Fair Trade 2.0 conversation starts with a focus on RFID tagging and data:

- On the consumer end you run the risk that through electronic tagging consumption habits ever more closely monitored

- people talk about the internet of things - the moment something is produced it is RFID tagged. The question is whose data is it? When the product is no longer just physical – but physical product + data – should commercial data be public? knowing behaviour impacting your world is critical

- Data asked for by companies is out of touch with current lives – In USA in order to buy online you often have to put in your landline number – I have 4 children and none of them have ever had a landline

great comment about data control – ‘if you want marketing data from me YOU can pay ME’

Q – how much do data chips cost and how would a producer get them??

A 3-5pence each – if wallmart wants to do deals with you they will provide you with chips and feed the cost into their agreement with you

- Now that its possible to have digital data on things – and in things – there must be a legal aspect (data protection) – tracking products could be great for being aware of the whole life cycle – but do you want someone to impinge that much on your life? Issues around privacy – the transparent consumer

- If this technology is spreading – is there any way this could be subverted for the balance of power between corporations and consumers -so it’s not the corp gaining the information but actually the consumers gaining more information about those corporations and how we  can change the terms of that relationship

- My assumption is that in Fair Trade 2.0 the corporation doesn’t exist -you should be able to buy your products direct from the producers -ie- buying your olive oil direct from Gaililee

- It would be great if I could use the technology to subvert the supply chain and enable a disintermediated transaction - I haven’t found any Fair Trade producers on Twitter yet but it would be great if there were – I could tweet an  idea for a product up, someone could reply and offer to make it for their chosen price and I could do the transaction directly through social media.

Q – but would you put your unique idea on Twitter? (fear of copyright / intellectual property)

A – the key is about disintermediation so on the issue of would I share this – yes- I’ve got many of ideas that i can’t / don’t want to exploit – creating mini-marketplaces for ideas – looking at the examples of Etsy and Folksy – handcraft sold online – which is a marketplace with very little intermediation – lots of producers can sell whatever handcrafted goods they want. Many of them are Fair Trade.

(my comment – issues of standardization being raised – is the issue about more Fair Trade certification or better products?)

Robin: I am working with a new org called Serk(sp?) in US which is taking the concept of an online workshop where artisans collaborate with designers to create new products – because fair trade is fundamentally about participation. Conscious consumers are investors, they are people who know where they want their money to go - so the idea of investing time, values and money to create a more sustainable economy is where we’re heading.

Tim:  looking at networked invidualism - it follows the same thing as mentioned earlier about how we’re moving from stories about groups of producers to stories about  individual producers -  how do we help people engage in that story?

Robin: Marketing is driven by one word – aspiration, that is now being replaced by inspiration. These are fundamental shifts we’re seeing. the I is absolutely critical – if you haven’t got the balls to go online and talk about yourself you won’t engage with the WE or the US – the world won’t change without that

Laura: social media isn’t all about ME it’s about sharing – it’s social history, sharing information, forging relationships online

- Individuality and uniqueness is important needs to be celebrated for consumers- especially in fashion – story is important – more individuals are trend setting now than ever before

- We need to do more knowledge and skill sharing without worrying too much about somebody nicking our idea

Q – What is the next step in capturing the market - what should people who are active in the FT community be looking for?

Tim: there are two things that FT organisations need to do – one is take FT as a concept into people’s online lives – it’s about content – is there a way I can easily display my affiliation with your brand / cause on my social media? Using content more people can take their FT identity into their online lives (looking at Amplified as an example!) -  the other thing is looking at the Long Tail – the reach outside of the mainstream

Q – how do u move from a consciousness of duty to a consciousness of fun – and difference? And how can you use people’s sense of play and competitiveness in this direction?

