CAPSELLA (Collective Awareness PlatformS for Environmentally-sound Land management based on data technoLogies and Agrobiodiversity) took its first steps on 1 January 2016. Just like the tiny yet sturdy little plant it takes the name from, the CAPSELLA project will deepen the roots of sustainability in agri-food systems by harnessing scientific and local knowledge, people’s energy, motivation and innovation skills around the theme of agro-biodiversity by making use of novel, improved and demand-driven ICT solutions. CAPSELLA will focus on two complementary domains: agro-biodiversity and the food supply chain. It will use participatory bottom up data collection and top down data integration to develop solutions for these domains. The project will build from scratch open data repositories concerning regional agro-biodiversity, and will build upon and enhance existing data sets on the agro-biodiversity and food domains. Based on these, the project will develop a number of community-driven data powered ICT solutions, which will be tested by the communities engaged in the project and will result in a number of pilots. At the centre of the CAPSELLA work will be three multidisciplinary, community-driven use cases: “field scenario” addressing use of functional agro-biodiversity in cropping systems; “seeds scenario” addressing on-farm genetic diversity conservation and informal seed systems; “food scenario” addressing the transparency of the food chain in the processes related to the production, distribution and consumption of food. CAPSELLA will build a sustainable technical prototyping platform, a meeting environment for innovation that democratizes access to big data, cloud computing, open data, open software and pilots. To do so, it will build up on on-line and off-line tools including the organisation of key events to raise awareness about the project and collect information by a button up approach. The project will have a strong societal and business sustainability focus by including incubation activities for selected pilots