mundraub.org maps freely available eatables in public spaces and on private land subject to the owner’s permission. The users can add or search for fruits, berries, nuts or wild herbs as well as comment on locations.
Since 2009, the site has grown into an active online community on issues of wild produce and commons. It has millions of hits per year and a few thousand active members. During the season, dozens of entries as well as many new members are added daily. This platform is known not only around Germany, but also has active users in France, Austria, Switzerland, even in countries like Mongolia and Brazil.
The team of mundraub.org also initiates and directs projects in the real world, such as setting up mundraub regions, enhancing ecological compensation sites together with stakeholders of land-intensive industries or producing mundraub juice. The first juice has been produced in connection with the Bundesgartenschau (German National Garden Show) of 2015. Looking at the variety in the mundraub community clearly shows: mundraub.org is inclusive. It appeals to singles, families and the elderly, and also to people from both urban and rural backgrounds. Recently mundraub started cooperations in educational sector concerning natural and environmental issues connected to traditional orchards and the variaty of etables.
The project’s contribution to environmental protection
First and foremost, the concept of mundraub.org advocates diversity within cultivated landscapes, including eatables that can be freely gathered by anyone. It is a straightforward invitation to people to reappraise their surroundings, set themselves free from market forces in their free time, to feel liberated and thus to recognize and reevaluate the value of commons. Sustainability and environmental protection are not mere technical concepts, but lived by sense experience. It is such experiences that mundraub.org inspires: Using the digital platform arouses the curiosity of the real world and through its contents the site also educates on environmental matters. The users go out looking for locations and comment on them, creating a citizen-made registry on the condition of fruit trees in the landscape. Awareness of regional and seasonal foods is generated or consolidated further. Packaging are ultimately avoided, waste and CO2 emissions are reduced.
How the project will contribute to protecting the environment in the future
We do not like guessing games, at least not when it comes to the business side of things. Investors want to see figures, although most projections never come true. We can definitely say that mundraub.org has in the past year grown by 10,000 new locations and more than 20,000 registrations. Half a million people have visited the site in 2014. The scope of mundraub.org can also be seen in the press: Along with the regional press the national media also regularly cover these issues.
Within one week, over 70 people have signed up for three harvest camps that took place in fall 2014. We worked together to harvest about 30 tones of fruit from unused land and turn it into juice for the German National Garden Show, BUGA 2015. This project has nationwide appeal and will also stimulate a debate about how unused fruit resources can be recovered. As part of the DBU project mundraub-Region Hasetal in Lower Saxony, we have found over 200 tree sponsors, who now maintain over 1,000 fruit trees in public spaces. We have contributed to an awareness and delivered results, and we want to continue to do so not only in Hasetal but also in other projects. This scalability now depends on the partnerships that will evolve, and also on who believes in us and in the potential of mundraub.org. In November 2014 the project gained the first price of one of the most important awards in the sector of tourism, the "Deutschen Tourismuspreis".
State of implementation of the project.
The technical platform is stable and continuously growing by about 25% annually in terms of users and locations. In 50Hertz Transmission we have found our first business customer who wants to make more out of their compensation sites than is prescribed by law and to provide better stakeholder involvement. With the 2015 National Garden Show we have a very appealing partner on board.
The challenge is on the one hand to keep the platform attractive for the community in the long term and on the other hand to develop a social business that generates revenues. New features (e.g. mobile app, greater interaction, multiple languages) are just as important as visible results in the form of value creation through and in the cultivated landscape (offline). The development of user numbers, the response from the media and wider social developments prove that mundraub.org was devised and set up at just the right moment. Now is the time to utilize and further develop this potential. This will involve shaping the business models in such a way that they live up to the standards of a social business. The project could be hinders by funding bottlenecks that would result in having to lay off employees.
What distinguishes mundraub from other solutions?
At its establishment, the platform mundraub.org was a first mover and has inspired many other mapping. We are distinct in that we focus on self-growing edible plants and will not water the concept down. What is the innovation? Surely not the development environment Drupal. The futurologist Matthias Horx states that the time of the technical utopias is coming to an end and the question of the future society is not technical but socio-technical, and that through such new social technologies we come to a better understanding of humanity and society. What can mundraub.org do to help? We use technical possibilities to concretely map access to and use of common goods, and to extract from the community opinion trends on ownership, growth, responsibility and food. Another innovative feature is that mundraub.org bridges the divide between the digital and the real world, as very few web projects do. This inspires thousands of people to re-discover their environment and to share information, observations and other developments. In times of OpenData and OpenGovernment, the platform can make a contribution to freely and easily available, clearly understandable data on the presence and condition of fruit trees and shrubs. mundraub.org is a large, ever-growing interest group for edible city- and landscapes and unique in this form.
How did the idea for the project originate?
In the late summer of 2009, several friends were paddling down the river Unstrut in Saxony-Anhalt. At the rest areas along the river, mirabelle plums and summer apples on public land were literally there for the taking. We had with us fruit bought from a supermarket, but that now seemed absurd to us. The idea was born, to start a mapping project to make such forgotten fruits visible. In the initial phase, the original core team was financially supported by a private sponsor from Bavaria who asked not to be named. Subsequently, the Anstiftung & Ertomis from Munich pro rata financed the switch from WordPress to Drupal. Together with the Tourism Board Hasetal (Lower Saxony), we developed from 2012 to 2014 the mundraub-Region Hasetal, which was co-financed by the German Federal Environmental Foundation and the Bingo Environmental Foundation. In 2014, we were awarded the contract of the 2015 German National Garden Show at Havel-Region for the purchase of 20,000 liters of mundraub Juice. Harvest was in September 2014 on public and private lands in consultation with communities and owners, and involving 70 members of the mundraub community. For 50 Hertz Transmission we are developing an approach, to allow compensation areas from the mandatory compensation scheme to be better used for the integration of stakeholders and employees.