I had the idea of a “virtual stewardship”, a digital place with a list of seeds available in the community. Each one updates his list. everyone sees the catalogue and orders in private exchange what he wants to who owns it.
A kind of rationalization of private exchanges as we have begun to do here :
The serendipity seed swap could be composed only of grex, mix, landrace…
everyone receives it and adds these new varieties of beans in the overall mix bean etc…
If Mr X already took the super bean mix on the way to the seed train in 2023, but he sees that Madame Y has 2 new varieties to add…rather than asking for the seed train he contacts Madame Y live to acquire the 2 new varieties missing from his current project.
But the person who starts a bean project prefers the train to have the latest most complete mixture in Europe.
Thus, two systems that already work are maintained but try to make them complementary rather than similar.
It’s not yet the idea of the century but I hope to advance the discussion. my brain is HS…I will find nothing better I’ll sleep lol
A more simple version would be a catalogue. Our local seed saver association does something like that. There’s still a database with all the info on the crop types. Then every half year you signal in the user database which ones you have seed of. Two administrators collect the catalogue and releases it.
This reflection is really to think about systems (serendipity + P2P + steward )of seeds that should be built on a model of complementarity.
the selected systems must not compete with the others, at the risk of eliminating the two first existing systems.
Keep in mind not to reinvent what already exists…and especially the most simple as possible that people quickly adhere and use it.
This is exactly where we need to focus because in practice it already works today but I noticed in the discussions that they lack the following data to make the system more resilient and above all more used:
who owns which seed? > more community visibility
what is the easiest way to get it? > more efficient exchanges
what is the history of this variety, mix, landrace… ? > more membership to grow
who is working on what type of vegetable and project? > more cooperative work
on which vegetables no project is underway? > more innovation
…
I fully understand your need Malte to organize discussions that go in all directions. If we are to expand the network and be more numerous for even crazier projects, everything must become as fluid as possible on issues of seed stewardship. Let’s free up time by organizing effectively on this subject which is not the most interesting (classifying, sorting)…
To gain even more joy and collaboration on what we all love: growing landrace and doing adaptation gardening projects together
Why not just have everyone list their seed collections up for trade? Maybe there could be a subsection under seed sharing for this kind of thing? Or maybe under all of our profiles. That way we could DM each other for the seeds we want to trade?
Ideally we could list our individual seeds/plants under a section of our profiles. Then that info from the section could be automatically pulled and entered/updated into a community page which shows all available species and the individuals that have them.
I love it! That idea is Fantastic & sounds Quite Easy to implement! We should tell the GTS Team about it, I’d love to make it happen. We could just Crt F the species. Ideally it be great if people could also upload photos too & have a lil description of the seed like flavor, size, yield, preformance, ect.
