**WE ARE CHANGING OUR NAME** Vote Now on the New Name for our Standard

[RaggedStaff]

In the previous discussion (#14), everyone supported the idea that we need a new name, so @RachL & I have kicked a few ideas around and come up with some options (more details are in this jamboard). We hope you like at least one of them, but if not... please suggest alternatives in the comments!

A few notes on the options we came up with:

Option 1 draws on the EU standardisation around the term "Short Food Systems" and could help us make sense in that space.

Option 2 was inspired by the work of one of our partners in the UK Food Data Collaboration project: Duncan Catchpole (of Cambridge Organic Food Co) has written about Local Food Ecosystems as the future of food. There is also an amazing film from Scotland: Rooted that talks about LFE's

Option 3 comes from comments by some of our partners that the TLA "DFC" has been difficult to get people to notice & remember, but now they are remembering it, it would be preferable not to change it.

Option 4 draws on the work done by Growing Communities in the UK around Food Zones, which are very applicable to what we're trying to support with the standard.

Important

This poll will be open for 2 weeks (until Tuesday 5^th March/Mardi 5^ème Mars), please submit your votes (& comments) before then.

[lecoqlibre]

Thank you for opening the discussion.

I'm surprise to see that there is the word "food" in every proposed name. I thought we agree that the standard was also designed to support non food items (like soap or jewelry for instance)?

Also I'm wondering if "data standard" is a good choice because the standard is also defining technical rules (so for me it's more than rules only on data).

I have some questions and remarks about the voting procedure. I'm confused about what this vote will lead to? Is it something official? For now as we didn't work on any procedures, I would consider this vote only as a survey. Moreover we don't see who has voted, right? And we did not define who is eligible to vote (maybe we forgot some people?). What happen if someone propose an alternative name? Do we vote again?

I would also like to propose to use the Majority judgment which allow to give a note to the different choices. What do you think?

[RachL]

Regarding the term food, I understand it in a broad way (like we would use it in "nourriture" for example in french).

There is no well-known word for "circuits courts" in English. So unless we find something that works well, food is the what remain the simplest word to describe what we are about. Even if the standard can work elsewhere, I think that most platforms will handle food as well. Platforms handling only non-food goods would need to tweak the standard, and therefore give it a new name?

Regarding people we may have forgotten, I was under the impression that Garethe+me had a good idea of who to ping, but let me know if you think we've missed a group!

[David-OFN-CA]

Hi all - as I mentioned on a call with Garethe, Maxime, and Baptiste today - I fully understand and support the rationale behind the name change idea, but I would like to suggest that we consider holding off on an official name change for at least another 6 - 12 months.

In North America, we are just now building serious interest in adopting and supporting the 'DFC standard,' particularly in the context of the OpenTEAM ecosystem. Changing the name at this particular point in time would be really inconvenient. The work we’ve been doing to promote engagement and adoption of the 'DFC standard' over the last couple of years is gathering momentum quickly in the context of OpenTEAM's USDA-funded Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities project, which OFN and Startin’Blox offically joined this quarter: https://www.wolfesneck.org/partnerships-for-climate-smart-commodities/.

I'd really rather avoid confusing people, by changing the standard’s name right at the moment when they are getting interested in it, and starting to understand what it could do to support their own work and initiatives. I think it would be much more productive if we just focused our energies on promoting adoption and financial and technical support for the standard, rather than spending a lot of hours clarifying that, “Yes, the ‘new SFSDS’ is actually the ‘old DFC standard’” etc… over and over again in a variety of different contexts.

Along the same lines: I think it would be smart to look at any name change as a major rebranding exercise that has to be planned, financed, and maintained. Simply choosing the new name seems like the easy part to me. Communicating the name change, and ensuring that people understand the underlying continuity between the new ‘SFSDS standard’ and the old ‘DFC standard’ will be the hard part. (A name change would also likely necessitate the creation and maintenance of a new 'SFSDS' website. Who would take this on? With what budget and HR resources?)

In my opinion, the particular string of letters that we use to name the standard is way less important than the fact that people understand what we mean when we use these letters. Given resource contraints, I think we should keep our energies focused on the essential things - and return to dicussion of rebranding and renaming at such a time as we have a budget and strategy to support that work in an ongoing and sustainable way.

[kirstenalarsen]

Completely agree with David. As well as North America I have it built into and raising awareness in Aus. Please don't make me have to have annoying, confusing conversations. In recognition of your concerns /reasons, i voted for change of meanng while keeping DFC acronym, but vote could equally be for last option ie. No change

[RachL]

Thanks for your feedback @David-OFN-CA !

If we do postpone that work we would need to decide how to handle the following cases :

• OFN UK is dedicating budget on documenting the standard better. This includes a dedicated website for the standard. We could postpone this dedicated website, but people searching for the standard will end up on the FR DFC website, which may increase the shortcut that this is only a french initiative. Can we live with it?

• UK is going to launch pilot projects in April. These pilots projects will communicate heavily on the standard. Are we sure we want them to communicate on the "data food consortium" standard?

• the FR org is going to organize itself more and more now that it is separated from OFN France. The structure is searching for means to earn money, different services will be handled by the org this year (that may or may not use the standard - this goes from maintaining the connectors, up to events, memberships... Who knows what this year finances will bring the structure to do!) - are we ok if financially there are invoices that are sent with the same name as the standard?won't this affect the "non profit" side of the standard

• There is budget to rebuild the FR website, but if the names are idenical, it's difficult to promote he standard as separate. As the FR org should remakn sovereign on is strategy and how it is moving forward, can other " instances" live with the fact that any activity in FR can be understood as something the whole community endorses?

Yes the letter strategy is a patch, but perhaps something we can only do now, when the impact is limited.
You would still be able to say it's the "DFC standard". We could also have the strategy to simply stop speaking about the meaning of the letters for a while? Would that be an option?

[RaggedStaff]

This has been shelved for now due to lack of bandwidth within the team.