- Actually there’s lots of fun in FT it’s just not in the newspapers or in the advertising – it’s not in commercial spaces so the problem is the connection

Tim: young people ask what’s in it for me? how can you make this fun and there be something in it for me as well to take to my community. The challenge is how can we take this idea of competition and imagine an online scenario where you are competing with other people to get a share of the profit from marketing FT to your community - the key with online is we can try these things, be playful and scale up of they work rather than the economics of traditional advertising

- concept of value – we need to turn concept of value on it’s head – the only way that can happen is through social media, networks, and community initiatives

with social media it’s the way of communicating that’s changing, not the ideas themselves

Example in action: Dr Ian Brown and Dr Dorothea Kleine – The Fair Tracing Project

The Fair Tracing project is a research project from Royal Holloway Uni on using technology to open up the supply chain and involve consumers within the process:

The Fair Tracing project, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant number EP/E009018/1, aims to help bridge the digital divide between Northern consumers and Southern producers by using tracing technology to enhance the Fair Trade model of trade. Digital tracing technology enables each individual product to be both given a unique identity and tracked throughout the value chain from producer to consumer. The Fair Tracing project believes that attaching tracing technology to Fair Trade products sourced in developing countries will enhance the value of such goods to consumers in the developed world seeking to make ethical purchasing choices

Ethical consumption  is giving consumers the choice – creating a regulation, giving choice, offering information to the consumers – this project is about how to get the information to the consumers. Mapping a chain of a product – valuable to both producers and consumers, but also how can we give businesses an opportunity to use the tool to show they are doing things better?

The project is looking at two different Fair Trade products – Chilean Fair Trade wine and Indian shade-grown coffee – and creating an online tool that took into account producers and consumers. Looking at production process as well as social and environmental aspects that producers might be interested in. Looked at where the money from Fair Trade went in communities. Mapped the entire value chain

As part of the research they talked to consumers about their decision making. They found consumers made their decisions differently based on different products – varied in the two diff products they were looking at – coffee and wine. Consumers cared about fair trade, food miles, carbon footprint, child labour. what they wanted was third party info – where can I see where my money goes? high degree of distrust for UK supermarkets and scepticism of ethical claims made by supermarkets. Aura of trust in brand changing trust in belief of fair trade- I trust Waitrose so I trust their FT claims.

Looking at how you use technology to make people feel connected with the producers and to feel the same affinity as they do with local farmers. On site could collect video, audio and text all the way along the chain and play it back to consumers. Food miles came up again and again – especially when using mapping data. Also working with Nokia – using barcode readers,

Started project at the end of 2006 – now are in touch with 13 other similar projects in UK, USA and Finland – trying to find points of agreement to create open source effort to bring all ideas together – held Ethics 2.0 summit in Oct 2008 to try to put together ethical consumer information system – no decided system yet – the buzz is there but no concrete answers yet

learning experiences:

• True participation is crucial to building the system but is resource and time intensive
• Language barriers caused problems for international fair trade
• Key difficulty with using such open info – what happens to the trust? Who should have editorial rights? Should info be crowdsourced and if so how do you build trust?
• Time pressure issues – too much info is overload for consumers
• Important to understand when academia should hand over to social enterprise
• process is deeply replicable but product is evolving

Social Media speaker 1- Steve Bridger – Online Community builder and Digital Engagement adviser to charities

Steve talked about his past with Oxfam. Progresso Coffee was before its time

He first saw the power of individuals in making change in 2007 when he watched the Water Buffalo Movie – technology helping us to connect people directly to issues (the YouTube video has been watched 56,282 times)

Other great examples: Akvo – non-profit organisation with a knowledge, funds/projects matchmaking and monitoring/reporting web platform for water and sanitation projects – set themselves up as a platform for small NGOs to share knowledge and tell their stories – often through video (which now is pretty easy and cheap to do)

mobileactive.org – A global network of people using mobile technology for social impact - the power of mobile now is being able to tell personal stories. Also huge potential of gaming and apps to bring people closer together

Social Media Speaker 2 - Pete Cranston, New Media and ICT Specialist - “I’m a convergent geek!”

