In the fall of 1986, a half-dozen Boulder County farmers came together around a vision: to create a market for farmers -- run by farmers -- where vendors could sell what they'd grown directly to the local community.
With the support of Boulder County, the city of Boulder, some students at the University of Colorado and a lot of volunteers, the Boulder County Farmers' Market launched in 1987 with the goal of supporting local agriculture. This year, the market -- which returns for the season April 7 -- celebrates its 25th anniversary.
"Twenty-five years ago in Boulder County, we had some visionary individuals come together and (set up a market) before it was fashionable," said Shanan Olson, the market's interim executive director and a farmer herself. "They consciously decided they wanted to feed their neighbors and families and friends.
"There's something pretty fabulously amazing about that."
Over the last quarter century, the original Boulder market has grown into a touchstone of the community; a second market was set up in Longmont; the hours, the days of the week, and the length of the season for both markets have been stretched year after year; and the offerings available at the markets have diversified in creative and unexpected ways.
But one thing has not changed: Every farmer who sells at the Boulder County Farmers' Market grows his or her own produce, setting it apart from most farmers' markets across the state and across the country. The premise of grow-what-you-sell is woven directly into the fabric of today's market, just as it was in 1987 when it began.
"It's always been run by farmers, and it always demanded that the farmer that was selling it had actually grown it," said Bob Munson, of Munson Farms, who has been part of the farmers' market from the beginning. "At that time, a lot of farmers' markets started all over Colorado. (They) quickly became a place where junk produce was sold. You can get junk produce for nothing and sell it for something."
The market that began in 1987 along 13th Street between Canyon Boulevard and Arapahoe Avenue was built on the shoulders of an earlier market that grew up on the lawn of the Boulder County Courthouse in 1975, when Pearl Street was still a through-road.
That small market was organized by Richard Foy and David Bolduc through the Downtown Boulder Association as a way to attract shoppers to the area.
"They visualized that it would be a real nice draw for people to have events down there," said Munson, who sold at that market with his two young sons. "They made a big banner -- a canvas sign -- and it could hang all the way across the street or it could hang all the way across trees as you enter the courthouse."
Munson remembers about five other farmers selling regularly at that first market, which ran for a couple hours on Saturday mornings from July into September.
But the market faltered after its 10-year anniversary, partly because of the limited size of its location and partly because of new competition from a short-lived produce and crafts market set up in a parking lot near the site of the current farmers' market.
"The courthouse lawn was limited in space, and the space was not viable anymore," said Ulla Merz, who interviewed 10 of the longtime farmers selling at the market for the Maria Rogers Oral History Program at the Boulder Public Library. Merz, co-founder of Bookcliff Vineyards, also sells Colorado wines at the current markets in Longmont and Boulder.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Now There’s Not An App For That
Location-based social network Foursquare Labs has cut off access to its technology for an application that made it possible for guys to pinpoint the location of nearby women on a map and view their personal data and photographs.
What really raised privacy concerns about the app — unabashedly named Girls Around Me — is that the women it tracked hadn’t opted into the service and weren’t made aware this was going on.
Here’s how it worked. The app took information women made public about their location on Foursquare, paired it with photos and personal details those same women made public on Facebook, and then put it all together on a map to show names and faces of women near a user’s location.
“Girls Around Me is the perfect complement to any pick-up strategy,” the app’s website says. “And with millions of chicks checking in daily, there’s never been a better time to be on the hunt.”
You can sort of imagine the idea sounding funny to a basement full of college-age hackers in a coding frenzy sometime after midnight. But in the real world, it felt like stalking. Foursquare determined that the app went too far and cut off its access to its location data.
“The application was in violation of our API policy, so we reached out to the developer and shut off their API access,” a Foursquare spokeswoman said Saturday. She said Foursquare has a policy against aggregating information across venues, “to prevent situations like this where someone would present an inappropriate overview of a series of locations.”
