Hola a todos,

Looking forward to meeting you in San José! We are project DatAgro, based (for starters) in the wine and fruit region of Chile. We are looking to expand to other countries in the world.

Through DatAgro's open source technology, farmers can use text messaging to access locally relevant information that improves productivity: including market prices, agricultural data and news.

In this way, farmers can define the types of information most critical to their lives and livelihoods and receive it via SMS messages. In Chile, we are also busy looking for ways to use text messaging to raise awareness about other important informational resources, such as community radio programming on agricultural issues, or participation in online agricultural forums.

For more information, check out our project page: http://www.netsquared.org/projects/datagro

We're looking for people interested in the project to help us identify potential partners in other countries and to help us communicate: by writing blogs, publishing stories and just generally spreading the word.

DatAgro uses a standard (or even legacy) cell phone connected to a server running open source software (Ruby on Rails) so we are looking for Rails enthusiasts who want to develop additional SMS features for public health and agricultural or other applications.

Also, we would love to link up with agricultural innovation experts to dig deeper into communication and agriculture issues. The more we talk, the more we learn!

See you soon,

The DatAgro Team

John Zoltner, The Zoltner Consulting Group (www.zoltner.com)
Tia Gao and Meghan Cagley, DataDyne.org, Washington, DC (www.datadyne.org)