the Global Digital Divide initiative
of the EPSRC (Engineering and
Physical Science Research Council)
to look at the potential for offering
small producers across the world
the same tracking benefit as big
companies are realizing, with the
added opportunity for marketing
through tracing—showing prov-
enance so that customers can judge
production methods and their
impact. Could the research team
design a system that gave micro-
enterprises the means of tracing
their output through the necessary
stages of production, eliminating
unproductive stages and present-
ing their wares, with social, eco-
nomic, and environmental produc-
tion information, to interested
consumers? Could we create an
open-source tool that each player
in the production chain (including
the consumer) could use to share
information? We spent three years
testing the viability of four aspects:
Web 2.0 tools for sharing video at
each stage in production; auto-cap-
ture to collect more mundane prod-
uct data from traders’ computers;
electronic authentication to endorse
the information’s provenance; and
the Web to make new markets in
buying directly from producers.
Specifically, we followed two ethically grown products, Indian shade-grown coffee and Chilean fair-trade
wine, from soil to supermarket [ 3].
The team discovered that most of
the collaborating micro-enterprises
were far from ready to make video
or have their data snatched automatically by adding some code to
their business systems. They were
sending handwritten product infor-
March + April 2011
