New Market Module & Hylo Updates

We’re pleased to announce some new survey options developed through community input: 

• A new question set for Farmers Market enrollment profiles. Similar to the Common Profile for farm enrollment, this will  collect basic information about markets, food hubs, and distribution centers.
• Updates to the SurveyStack x Hylo integration so that it can be used in conjunction with a pared-down Contact and Address question set, rather than requiring the full Common Profile. 
• The ability to use SurveyStack to create both farm or non-farm groups in Hylo 

When we originally designed our interoperable survey tools like the Common Profile and Hylo Onboarding, we were focused primarily on the needs of farms and farmers. As our community has expanded and worked with these tools locally, we’ve seen the need for additional flexibility for other groups in the food systems world. That feedback informed the creation of these new features– and continues to drive our development work. 

Background

In our pilot of the Common Profile, we created a set of shared questions that many different organizations want to know about farms in their networks, and designed a question set template that collected this information in a standard way. This question set can be placed into many different enrollment surveys and customized for an individual organization’s needs, while also building a collective database of answers. 

 Through conversation with collaborators like the openTEAM Fellows, we identified a set of users–market and food hub managers– who also need to share information about food and land, connect with farmers, and onboard members into their network, but through a different set of core questions. 

Our friends at Seacoast Eat Local contributed the questions they’ve been using to add markets to their Seacoast Harvest project, and worked with us to test and troubleshoot throughout the development process. OpenTEAM fellow Steph Wiley also tested this module for use in his survey for the Black Farmer Fund and Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust. Within the module itself, users can also opt to get connected to our friends at the Open Food Network– and we’d love to add more connections! We’ve learned so much from these collaborative partnerships, and could now use your help in testing and suggesting improvements for future versions. 

_{Graphic by openTEAM. You can find out more details about the Common Profile here, or learn more about the} openTEAM tech ecosystem here.

How it Works

The Farmers Market Onboarding Profile question set is ready to go in any survey you’d like to add it to– here’s how: 

In the past, we designed the Hylo Onboarding question set to always be paired with the Common Profile in order to access the Hylo API and create a Hylo farm group, as well as passing information to other tools and modules. You now have an additional range of options for creating Hylo groups through SurveyStack:

• Use the full Common Profile + Hylo Onboarding to create a farm profile
• Use the much more concise Contact and Address questions + Hylo Onboarding question set to create a non-farm group
• Use all three to create a survey for both farmers and non-farmers, using relevance statements to direct users to the right question set for their needs.  

Note for developers: If your SurveyStack group is integrated with Hylo, logged-in users who consent to enrollment using your survey will be added to your network on Hylo as well. You also now have the ability to assign users to groups using API Compose. 

This new flexibility means you can use these tools with any custom question set you can think of. Got an idea? We’d love to work together, or connect you with a working group to bring it to life! Contact us at info@our-sci.net, or join the Common Profile group on Hylo.