FND

About

Who we are, and why Fruitful Network Development exists.

The case for coordinated local supply, and the person building toward it.

Why we exist

Northeast Ohio was once a fresh-produce powerhouse. Today that tradition survives in passionate, dispersed pockets: Harbor Gardens, Purple Brown Farm Store, Ohio City Provisions and the East Side Market, Yellow Bird Foodshed, the CWRU farms, and others. Fruitful Network Development is taking the next step: making local agriculture equitable to work in and with again. Today we work with Cleveland Clinic and Food Strong on Northeast Ohio food-system programs.

THE VISION

The mission, plainly

Local agriculture is undercapitalized, undercoordinated, and full of people who would still rather be there than anywhere else. The first job of Fruitful Network Development is to make their day-to-day operations a little less broken: websites that work, payments that clear, mailboxes that don't get lost. The second job, open-source operations software that small operations can share without losing ownership, is what the first job pays for.

From the farm to anyone

MiCyte began on the farm, where the records live in spreadsheets, inboxes and a clipboard on the barn door, and where every platform that offers to fix that takes the data with it. What we are building is not another platform. It is software you run yourself: your records, your contacts and your customers stay on a machine you control, and applications are written to work with that data where it sits instead of asking you to copy it into someone else's service.

The services FND provides, email management, website hosting, payment processing, are built the same way. Your instance can be set to employ them, the way you plug in an appliance, and unplug them without losing anything. It never has to rely on them.

The tools are free to use like a spreadsheet. If you ever want to plug into something bigger, that's your choice: never a subscription, and your data stays yours.

HOW IT WORKS