All items
Fair trade 2.0
It’s good to be back home in green Somerset following two hectic days in London packed full of meetings (planned and unplanned). Plenty of talking; even more listening. I promised myself - and the 2gether team - that I would find a few minutes today to come up for air, and post some reflections on the week, and how this all might all gel with 2gether08. So, here we go; this is all moving, but I’ll have a stab at pulling some strands together, starting with fair trade.
On Tuesday, at The Innovation Edge event, I bumped into Robin Murray at the end of Sir Bob Geldof’s tour de force. Robin is one of the founders of Twin Trading, which for two decades has been instrumental in developing the leading Fairtrade brands in the UK, like Cafedirect and Divine Chocolate.
At the end of last year, I had a couple of wonderful rangy conversations with Robin, about how the social web could bring growers & producers ‘closer’ to consumers through, for example, digital storytelling.
Anyway, Robin really ‘gets it’, and we’re thinking about kicking something off next month when two-dozen representatives from grower co-ops in Africa and Latin America gather in the UK.
I hope Robin will join us at 2gether, where together we might all come up with some innovative solutions for connecting the dots along the global supply chain.
Tags: Discussion
5 comments for “Fair trade 2.0”
Post a comment
Content on this site is Creative Commons Share-Alike unless otherwise stated.
Contact information
© 2008 2gether08. 
Some of the work the Fair Tracing project are blogging about over at http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/C.Wallenta/fairtracingblog/ seems to point to a number of good Fairtrade 2.0 models for me….
Tim, that’s v. helpful. I didn’t know about that project. Will investigate further.
Do you know any of the people involved? I recognise one of the Advisory Board members from my time at Oxfam.
S
Hey Steve
I don’t know any of them directly alas…
I’ll try and dig out though some work I did when I was Communications Manager for the Fairtrade shop in Leicester - we applied for funding to create a Point Of Sale system that would give customers information about the product suppliers on their till receipts. We didn’t get the funding unfortunately - but its still an idea I’d like to explore…
I’ve jotted down some of my Fair Trade 2.0 ideas over here: http://timdavies.org.uk/2008/05/23/what-would-fair-trade-2-0-look
And I’ve dropped an e-mail to a couple of people I know from when I was involved in Oxford Student Fairtrade Coalition to invite them to join us in the discussion here…
[...] Thursday a number of us (including Paul Bradshaw, David Wilcox, Dave Briggs, Dominic Campbell and Steve Bridger) are getting together with Simon Berry as part of his secondment to Communities and Local [...]