We’re in phase 2 of using social media – now I can see who’s talking to who and can move laterally – I can see what’s going on and have multiple separate conversations – exponentially connecting people

Using social networks – Oxfam is on many of the social platforms (facebook, MySpace, twitter,) Greenpeace US as over 100,00 followers on MySpace (actually 122,019 as of today!) -  value of network is in engaging people in the wider issues around the product

Issues in Masai Mara being discussed through social media – Western Kenya reserve talking to the rest of the world through twitter facebook, etc

Not just about outside conversations – La Campagne – group of Haitian vets set up a buy-a-cow-for-a-farmer project that you can track – you loan a cow to a farmer and are kept informed of its progress – after it has had 4 calves you get one back

Kiva - direct microloan organisation – loaning money directly to individual entrepreneurs. Kiva is a tiny organisation so very small overheads – huge power of re-intermediation. However - Social Edge (part of the Skoll Foundation) did a critical review of Kiva and the transactional impact on small producer- you have to show how you spent the money (blogging, video etc) rather than just writing it – asking people who are farmers to produce and edit compelling video as they are now competing on a global market

Safe assumption that pretty much everyone can use a mobile phone – and as soon as people can connect they go social - Mixit: a basic mobile only social network enabling you to communicate to your whole network by SMS is hugely popular in S.Africa with over 6 million users

convergence and digital divides – mobile is the technology for Africa – no longer just a phone it’s effectively a computer you can talk to people on

questions / points raised:

• risk of making it harder for smaller, poorer producers – how much does it cost?

• tracability is absorbing – will create high transaction cost on consumers

using RFID technology to trace value chain – story telling element and electronic systems being implemented – combining these is powerful – links to how we can create models of trust based on factual reality of social constructivist ideas from people’s own stories – think about trust (WFTO running a sfms – barcode traceability through system)

• How does the producer feel about collaborating and talking to the consumer?

Robin Smith talking about World Fair Day website – most is artisan-produced content – producers want to be involved in the conversation

• Issue of older people not online – people don’t always want to go to a website- what else can we do? Reflection from audience – at her fair trade shop they write the name of the producer on the price tag of each product sold – Tim Davis - Is the till receipt where we tell the story?

Dorothea Kleine – generational gap – there’s a space for intermediation between twitter and the newspaper – how can we open those different channels for different people with different usage profiles to get the plethora?

• consumer end of the chain is too politicised – we don’t talk enough about the producer end

Wow, the idea’s come a long way since we first thought we needed to do ‘something cool about the impact of social media’ and mix it with the things we’ve seen working at previous Amplified events!

We threw out the idea of a free (or nearly free – £1.40 to be precise) Amp-style event, and got a huge response. Including a response from Reuters, who also saw that there was room for such a conference and offered to host it at their building in Canary Wharf.

Wow.

With the added infrastructural possibilities that the Reuters facilities offered (we’d seriously considered holding £1.40 in a park!) – as well as the expertise of the wonderful people who work there – we set about making the most of the space, the team and most of all the amazing minds of the people who’d said they wanted to come along.

We came up with the framework of a ‘Curated Unconference’, where before each of the first two sessions, we’ll offer two 5-10 minute ‘question framing’ talks, inviting us to consider the ways social technologies have completely changed the environment for news makers and consumers, and also the changing landscape for politics, democracy and governance, followed by small group conversation, taking that start point wherever it goes. There’s no hard and fast injunction to stay on-topic, and I’m sure all kinds of conversations will spring out from it.

The ‘Amplified’ bit will be to document those conversations - feel free to record, video, audioboo, tweet, blog, take notes – we’ll be on hand to help, to collate, and to generally encourage all of us to document all the great ideas, and hopefully provide materials and mechanisms for all the discussions to be taken beyond the walls of the venue.

For the last of the 3 sessions, we’re going to take the best of the ideas that have already been posted on the wiki, and throw those open for group discussion. There are SO many great ideas there, it’ll be hard to decide (and of course, I’m sure a few other topics will come up as we go along). And alongside that, there’ll be a web-cast panel conversation pulling together themes and ideas from the day, and inviting as much participation, widsom and comment from those outside of the event.

We’re REALLY excited about this. The format works, the people who say they’re coming along are far too brilliant to try and force them to listen to talks all day. We’re trying to curate a space for all those minds to explore the past, present and future of what all this social technology means, and help carve out a path for our thinking and planning in those areas.

