The Fair Tracing Project

 On Thursday, 23 October 2008, the EPSRC Fair Tracing Project, Centre for Developing Areas Research (CEDAR) and UNESCO Chair in ICT4D at Royal Holloway, University of London, hosted a workshop on “Ethical Consumption, Traceability and ICT” – or, short and snappy – the Ethics 2.0 Summit.  The workshop brought together 35 participants from business, NGOs, and academia. Speakers included Tim Wilson (Historicfutures), Wesa Aapro (Consumergadget), Annesley Newholm (Easyethical), Rob Harrison (Ethiscore), Juha Kaario (Nokia Green Team) and Ann Light, Macarena Vivent, Helen LeVoi and Dorothea Kleine (Fair Tracing).

The speakers, from the UK, Finland and Chile, presented six different projects and answered questions about the thinking behind their systems. Getting this set of individuals together was in itself a success: as one speaker remarked, “I have not been to an event where you had this many key players in the field all together”.

During the lunch and coffee breaks, participants were able to try out and comment on post-its on the different interfaces of the various projects. Holloway students Andrew Brooks, Lucy Fenner, Simon Hepher and Rebecca Sankar exhibited posters of their research projects on ethical consumption. From the ICT4D Collective, Win Min Tun, Andrea Burris, Marije Geldof, David Hollow, Niels-Peter Nielsen and Ugo Vallauri assisted in running the workshop on the day.

In the discussions it became evident that there were fascinating parallels and promising synergies between the projects. We were fired up by seeing how many pieces of the puzzle allowing for a system of ethical tracking and tracing, and communicating it to consumers were there in front of our eyes, waiting to be assembled. At the end of the day, there were networking groups discussing themes like

• “How can we give producers a voice in developing these systems?”
• “How can we express ethical issues in figures or symbols to get information to the consumer quickly?”
• “What kind of business model could be used to make information services for ethical consumption financially sustainable?”

In our concluding remarks, we expressed our hope that several of the projects would now begin to collaborate or, at the very least, that we would keep each other informed of our work so that, as our projects progressed, we could avoid reinventing the wheel and, instead, exploit synergies. Thanks to all the speakers and participants for coming and contributing to an exciting day!