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Junaid Haq has been working for the last year on a Fair Tracing application for the iPhone as part of his MEng computer science degree at UCL. You can now see the results of his work in his report — well worth a read. Thanks Junaid!
iPhone app
July 5th, 2009Fairtracing inspires design project
June 22nd, 2009Guiseppe Constanza is completing his MA Communication Design degree at University of the Arts London Central Saint Martins with a project called foodtracer.
Food tracer uses d-touch visual markers which can be read at point of sale with a mobile phone. It is designed to address several “ethical issues” such as carbon cost, packaging, local food, Fair Trade and organic. Many of Guiseppe’s ideas take the thinking behind the Fair Tracing project into exciting new directions. He says: “Fair Tracing has been an importnat source of inspiration for me”.
Have a look at Guiseppe’s project website: http://www.giuseppecostanza.it/foodtracer/index.htm
Foodtracer is also on display at the Central Saint Martin’s 2009 Finalist Exhibition, June 22-25 between 10am -8pm at Candid Arts, 3 Torrens Street, London, EC1V 1NQ
Fair Tracing presentations and publications now up-to-date
June 18th, 2009With the Fair Tracing Project entering its final “dissemination” phase, we have double-checked that our presentations and publications are up-to-date. In many cases, we now provide links from the items directly to the full presentation or publication.
Yet more presentations and publications are planned, and will be blogged as they become available.
Fair Tracing in the New Scientist
June 16th, 2009
Journalist Mason Inman from the New Scientist magazine interviewed Fair Tracing Project Manager Dr Dorothea Kleine for his article “Barcode’s could reveal your food’s credentials” which has just appeared in this week’s issue. In it, Inman cites the Fair Tracing project:“Meanwhile, an online initiative called the Fair Tracing Project aims to publicise how farmers in poor countries are treated by the multinational companies that sell their produce in the west. Farmers use mobiles to upload photos and videos “so they can tell a story about the labour conditions they’re working under”, says Fair Tracing team member Dorothea Kleine of Royal Holloway, University of London. Kleine and her colleagues add this to data on how the goods travel from farm to store, including the amount that packagers, shippers, and retailers get paid along the way.
So far they have completed case studies on Chilean wine (see diagram) and Indian coffee. Customers in stores should eventually be able to photograph a product’s bar code with their phone, and be directed to the relevant charts and videos.”
See the diagram: http://tinyurl.com/lxup24
This is the second time Fair Tracing appeared in the New Scientist, and this time we were also able to point to the other projects we collaborate with in the newly formed Ethical Consumer Information System (ECIS) network. Of these, the GoodGuide Project (www.goodguide.com) was also mentioned in the article.
Civil society and fair trade
June 1st, 2009This is a useful survey of Fair Trade (thanks, Marcelo!):
This publication offers a guide to Fair Trade through the exploration of 49 sites which include the official organizations of the movement, alternative traders, labeling organizations, government and multilateral bodies, NGOs and academic research across North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Guide makes no claim to be representative, many sites being chosen for their intrinsic interest (availability of information, documents), but it does we feel capture the breadth and diversity of the movement and makes accessible a wealth of documentation on the key aspects of the movement, from facts and figures to analysis and debates.
Stopping rape-enforced mining
May 29th, 2009Via Boing Boing: This is a shocking video where Eve Ensler explains that Congolese militias use rape to enforce discipline among a slave workforce that mines columbite-tantalite ore, a common raw material for many devices.
Ensler is campaigning for “Rape-Free” consumer electronics products whose raw, mineral components can be traced back to sources that can be verified to have procured them ethically.
New Fair Tracing publication
May 22nd, 2009
The article “The Fair Tracing project: mapping a traceable value chain for Indian coffee”, by Ashima Chopra and Apurba Kundu has just been published in Contemporary South Asia, 17:2, June 2009, pp 213-223.
Abstract: This research note describes the second stage of the ‘Fair Tracing’, a research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the United Kingdom. The project aims to support ethical trade by implementing digital tracing technologies in value chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information about specific products; in this case, Chilean wine and Indian coffee. The genesis and first stage of the project—as it related to the India case study—was documented in an earlier research note published in Contemporary South Asia one year ago. This note goes on to describe the second stage of this case study which beings by mapping the life of the coffee bean in its current global commodity chain, and ends with proposing a traceable value chain for small growers of Indian coffee. It is argued that the use of tracking technologies will help increase the value chain ‘rents’ that accrue to farmers in developing countries by allowing them to charge more for differentiated products increasingly demanded by informed consumers, both in the West and in home markets.
This article is the second in a projected series of three following the India case study of the Fair Tracing project. The first in the series was “The Fair Tracing project: digital tracing technology and Indian coffee”, Contemporary South Asia, 16:2, June 2008, pp 217-230.
Fair Tracing’s demo at ICTD2009 in Doha, Qatar
May 7th, 2009
Fair Tracing’s Research Fellow and Project Manager Dr Dorothea Kleine represented the project at ICTD2009, the international IEEE/ACM conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development held in Doha, Qatar from 17-19 April 2009, with over 300 delegates in attendance.
Our demonstration, “Understanding the Provenance of Ethically Produced Goods”, showed the early Fair Tracing computer screen version with the Google Earth map, and used the Upcode application to demonstrate the tool on a mobile screen. We were able to let people use the Nokia N70 or N95 to scan a barcode on a bottle (in Qatar alcohol is banned so we had to go for a water instead of a wine bottle) or a coffee package. The mobile could then go online and link directly to key information from our Fair Tracing data set. Information on offer included the pie chart of “Where does the money go?”, the producer’s website, and the YouTube videos which we have produced in partnership with the Chilean producers.
There was great interest the Fair Tracing demo stand which was up for two days. Over 70 people came to talk to us and try out the demo, including development practitioners from Ecuador, Pakistan, Australia and Egypt.
Mapping Sales
May 5th, 2009Fair Trade consultant designer Helen Le Voi drew this new initiative to my attention, pointing out how good it would be for showing ethical sales: What towns are most ethical… what ethical goods are being bought in India from which region, etc. …
Zappos Launches Realtime Ordering Map
“Want to know what shoes people are buying in Montpelier, Vermont? Then just watch the realtime map on the Zappos website long enough and you just might find out. With this new feature, the popular online retailer is giving consumers even more reason to keep up with the Joneses, as users are granted the ability to zero in on their home towns and wait to see what items pop up.”
University of Stanford’s Podcasts on Responsible Supply Chains
April 15th, 2009Browse topics such as 2008’s “Fresh Approaches to Supply Chain Practices”, and 2007’s “Doing Well and Doing Good in the Supply Chain” addressed by major international players.
If anyone is going to this year’s conference and would like to write us a summary, that would be great. Otherwise we will catch up here: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/ser/resources.html in the fullness of time.
