatically rise to the top. Open access: this should really be a no-brainer. But we’ve found that there is so much valuable information tucked away behind the pay-walls of institutions and publishers, it’s outrageous. On PlantVillage, all user-provided content is made available under the amazing Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It allows you to take the content and do with it whatever you want, but you must make the results available under the same kind of license. This guarantees that the content will remain open access forever. Community-driven: People know best what works and what does not, so we’ll let them decide what needs to be seen first (i.e. at the top of a page). We are now at the beginning of PlantVillage. We have big plans for where we want to go from here. Building a community takes time, and we understand this. But that does not mean we’ll sit around idly. In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out new features. Please give us your feedback about what you like, and what you don’t like. We’re listening. And we’re excited to read the questions and answers about the most important and satisfying thing humans can do: growing food.