What is the Virtual Farmers' Market? The Virtual Farmers' Market is a set of web applications that can easily be accessed at the stall in the market whilst you're waiting to be served. The aim is to enrich communication and help people get the most from the stalls within the market, using technology that is easy to use and cheap to deploy. Our initial applications are the "Visitors' Book" and "Ask Us About...".
Who is doing this?The Virtual Farmers' Market is a collaboration between the Informatics Department at the University of Sussex, and the Common Cause Co-operative, who organise the George Street and Lewes Farmers' Markets. When is the Virtual Farmer's Market being deployed?The first public deployment will be on May 23 at George Street Farmers' Market in Hove from 10am to 2pm, and at markets over the Summer. Visitors' BookThe "Visitors' Book" allows customers to tell each other about the products and services on sale. If you enjoyed what you've bought, share the pleasure with others.
Ask Us About..."Ask Us About" is a way for the stall holder and producer to communicate with the customer, giving information about produce and any special deals available, and providing links to other web pages of interest. If you find anything interesting in this application, ask the stall holder for further details.
I come to farmers' markets to talk to the stallholders. Why should I go online?Our aim is to enrich the experience of the market, and to increase the sense of fun when shopping at the market. Whilst you wait to be served, our applications provide ways to find out what other shoppers think, and to catch up on the latest news from the producers. We want to help you talk to the stallholder, so we provide bite-size gobbets of information that can provide common ground for the conversation between the stallholder and you. How do I access the virtual Farmers' Market?Each of the stalls has a couple of 2-dimensional bar codes, also known as QRCodes, on display in a prominent position. Using the QRCode reader on your mobile phone, simply snap the QRCoder as you would take any picture, and you will be taken to the web application available for that particular stall. You will then be able to interact with the application.
If you want to add a comment to the application, then you will need to have a username registered, and login using the username.
What are QRCodes? A QRCode is a form of two-dimensional bar code, encoding text in a way that is recognisable by image processing on a mobile phone. The text can be anything, but most often is a URL that provides access to a web page relevant to the current physical location. They are very common in Japan, and increasingly being used in the rest of the world.
How do I install a QRCode Reader?QRCode readers are already common on mobile phones in the Far East, and can easily be installed on a wide variety of phone models. We recommend the i-nigma reader. Navigate to <http://www.i-nigma.mobi> to install the reader. Please note that you will be subject to the costs of internet access under your current mobile plan.
Do I need to provide personal information?We do not require any email addresses or telephone numbers to be registered on the system. You only need to generate a unique username and password.
You may wonder how we can ensure that the comments remain useful, and are not overwhelmed by a deluge of spam. Our approach is to allow users to join groups, so that their username is registered as a member of the group on the system. In each application, a trust score is calculated for each of the comments based on which groups the application owner and the viewer consider trustworthy. Comments are then ordered by their trust score, ensuring that untrusted comments are at the end of a page.
GroupsAnyone can create a group, and anyone can ask to join a group. When a group is created, the creator becomes the group administrator. The administrator provides a short piece of text, specifying how they are going to verify that a given username should be a member of a group, e.g. by suppling a name and telephone number so they can check in their address book, and ring the requesting person to confirm they actually made the request. When someone wishes to join a group, they see the group entrance text, and supply the needed information in a web form The request then awaits the administrator's attention. If the administrator can verify the request, then they can assert the username is a member of a group.
Privacy PolicyWe do not collect any other information beyond the username and the added comments. We will not divulge any information to other parties, and any publications based on analysis of the information will use anonymised data. If you have any queries, please contact Ian Wakeman,
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What does the University get?Because computers are getting both cheaper and more powerful, we are able to put computing power in many different parts of everyday life. Our research is aimed at helping people build and maintain trust relationships in a world where computing is pervasive in everything we do. The software and programs we write should help and enhance our interactions with each other, rather than throwing up barriers of distrust. We've built the Virtual Farmers' Market so that we can experiment with methods to understand how communities function and then build pervasive software that supports their function.
What does the market get?The applications we've built support the community of shoppers and stallholders that make the Farmers' Market such an exciting place to shop. Everything we've built is intended to help people talk to the stallholders over the counter.
The stallholders gain insight as to how technology will change even the most traditional of activities such as markets, and we hope with understanding will come the power to ensure it works in the best way for everybody.
How is this being paid for?We're funded by the government through the EPSRC to undertake research and communicate our findings to help influence the next generation of technology, and we're neither charging or being paid by the market organisers. We're providing the infra-structure so that we can discover the answers to our research questions.
The overarching theme of our project is how best to facilitate genuine trust relationships in market situations, enabling customer and vendor to quickly form well-founded beliefs in each others' integrity. Farmers' markets are particularly interesting to us since they have as an underlying premise that people wish to buy food direct from producers, and to form a better understanding of the supply chain for the products they buy. The other partners in the project are University College London, Kings College London and Southampton University. Other project achievements are the electronic gavel for auction houses, and the development of a complete system for mobile recommendations.
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Farmers Markets
