Design and development of an interactive community-driven information system for rural artisans: CISRA framework

Abstract

Most e-commerce platforms have been developed as sales and marketing channels, offering artisans of all skill levels equal opportunities for growth and provide very low-cost worldwide visibility. These strategies never allow any artisans to give opinions about willingness to accept/reject orders due to personal inconvenience, wages, item shipping deadlines, etc. Extant exogenous approaches undertaken to provide rural producers with direct access to market have mostly done so sporadically, by incorporating measures that are not designed in accordance with rural context and needs. In this context, this paper attempts to securing active participation of rural producers in the process of production by considering the opinion and purposive collaboration between relevant rural-urban agents by allocating an order to the rural artisans. This paper will propose a Community-driven Information System for Rural Artisans (CISRA) which identifies the selection of artisans in fairness manner as a strategy to boost market opportunities of rural producers. We used a simulator called AnyLogic to ensure fairness and scalability in the artisan selection method and to measure the efficiency of our allocation model. The simulator will optimize the allocation policies of a job to the artisans based on the opinion value.