Immediately prior to the BGDD Network conference, the Fair Tracing management team held the first meeting of our Advisory Board, hosted in the Department of Geography of the University of Cambridge.
In attendance were Elsbeth Fabels (Project Manager, Certificering Leveranciers, Dutch Association of Worldshops, Netherlands), Matt Jones (Future Interaction Technology Lab, Department of Computer Science, Swansea University, UK), Paul Palmer (PRIME Faraday Partnership, Senior Research Fellow, Loughborough University, UK), and Roger Tucker (The Local Language Speech Technology Initiative, Outside Echo, UK). Unfortunately, Carol Bergin (consultant based in Ireland), Rachael Wilshaw (Oxfam, UK) and Tim Unwin (Department of Geography Royal Holloway, University of London) were unable to attend.
The meeting began with a presentation from Dorothea Kleine on the Fair Tracing project, including its origins, methodology, and background on its prospective partners in the two case studies located in Chile and India. The presentation also included a section on tracing technology using google mapping by Christian Wallenta. The presentation sparked off a number of interesting and valuable comments from the Advisory Board on a number of issues, including the particpation of retailers in the project, the attitude of consumers to various means of accessing digital tracing information, and the suitability of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology for the project. Following the end of the formal part of the meeting, the discussion contunued over lunch at the University of Cambridge’s Riverside Restaurant.