Growstuff
An open data platform that crowdsources and shares information about what food gardeners are growing and harvesting.
What is Growstuff?
Growstuff is an open data platform for food gardeners that crowdsources information about what members are growing and harvesting. It aggregates this gardening data and makes it available as open data through a public API. The project helps create a shared knowledge base about food production patterns for gardeners, researchers, and developers.
Small-scale food gardeners who want to track and share their growing data, as well as developers and researchers interested in accessing open data about food production patterns.
Growstuff provides a unique combination of community gardening tracking and open data accessibility, creating a public resource that benefits both individual gardeners and the broader ecosystem. Unlike proprietary gardening apps, all data is openly available and the platform is community-driven.
Overview
Open data project for small-scale food growers
Use Cases
Best For
- Gardeners who want to track and share their planting and harvest data
- Researchers studying food production patterns and gardening trends
- Developers building applications that need gardening data
- Community gardening groups looking to share knowledge collectively
- Open data enthusiasts interested in crowdsourced agricultural information
- Educational projects about sustainable food production
Not Ideal For
- Commercial applications requiring proprietary data control, as Growstuff's open data model mandates sharing.
- Projects needing real-time data processing or high-frequency updates, since gardening data is typically updated infrequently.
- Teams unfamiliar with Ruby on Rails who prefer modern JavaScript frameworks, given the backend's Rails-based architecture.
- Apps focused solely on individual tracking without community interaction, as Growstuff's value hinges on crowdsourced aggregation.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Provides a public API that makes aggregated gardening data freely available for developers and researchers, as highlighted in the README's emphasis on open data.
Actively welcomes contributors from all backgrounds, with GitHub labels for designers, writers, and data wranglers, fostering diverse participation beyond coding.
Founded in 2012 with continuous development by dozens of contributors, indicating sustained commitment and reliability over a decade.
Aggregates member-contributed data on plantings and harvests, creating a valuable public resource for food production patterns, as described in the project's core mission.
Cons
Being a project since 2012, it may contain outdated dependencies or require familiarity with older Ruby on Rails practices, potentially hindering modernization and quick adoption.
Setting up the development environment involves Ruby on Rails and JavaScript, which might be daunting for newcomers, as hinted by the detailed 'Getting started' guide requiring specific configurations.
The presence of 'needs: documentation' labels on GitHub issues suggests incomplete or evolving documentation, which could slow down contributor onboarding and API integration.
Frequently Asked Questions
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