See you on Nov 11th.

The day will run from 2pm til 8pm, so there’s time for those of you who work in London to come along for the last session, or watch the stream and join the conversation online.

Please sign up here: http://1pound40.eventbrite.com/ (I know, you already registered an interest on the wiki, but spaces will be limited to some degree, so we need a fair way of managing that, which Eventbrite gives us).

The minimum fee is £1.40 for this event. All proceeds will go to charity (www.dec.org.uk) to the Indonesian disaster appeal. We suggest donations of £14.00 or more if you can. Many thanks.

Please keep the conversation about the day and its possibilities going – here in the comments, over on the wiki, or in your own bit of the internets.

Amplified were invited to join Tuttle in Barcelona on the 18 September 09 and Podcamp on the 19 September. Steve Lawson and Lucy Windmill went on a little SoMeWe adventure…

I arrived in Barcelona on Thursday and spent the day walking around the city, down la Ramblas, to the port, across to the beach… It was a little too breezy for the beach but a number of determined Brits were there, spread-eagled across their towels (“I will get a tan”). Next I walked to ‘Gotica’ (the old Gothic area) which is gorgeous, all winding cobbled streets and little art shops and boutiques, coffee shops and bars set up in hidden court yards. In the evening I had a beer and a little BCN tweetathon as @solobasssteve Lawson had missed his flight and was due to be speaking at Barcelona Tuttle on Friday morning (I’m not much of a public speaker myself!). He managed to get an early flight out on Friday with easyjet (via Twitter – impressed) and I met up with 2 other Barcelona SoMeWe weekenders from out of town – @StefaanLesage from Belgium and @moof for tapas e vino and lots of talking…

Friday it was off to @citilab in the West of the city (Cornella) for Barcelona Tuttle organised by @cataspanglish (Chris Pinchen, who invited us to Barcelona when he came to the Amp09 Midlands event). We met a bunch of amazing people from all different sectors with the common interest of pioneering social media – in education, government, the health service – quite a few PhDs in there! We also met the couple behind @catavino – their mission is to get the vineyard world online (and they organise Twitter wine tasting – very cool). We have a few videos and pics to post up soon.

Tuttle was held at the Citilab – what a fantastic place! I was in venue heaven imaging what we could do with the space. It’s huge!! It’s modern, it’s spacious, it’s flexible and it’s got wi-fi… we need this in London! It’s also doing some great projects of course; Citilab-Cornellà is a workspace dedicated to training and research on new technologies and social innovation, an entrepreneurial hub. And we like it.

Later in the afternoon we did some sightseeing with @moof and @stefaanlesage. We saw the Sagrada Família, a massive, privately-funded Catholic church that has been under construction since 1882 and will not be finished until at least 2026 – but you can walk around inside with the construction going on. (We had a little giggle about the Doozers). It really is spectacular… a Gaudi piece – so intricate and inspired, almost too much to take in from the ground.

We then headed off to the centre to meet @cataspanglish and @anafmora for an evening of more food, wine and laughter (language based! Not sure I will reveal that here – Steve can!).

Up early for Podcamp BCN on Saturday 19th; meeting place confusion and bus driver mistaking 9am with 9pm aside, we arrived in el Masnou. The simultaneous translation was excellent (and necessary!).

Steve did a 45 min slot on Amplified – our boy did good! (more invitations please!). It seemed to go down really well – and he certainly kept the translator on her toes (in fact did they have to change over at half time?!).

I wrote a few blogs on what I saw at Podcamp – some written after the port tasting before lunch and the wine tasting courtesy of @catavino – what a treat. Coming to an Amplified event near you soon – we hope!

Dolors (@dreig) is brilliant – a psychology teacher by trade, she is in to communities, e-learning, web 2.0, web 3.0 – and she is a pioneer for open education and this is what she has come to talk to us about at Podcamp BCN.

First up – a little recommended reading; she talks about ‘Free – the future of a radical price’ and ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’ (Eric Raymond).

