OpenOlitor nominated for Open Source Award

The CH Open Source Awards will be presented on Wednesday, 26 October 2016. OpenOlitor, the web application for community-supported agriculture initiatives, has been nominated.

In community-supported agriculture (CSA), consumers get regional, seasonal vegetables at a fair price in return for a long-term purchase commitment. OpenOlitor helps manage the administrative processes that come with it: master data, orders, delivery planning, invoicing and work shifts.

Most CSA initiatives are small, and they face very similar administrative hurdles. Their day-to-day operations are complex. The right software cuts down the admin work and removes sources of error. In keeping with the principles of community-supported agriculture, OpenOlitor was designed as an open source application. It's available to any initiative that wants it. For new CSA initiatives in particular, having an industry-specific tool ready to use can make a real difference to a successful launch.

The first version of OpenOlitor was funded by the Federal Office for Agriculture, soliTerre, the Fondation Sur-la-Croix, the Bioabi association, the Kleinbauern-Vereinigung (Swiss small farmers' association) and many individual donors. Bern-based software company Tegonal also made a major contribution to the project with its own work.

Tegonal builds OpenOlitor in Scala, the programming language developed at EPFL. The front end uses AngularJS.

OpenOlitor is attracting a lot of interest, not just in Switzerland but internationally too. In Germany, for example, a partner organisation is preparing OpenOlitor for the German and European market.

To secure OpenOlitor's long-term funding and development, an association of the same name has been founded. Its members are representatives of the participating CSA initiatives and Tegonal, and it's open to other interested parties.

There are still seats available for the CH Open Source Award ceremony at the Haus der Universität in Bern. Registration is free.

You'll find more information about OpenOlitor at OpenOlitor.org.