Hey everybody, I hope life is treating you well! Today is a big day because we are going to start putting in a lot more towards the local food modelling. As some of you may or may not know, my name is Chris and I am an OH local living in Iceland now where I am studying environment and natural resource mgmt with a focus in Urban Agriculture. I was fortunate enough to have most of the data available for Icelandic produce production and am working on a model/analysis here on where HAPI systems can best be utilized and fill in agricultural niches that are not being satisfied by conventional agriculture (I HOPE that made sense; I repeated that so many times I get lost in my own words). What I want to start doing is a bit more on the food modelling aspect and come this weekend/Monday I will be pumping in a lot of papers on sustainability and data analysis. 

What I want to start now is getting our footing and finding out where to go. With that said, we need to start discussing and implementing a few things. What I hope to get on now is the following categories:

Scope and Boundaries: let's start by looking at the scope of our research and boundaries. What aspects are we ignoring/currently overlooking? What products are we most interested in? What is the timeframe we are looking at and what instruments are we using to analyze the data?

Goals: hopefully we can start allocating personal goals and "positions" (based on your interests and strengths) and project goals. If you can, lets develop a ROUGH timeline with certain milestones and overall goals and achievements so we can hone in on what we are hoping to analyze and achieve.

Definitions: this one is quite difficult because we want to have thorough definitions, but cannot get too caught up in it. What we want is to use definitions as a means to reiterating boundaries and defining obstacles. This means we should consider terms such as "organic", "local", and the like. But hopefully, by getting some "philosophical" parameters, we can start to tie in the data better. 

Sources: just looking at any sources we can start with to gather and compile info, how we are going to compile it and how we are going to display/execute it. It doesn't have to be total, but just giving potential sources and then looking at the viability (weak, strong, uncertain of accuracy, etc). 

Obstacles: finally, we want to start to look at obstacles and points not discussed earlier that would impede our progress. This should be straightforward enough and just addresses concerns or miscommunication.

If anybody wants to make a SWOT analysis, that is pretty simple and a quick way to get ideas rolling.  

That said, let's do this! I can always be reached here or through Skype @ chris.williams4010. Let me know what ya'll think and we will get it going!