Like many others Dolors believes that our education system is not working; there’s a lot of talk in the media about this but what I like about Dolors is that she actually has some ‘solutions’ to change and she’s positive about it. She isn’t standing here ranting about what’s wrong without putting it right. Refreshing.

She says in order to learn, self-motivation is key, along with attention and relevance. In the world of business it’s all about rights and ownership whereas in the education sector we are geared towards learning: so why don’t we have a more open style of learning? When you realise how much you can learn on the basis of other’s recommendations… information is power!

Dolors talks a little about the ‘university of the people’ (UoPeople) which is ‘the world’s first tuition-free, online academic institution dedicated to the global advancement and democratization of higher education’. The educational model embraces the internet and reduces technology costs to bring university level studies within reach of people across the world. It has the support of respected academics, humanitarians and other visionaries. Obama says it’s a good alternative for those who are not ready for university. Low cost education for all. “By 2020 these universities will be abundant”.

Dolors talks about 2 models for the future:

The MOOC model (a mixed education model: Massive Open Online Course). It’s a free and open ‘Connectivism and Connective Knowledge’ course.

Then followed CCK09 – Connectivism and Connective Knowledge by George Siemens. Content and conversations are open so participants can take the course in any direction that they find useful.

Dolors tells us about an open education conference in Barcelona next year, a meeting point of HE professionals. They all work with the internet and believe that an open social learning is very important. (Good start! Back to Barcelona again then…).

As was brought up in Stefaan’s discussion: it is no longer about software or hardware now – it’s about crossing the chasm. We need a change of mindset.

E learning is not just digitising the existing resources and getting them onto pdf with no interaction – that is not e-learning at its best.

So… does Google make us stupid? Quite the opposite, she says. The abundance of content makes knowing the right content to choose the most important. (The difficulty I suppose is teaching young people how to check the quality of their sources?).

Education should be open: no more ‘sign up’ communities. I suppose much of the hesitancy in teachers and academics is concern over making mistakes so publicly – but @dreig believes this is the key to learning. Making mistakes is OK.

So – what can we do to make small changes now? How can we make the most of what we have? Dolors suggests using blogs on which to publish learners’ work, using PLNs (personal learning networks ). These could also be used as professional networks. Everyone should be teachers and learners: we can comment on each other’s work, build knowledge collaboratively. Social skills and learning as a community is so important, as is trust and transparency, and authenticity. “Transparency is the new objectivity”! We don’t need to be total experts as long as we’re not claiming to be… (phew!). It may sound Utopian but it is the main goal she has in her quest to open up education. Get free of copyright based models – open course web; start freeing up content, publishing it on the web, working in class with a wiki – it all makes a difference.

Other things that educators can consider in improving education in the here are now, is simply to remember that customised, personalised, contextualised education will help people excel.

Centralising tools of dissemination, collective distribution throughout communities can help and there are already a number of tools available such as real time web (Twitter etc).

http://www.dreig.eu/caparazon/

We’ve had a week to recover from the frantic Amplification of the CSLive event last week

The relationship between the civil service and social media is an awkward one, at best. Of course, many many civil servants are using social media platforms in their non-work life, but unclear policy statements on what they can and can’t do online makes it tricky for them to be ‘out and proud’ as civil servants, and very few are able to use social media services for work as anything other than a glorified RSS feed.

So what we ended up doing was 4-fold:

• Documenting the actual sessions (Joanne and Lucy did an outstanding job of writing up and commenting on much of the stuff coming out of the keynote sessions, often updating them in real-time for anyone who wanted to follow online.)
• Reportage from around the conference floor (Christian and Benjamin did a fair bit of this on the first day, via Qik, which gave a pretty fun overview of what was going on…)
• Recording conversations that were happening outside of the structure of the event – trade shows are incredibly predictable affairs, but the conversations that go on in the corridors and over coffee often have far far-reaching implications, if only those blue-sky thoughts could be documented and built on. We did some of that, with civil servants of all levels
• Informally consulting on – and demonstrating – the way that social media works, what it actually is, how things are found, how stories are followed and how information gets out.

