LibreFoodPantry – a community building FOSS for food pantries
librefoodpantry.org
librefoodpantry.org
Ok, so you make software for food pantries. What does that software do for me, as a food pantry, and why should I use it? How do I get started with it? How do I use it? How do my employees or volunteers use it?
This website answers none of those questions. As a food pantry, I can't make any sense of this website.
A lot of people around here have difficulty with the idea of communicating what they're doing, and marketing of any level.
I would humbly suggest the best next thing to work on would be someone with (copy)writing experience and ideally they would talk to end users about how the software has helped them. Too often we get consumed with the idea of software for software's sake.
Most of these nonprofits would be better served by low-code commercial solutions. That might sound bad, because you have to pay, but you also have to pay to host FOSS software, so not so much of a difference. The pantry probably needs email, so they probably have access to O365 or Gmail already. For more complex things, AirTable/SharePoint Lists is often going to be enough, if sub-optimal.
Glancing at the code, this appears to be mostly about apps for ordering and processing orders: https://gitlab.com/LibreFoodPantry/client-solutions
This can usually be achieved pretty well (80% of the need for 20% of the effort) with a Google Form + Sheets + light automation.
Ultimately these are information management problems, so it is best to approach from an IT perspective rather than a CS/SE perspective.
If you’ve succeeded, food pantries are beating down your door to use the software and you can objectively demonstrate how it’s improved the delivery of services to food bank customers. Your service is also top of mind when someone considers spinning up a food bank or organization with a similar use case.
“Uber or Deliveroo for food pantries” as the SV pitch deck would be written.
Even the mostly-free solution using GSuite or whatever is past the technical interest and abilities of most of the staff. And honestly the low-tech solutions they already used worked just fine for them.
I will credit the commenter downstream who said that the project seems to have close relationships with a few large food pantries, that might have the necessary staff and volume to make such a system worthwhile. But I still can't shake the feeling that this is the product of a programmer who wants to do good, but has created a technical system that doesn't actually meet the needs of the people he's trying to help.
I eventually found a repo that had an authentication project, and presumably I would have found code in one of the other folders, but my curiosity was spent.
In the UK a pantry is a small room/large cupboard used for cool but not refrigerated storage; so I thought this was going to be a sort of 'asset management system' somehow specifically good for shelf-stable foodstuffs.
The word "pantry" alone has the same meaning in both countries.
It probably makes sense to change terms if one is more universal.
I've heard the term 'food pantry' only recently (within the past 3-5 years) and it means the same as 'food bank' (as far as I can tell).
As a sibling post mentions "pantry" has always meant "special room in the house where the shelf-stable food is stored" here in the US. Most middle-class houses don't have one, and those that do the "room" is really more of a closet big enough to stand in than a proper room.
> As of yet, no software has been deployed for a client.
Presumably, the goal of this project is to build a common platform that eventually replaces the individual one-off solutions that exist today for these three pantries, and are useful for more food pantries in the future.
No offense meant to people who are working on solutions to the world's problems, but the optics here are those of a problem that doesn't necessarily benefit from the added technical overhead of the solution. If I'm understanding the linked website correctly it's not a single software package but an organization for groups developing their own software independently for specific food pantries. Maybe there's some kind of intention to collaborate on these projects or combine work toward general-purpose pantry management software, but it's not clear from the site.
No, it talks about the developer community from the perspective of target members, because that is what it is the website for.
The projects, of which there are multiple, aren’t even mentioned, and it doesn’t appear that any of them are currently targeted on public users; on the projects page they have reference to two areas, a “Client Solutions Group” that is engaged directly with three food pantries for developing custom software for each pantry's needs, a “Common Services Group” building shared components to support those efforts, and a reference to “Other Projects” supporting the community website and infrastructure.
So, yeah, the community page isn’t an info page for prospective users since they aren’t trying to solicit users or making software that isn’t targeting people other than those they are directly engaged with for custom work.
From the website, they haven't released any actual software yet, which is even worse: they made a website before delivering anything at all.
https://librefoodpantry.org/docs/code-of-conduct/
Now, don't get me wrong - I have no idea whether that actually happens or not, since I've only just noticed the project. But such a repressive official policy is a bad sign. I doubt it deserves the _Libre_ prefix in its project name.
At this point, the culture war set pieces are extremely tired, regardless of which team you root for.
>allowing for arbitrarily and retroactively defining people's behavior as unacceptable, and consequently sanctioning them all the way up to expulsion
You could do that without a code of conduct... but even without one I think it would be unfair to criticize a group for it... if you know nothing of that happening.