2002-2004: Built on OSCommerce
The first two years of Athens Locally Grown ran entirely on OSCommerce—a free, open source e-commerce platform. I modified it to work for our farmers market,
and it worked beautifully for our local community.
2005: Invited to SSAWG Conference
By 2005, other communities were noticing what we'd built. I was invited to the Southern
Sustainable Agriculture Working Group conference in New Orleans to present about our
system. My advice to everyone? Use the open source tools I used—OSCommerce—and build your own
version.
I genuinely believed that was the best path forward: empower communities with free tools
and the knowledge to use them.
The Conversations That Changed Everything
But as I talked with farmers and market managers at conferences across the country, a
pattern emerged. They'd ask how to set up OSCommerce, how to modify it for their needs,
how to handle hosting, how to deal with security updates, how to troubleshoot when
things broke.
The realization hit me: they didn't need advice on using open source tools. They
needed someone else to be responsible for all of it.
The Core Problem
More than anything, farmers and market managers needed someone else to be responsible for
the software, the hosting, and all the infrastructure around it.
Community-powered shared tools are great, but they require someone local who is
knowledgeable in how they work to keep them going. Even with great documentation and role model markets to follow, managing open source tools
as the core of a business is beyond the available skills and energy for most markets.
So I built LocallyGrown to remove all those hassles while keeping the spirit of
community—giving markets the best of both worlds.