Open the app: collectively we brainstormed 100+ cool ideas for the app to make it more personal, more insightful, more actionable, more useful, more fun and more viral. But of course we can’t do it all. Or can we? What if motivated individuals and groups could easily plug into the app to build their own app inside the app: new experiences dedicated to the needs of hundreds of communities? Scanning one or more products could bring new knowledge, insights and actions. Select and activate the features that interest you and join the communities who build them!
How does the track work?
The discussion will take place in this thread.
If you’re interested, you can first register in the working document dedicated to the track (just add your name at the beginning).
Then you can have a look at all the ideas already shared on the white board.
And finally, you can enter the discussion here. For example, with the help of the white board, you can share what are the 3 main features you would like to develop in this track, and explain why.
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Hi Everyone!
Maybe the first thing we could do is review at all the ideas on the Excalidraw board to see which ones could be created as “extensions” or “plugins” of the newOpen Food Facts app, and what kind of generic features would be needed for that.
Some ideas for generic features could be:
- Special branding (e.g a WWF skin for the app)
- Specific contribution mode (e.g. when the “Cartoon characters” extension is activated, only display a button to say if the product has a cartoon character on its packaging.
- Display a knowledge panel when a product has a specific tag (e.g. a specific ingredient, category, label etc.) or when a specific nutrient is in a specific range (e.g. magnesium above 1g)
- Or play a specific sound for some products! (that could be fun)
- On a set of products (e.g. a list of what you own, what you have scanned, what you bought or ate in a given period), display some graphs / pie charts / histograms / scores. (e.g. distribution of Nutri-Score or Eco-Score, % of products that have a specific label, or that don’t have a specific tag (e.g. products sold in bulk vs products packaged with plastics)
Once we have a more complete ideas of those generic features and of the kind of extensions they could make possible, then we can dive into the other parts of the investigation:
- How can we make it work from a technical point of view
- How users / groups of users can create and configure those extensions
- Who would actually be interested in creating some extensions
- Evaluation of opportunities, risks etc.
What do you think?
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I started to explore all the cool ideas from the Excalidraw board to see which ones could be created by 3rd party individuals or groups as mini-apps within the OFF app: Track Open the app - Google Docs
With a few configurable basic features, we could unleash a lot of creativity without requiring coding!
Hi Everyone! We now have a new #opentheapp channel on Slack for this track. Please join it if you are interested in exploring how we can let anyone create extensions / plugins for the Open Food Facts app!
Based on all the feedback, I tried to summarize in the Open the app Google doc the features that we could propose:
Proposed features:
- Allow users to search for and install extensions created by 3rd parties (groups of people, associations) that extend the functionality of the Open Food Facts app
- e.g. extension from WWF, ADEME, Vegan association, people who want to avoid FODMAPS
- Enable the creation of extensions that add new knowledge panels that are displayed when products have specific tags, or combination of tags (e.g. categories, labels, ingredients, origins)
- Enable the creation of extensions that add new product attributes that can be selected for personal search and shown prominently on scan and product pages
- e.g. products with low or high amount of any nutrient (fiber, proteins), with or without specific tags
- Enable the creation of extensions that compute a value (e.g. lactose content, glycemic index, quantity of FODMAPS) based on the list of ingredients, and allow this value to be used in new product attributes and knowledge panels
- Enable the creation of extensions that compute scores, distributions etc. on a set of products (a list of what users buy, consume etc.)
- e.g. distribution of Nutri-Score, weight of plastic packaging
- Enable the creation of extension that add “special modes” to the Open Food Facts app, which display very specific information or actions when scanning products
- e.g. contribution modes with just one button to specify that the product has a specific label, or is in a specific category, addition modes that count the amount of something (e.g. nutrients, weights, nutriscores) for scanned products
What do you think?
A picture of what the catalog of extensions could look like inside the Open Food Facts app, with some sample apps to show the diversity of what we could enable. 
What do you think of it?
The next step is to list the strenghts, weaknesses, opportunities and threats for the Open the app track. I started to list some items here: Track Open the app - Google Docs
Do you have other items that you think we should mention?
- Strengths
- Enables a great diversity of use cases (a large number of ideas from the Excalidraw board could be built as extensions)
- Extensions can work on the app AND on the website
- Enables others to participate in the implementation of those use cases, and also in other key aspects: their promotion and their support
- Much easier and faster for 3rd parties to create an extension than a whole app, and they get instant international exposure to our community
- 3rd parties can bring very motivated communities to join forces with the Open Food Facts community
- Being a contributor or a moderator of an extensions is a way to recognize members of the community
- Very unique value proposition
- Can be done incrementally
- Weaknesses
- Delicate balance of level of customizability vs ease of building extensions
- Opportunities
- There are many existing motivated communities in all countries that could build extensions (e.g. groups of people with a specific diet, non profit organizations, health and environmental agencies…)
- Maybe an opportunity for funding: we could partner with small NGOs to help them build extensions, and apply together for funding, or create crowdfunding campaigns to build the extension for a specific NGO
- Threats
- Some extensions could be problematic for scientific, moral, legal or other reasons (e.g. apps that promote unhealthy diets, that call for boycotting products from specific countries or brands, that provide incorrect or biased information). This could be mitigated with rules and a review process.
We will be presenting all tracks (including the Open the app track of course!) tonight at 6pm Paris time. Here are a few slides to present the track: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14hfX71VDb0fIX866CHBlD4TM3qaSf7JEWyQZzftsed0/edit#slide=id.g257b01f9dd9_3_0
Any feedback?
I renamed the track “Community Extensions” to make what we propose more clear.
