Things are looking great so far with this hairbrained project of ours. Fabulous, actually: Bolt | Peters is super interested in the project and wants me to work on it for some percent of my total time at work. Which is fan-freaking-tastic! Thanks BP! If you have no idea what I am talking about, check out my last post about it. But, in short, these are the three things that I love about Kestrel already: Kestrel is a web application for farmers. Kestrel is a participatory design project. Kestrel is an open source project. Kestrel is a user-centered project. (Deeply so; as in, we won't build it if it doesn't solve real-people problems.) Ok that was four. Anyway, I've gotten so much great feedback already by email phone and comment -- and I am now setting up interview dates. Let me know if you would like to talk on the phone for about an hour. We'll be gathering feedback about the initial concept and looking at some first drafts of first drafts. Basically, we're gabbing on the phone for a bit and I'm taking some notes. You can participate in a number of ways:

• Giving feedback based on your professional experience (as a farmer, user researcher, designer, guru ...)
• Giving feedback based on your experience with other applications for famers.
• Giving feedback as a CSA manager, owner, or eater.
• Giving feedback as one of my parents, friends or online weakly linked nodes.
• Etc.

Please leave a comment or email me at unthinkingly at gmail if you want to participate. You know you wanna. Research is fun! We're conducting real live conversations, not just email exchanges, though email is also a great way to give feedback. Also, note that, as much as possible, we'll be recording interviews; part of the point of this project is that the methodology will be completely documented. We record stuff partly just part of the public nature of participatory design, partly because we want to get as much informed criticism as possible, but also because we want to teach other communities of practice to create a web app! Dammit, if we (as a very small, active team) can build something that work really well for 50 farmers, then we probably have created something that will work really well for 50,000 farmers. Thanks to tes, Andrea, Beck, Mary, Chris R., Rick, Ben, Mike, Nate and Anne for commenting already on the previous post; we already have strong support in San Francisco, Portland and Central NC.