In a statement, the app’s Russian developer, i-Free Innovations, said it has removed the app from the Apple iTunes Store, but it plans to continue developing the app and “limit it to showing only public places and venues.” I-Free defended the app’s intentions and said it only revealed data that is available publicly on Facebook and Foursquare.
“[W]e believe it is unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns,” i-Free said. “We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the apps’ goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions.”
More than 70,000 people downloaded Girls Around Me, the developer said.
A Facebook spokeswoman said the app is currently inaccessible and pointed to information on how users can make their information private.
The Girls Around Me fiasco — revealed in compelling detail by the Cult of Mac blog — comes as app developers are putting effort into blending the online world of social networking with the real world of face to face encounters.
Foursquare itself was an early explorer of this territory and among the most successful. Another start-up, Color, had a brief moment of fame last year after raising millions of dollars to fund its service, which enabled people to see all the photos taken at a particular location, even if they were taken by strangers.
More recently, the South by Southwest conference saw lots of interest in “ambient social networking” apps like Highlight, Sonar and Banjo, all of which let you know about people nearby who share interests or connections with you.
The idea that people might be able to anonymously view a mashup of your personal details and location probably makes a lot of people nervous. You can argue Girls Around Me took the idea over the line by explicitly introducing sex into the mix. But the bigger issue, as artfully explained by Cult of Mac, is that Girls Around Me starkly exposed the amount of information people are sharing about themselves and the sorts of scary scenarios that can come about when that information is pulled together.
What really raised privacy concerns about the app — unabashedly named Girls Around Me — is that the women it tracked hadn’t opted into the service and weren’t made aware this was going on.
Here’s how it worked. The app took information women made public about their location on Foursquare, paired it with photos and personal details those same women made public on Facebook, and then put it all together on a map to show names and faces of women near a user’s location.
“Girls Around Me is the perfect complement to any pick-up strategy,” the app’s website says. “And with millions of chicks checking in daily, there’s never been a better time to be on the hunt.”
You can sort of imagine the idea sounding funny to a basement full of college-age hackers in a coding frenzy sometime after midnight. But in the real world, it felt like stalking. Foursquare determined that the app went too far and cut off its access to its location data.
“The application was in violation of our API policy, so we reached out to the developer and shut off their API access,” a Foursquare spokeswoman said Saturday. She said Foursquare has a policy against aggregating information across venues, “to prevent situations like this where someone would present an inappropriate overview of a series of locations.”
In a statement, the app’s Russian developer, i-Free Innovations, said it has removed the app from the Apple iTunes Store, but it plans to continue developing the app and “limit it to showing only public places and venues.” I-Free defended the app’s intentions and said it only revealed data that is available publicly on Facebook and Foursquare.
“[W]e believe it is unethical to pick a scapegoat to talk about the privacy concerns,” i-Free said. “We see this wave of negative as a serious misunderstanding of the apps’ goals, purpose, abilities and restrictions.”
More than 70,000 people downloaded Girls Around Me, the developer said.
A Facebook spokeswoman said the app is currently inaccessible and pointed to information on how users can make their information private.
The Girls Around Me fiasco — revealed in compelling detail by the Cult of Mac blog — comes as app developers are putting effort into blending the online world of social networking with the real world of face to face encounters.
Foursquare itself was an early explorer of this territory and among the most successful. Another start-up, Color, had a brief moment of fame last year after raising millions of dollars to fund its service, which enabled people to see all the photos taken at a particular location, even if they were taken by strangers.
More recently, the South by Southwest conference saw lots of interest in “ambient social networking” apps like Highlight, Sonar and Banjo, all of which let you know about people nearby who share interests or connections with you.
The idea that people might be able to anonymously view a mashup of your personal details and location probably makes a lot of people nervous. You can argue Girls Around Me took the idea over the line by explicitly introducing sex into the mix. But the bigger issue, as artfully explained by Cult of Mac, is that Girls Around Me starkly exposed the amount of information people are sharing about themselves and the sorts of scary scenarios that can come about when that information is pulled together.
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