As we enter the final stage of this project, it is worthwhile to note the following academic workshops co-organised by Dr Ann Light, all of which included various inputs from the Fair Tracing Project:
• CHI2007: Workshop on ‘UUCD and International Development’, April 2007.
• CHI2008: Workshop on ‘HCI for Community and International Development, April 2008.
• OzCHI2008: Workshop on ‘Inclusivity, Interaction Design and Culture’, December 2008.
The clothing company MADE-BY (based in Copenhagen) is “decicated to promoting sustainable clothing manufacture…You can recognise items produced…by the blue button…[Using its Track&Trace technology] you can even find out who made your T-shirt or skirt, and who picked, spun and wove the cotton”. (Source: “Track and Trace: Who made your skirt?”, Jackpot Magazine, Autumn 2008, p 77.)
“MADE-BY Track&Trace follows the trail of your clothes. With the MADE-BY code in your garment you can find out where your garment was made and by whom. In this way, MADE-BY brands open up the doors to the production process…MADE-BY Track&Trace is the very first system to trace the origin of clothes.” (Source: MADE-BY Track&Trace page at http://www.made-by.org/tracktrace.php?lg=en.)
Track & Trace is a database system…for manufacturers that was developed by MADE-BY in collaboration with Organic Exchange and the English IT company Historic Futures. Every link in the production chain enters production information into the database and forwards it to the next link. This gives the brands as direct access as possible to production data from the other suppliers in the chain. Consumers can enter the code found on the clothing label into a simplified consumer page to see who was involved in the production of their clothing”. (Source: ”Track&Trace: what is it?” at http://www.made-by.org/downloads/TrackTrace_EN.pdf)
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
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!
Anyone recognise the place? As avid users of our Fair Tracing Demo will have spotted, this is Valparaiso Harbour in Chile, where the Los Robles Wine gets shipped off around the globe to Sainbury’s harbour warehouses in the UK. Dorothea Kleine and Macarena Vivent from the Fair Tracing team went there to see how the container shipments worked.
This August, about one year on from our original visit, Dorothea and Macarena from the Fair Tracing Team returned to Curico, Chile, to meet with the Fairtrade vintners again. For a variety of reasons, including the fall of the US dollar, the Los Robles co-operative was in financial difficulties (see here). The producers who had the Fairtrade certification, however, had managed to line up an alternative buyer for their Fairtrade grapes next year.
The vintners and employees of the co-operative were the first group to co-design our interfaces for Fair Tracing in 2007, so now we came back and presented the three versions of interfaces we have now begun to develop. The producers remain interested in continuing to work with us while the supply chains through which they are trading are changing. We wish our partners all the very best as they have to manoeuvre through these difficult economic times!
Yesterdays BBC NewsNight featured a report on energy aware computing and how companies such as IBM, Cisco or Google try to tackle the increasing amount of energy consumption caused by large data centres in order to provide service to the users. Figures estimate that by the year 2020, the carbon emissions of the IT industry will be higher than airline traffic and that it’s already as high as the car industry.
You can find the report about 31 minutes into the show on BBC’s iPlayer here.
Image source: www.lbl.gov
The global portal for the Fresh Food Industry.
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John Thackara reviews Confronting the Coffee Crisis.
Alternative trade networks and the coffee system
Every day 1.5 billion cups of coffee are drunk somewhere in the world – quite a few of them in this house – but few of us in the North know much about the 25 million families that grow and produce this valuable bean.
After reading a new book called Confronting The Coffee Crisis I feel better informed not just about the negative aspects of the story – but also motivated to explore practically the potential of emerging alternative trade networks to change the bigger picture in profound ways.
[For full review, click here.]
“The Fair Tracing project: digital tracing technology and Indian coffee” by Fair Tracing research student Ashima Chopra and principle investigator Apurba Kundu has just been published in Contemporary South Asia, 16:2 June 2008, pp 217-230.
ABSTRACT: “The present research describes the genesis and initial development of ‘Fair Tracing’, a research project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council—the UK Government’s leading funding agency for research and training in engineering and the physical sciences. The Fair Tracing project aims to support ethical trade by implementing digital tracing technologies in supply chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information about specific products. In the first instance, this concentrates on two products; Chilean wine and Indian coffee. This research note describes Fair Tracing in relation to the Indian coffee case study. After an introduction by Apurba Kundu, Principal Investigator of the project, the narrative is picked up by Ashima Chopra, one of the project’s funded research students. The aim of this research note is to illustrate how a research project is funded, created and then developed. It is hoped that this will the first of a series of notes tracking this project as it relates to its Indian case study. “
A German supermarket is encouraging customers to scan and ring up their shopping using mobile phones, and check out without the help of a cashier. It is one of the number of innovations at the new “Future Store” – as Steve Rosenberg discovered when he went along to do his weekly shopping.
Fairer than fair trade – The Guardian, 24/6/08
In Buginyana, a village high on Mount Elgon, I was taken to see a brand new coffee store. Sure, it was built with the social premium – but far more impressive was the room next door, where flip charts explained not just prices but the role of the co-op, the importer, the brand, the retailer, the consumer and even the media in the supply chain. According to Nimrod Wambette, chairman of the Gumutindo Coffee Co-operative, six out of 10 farmers on the mountain now understand these matters – an empowerment that goes way beyond money. This is the empowerment of ideas, albeit enshrined in brick.
