Sonoma Goes Local

Derek Huntington from Sustaining Technologies, LLC (www.sustainingtechnologies.com) and Sonoma County GoLocal Cooperative (www.golocal.coop) reports on his progress in Sonoma County.

For those of you that our unfamiliar with our project, we have created a cooperative that’s membership is composed of locally-owned businesses, individual Sonoma County residents, non-profits organizations, and government agencies. We currently have about 150 business members that together generate about a quarter billion dollars in sales each year, and are seeing our membership expand quickly. GoLocal is Sonoma County’s network of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA).

Our goal is to take our relocalization program beyond just a “buy local” campaign by implementing sustainable, community-scaled economic infrastructure to facilitate the development of a local living economy. Sustaining Technologies was formed as a worker-owned and cooperatively managed LLC to obtain the resources required for developing information technology and organizational structures, with an eye toward replication in other communities.

Please visit www.golocal.coop to see our community web platform at its current stage. We just released the newest version in December with our rewards card system integrated that processes loyalty rewards and local currency transactions at the point of sale via always on Internet. Last week we just finalized our first two installs at Community Market in Santa Rosa and Osmosis Day Spa in Freestone, and are in the process of rolling out our beta test to the existing GoLocal membership.

In addition, GoLocal’s board has just approved bylaws drafted by Sustaining Technologies (with the help of Katovich Law Group) that allows for an “Investor” membership class. Our goal is to use the CA co-op exemption to raise equity capital from our membership, both in the form of dollars and local currency, to be invested in expanding our rewards/currency program and in small business start-up and development in Sonoma County.

We are actively looking for a Django developer to speed up our development process, so please let me know if you have any recommendations. See announcement below.

Derek Huntington
d.huntington ( at) sustainingtechnologies.com

Software Developer with Django Experience Needed

Company: Seed funded and bootstrapped technology start-up with a highly capable and experienced team building a web-based community news, marketing, and transaction platform. Core technology, design, and architecture are all well established. We need ambitious software engineering talent to accelerate the development process.

Position: We are seeking a strong developer with full-stack web application experience and an eye for design. We expect you to be open minded, curious, focused, goal-oriented, and interested in supporting independent, locally owned businesses. You will play a major role in implementation of new product features, customization for client installations, and maintenance and grooming of our existing code base. We are looking for a self-directed engineer with Python and Django experience to help us expedite our ongoing development. You will have to be a fast learner to contribute and benefit. Consultant based compensation and work arrangement at this stage. Prefer a Sonoma County Resident, but telecommuting O.K.

Must Haves:
• Solid experience with Python (min. 2-3 years).
• Solid experience with the Django framework (min. 1+ year).
• Solid experience with MySQL (min 1+ year).
• Solid experience with JavaScript (min 1+ year).
• Solid experience with front-end web technologies (HTML, CSS) (min. 2-3 years).
• Experience with database driven Web applications.
• Experience in developing robust, high-volume, commercial web-based applications.
• Experience with VPS and/or cloud hosting.

Pluses:
• Computer Science degree.
• User interface best practices.
• Software as a service projects.
• Linux system administration and scripting skills.

Location: We are located in Santa Rosa, CA and prefer a Sonoma County resident that can work with the team in-person. We will, however, consider talent with excellent communication skills anywhere.