The recorded conversations was, I think, the hardest element to get right - on the first day, a lot of people were, understandably, very nervous of being recorded. The initial idea had been to run a ‘diary room’ where people could candidly be video’d about the conference, their work, and anything else. That didn’t happen. Most civil servants are, on pain of death, instructed not to talk to ‘the press’ about what they do. We looked like the press. FAIL.

So we shifted it to conversations about social media, and then if they had anything they wanted us to record off the back of that, we’d do a little ‘interview’ – very friendly and controlled, nothing scary or job-threatening.

What I loved about these recorded conversations is how the people I spoke to accidentally answered each other’s questions. Those who were fluent in social media – particularly Jenny Brown and Nick Jones – explained their relationship to social media while working in goverment in terms that the rest of the interviewees – who outlined their issues and fears about social media – would understand and hopefully be able to implement. One of the best things about working with the COI is that they are right at the heart of all of these conversations. Most of the people I spoke to that were forming social media policies within their departments were doing so in conjunction with the COI. That’s great news.

So it would seem that we now need to build a platform whereby this stuff can be share AFTER the event between the people who contributed.

So here were the Audioboo interviews with those who had questions about social media:

Firstly, Darren Weale of the Home Office - a lovely bloke, who seems to get the potential of social media, but who outlines many of the concerns that Civil Servants have about its usage:

Maxine MacKenzie has more hands-on experience of social media at work, thanks to her working at Direct.gov, but again, is all too aware of the problems of ‘unmoderated’ communications when social media is viewed as a broadcast/advertising channel. Here comment that “social media isn’t just the remit of the comms team, but for everyone at direct.gov” is really smart (and once again, advised by COI):

Rachel Neaman of the Dept of Health was perhaps the most wary of the role that social media plays in disseminating information, working as she is on the swine-flu situation, trying to get medical information out to people that need it. In this 2-part interview, it’s apparent that she’s deeply committed to people getting the best info that they can, but I think that many of her fears about the way information is shared on social media platforms would be put to rest if she jumped in and started talking to people (her faith in newspapers to do a balanced job of getting the information out there seems scarily misplaced, having seen the misinformation about swine flu over the last few days.)

Which leads nicely onto the two people that I spoke to in the civil service who most fully seemed to grasp the potential for social media in both internal and external government communications – Nick Jones of the COI, and Jenny Brown, who works with the MOJ web team:

None of these conversations were being recorded elsewhere. The rest of the audioboos recorded – by me and the rest of the team – are findable on the audioboo site. Please feel free to take and embed any of them you find interesting and want to comment on - this stuff is out there to be discussed, to be shared, to be agreed with, disagreed with, quoted, and used to learn. The ongoing conversation will be exponentially greater than the sum of its parts as the web of information builds and commenters add value to each other’s findings

This video summarises much of the discussion around social media within and beyond the civil service. Featuring Sir Gus O’Donnell,Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, Mark Lund, COI Chief Executive, and Howard Rheingold, Internet pioneer and future thinker. It lays out the challenge and the opportunity – and also conveys the level of activity (and the volume!) at the event. The audio clears up as the video progresses:

Thanks to all who took the time to answer and of course to Christian for the video.

Penny talks to Steve Lawson, a new media enthusiast & solo bass player, and the result is one of my favourite podcasts ever. Just jump straight in:

[display_podcast]

Steve talks about the moving from performing other peoples music to writing and how he was lucky that he always had geek friends to draw on.

“Curiosity turned me into an early adopter without even knowing what an early adopter was…”

The audience took him along from step to step, from having a site, to playing solo gigs to releasing albums. I particular enjoy the way he pulls away the curtain from the wizard controlling the conventional way of approaching a career in music.

“The music was part of a narrative that i was in charge of… I’m looking at the world and I’m playing what I see… what social media allows me to do is to tell my story and invite other people to contribute to that”

This is brilliant stuff and not only great advise to any budding musicians, but to anyone wanting to strike out in their own field. And he even has a delivery room story

To paraphrase: the return is larger when you get the opportunity to tell your story. The conversation is where the longevity is…

Photo credit: Steve Lawson by Documentally (used with permission)