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Fair Trade Finder: Mobile Application

Submitted by timdavies on November 11, 2011 - 04:22
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Over 1000 towns across the world have become Fair Trade Towns - coming together to promote use of Fairtrade Mark, and other Fairly Traded products - getting local citizens to connect with global issues through ethical consumption.

 

To become a Fair Trade Town, a local area must have a number of outlets stocking Fair Trade, and so many towns create directories of Fair Trade suppliers. However, these tend to be fairly flat paper directories. With over 27,000 Fairtrade marked products available, and many more crafts and fairly traded items - there are many opportunities to engage consumers more in discovering and discussing their fair trade consumption. 

 

A Fair Trade Finder mobile application could:

  • Help local Fair Trade Towns campaigns to map where Fair Trade products are available in their cities: creating an open data directory of suppliers - including recording details of products and whether retailers are 'Fairtrade plus' (i.e. businesses that are 100% committed to Fair Trade, not just chain retailers carrying a few products)
     
  • Help consumers find Fair Trade products in their local area - and report when the directory is out of date.
     
  • Make a stronger connection between the Fair Trade products and producers - for example - showing stories of producers linked to products
     
  • Include social features - using social media to share details of Fair Trade.
     
  • Providing people with information on how to get more involved in Fair Trade campaigning in their local area - working with their workplaces, community groups etc. to promote use of Fair Trade. 

 

This app could be developed as a nationwide application, or as a skeleton that local Fair Trade groups could customise to promote their campaigns.

 

It would build up a wide-reaching open dataset on Fairtrade availability to support other innovation. 

 

It could include additional social features to connect users direct to producers - for example, where producers have twitter feeds or other online presence - allowing consumers to connect direct to producers: improving connections and global awareness through trade. 

Qualitative Impact: 
The application has a direct impact in increasing Fair Trade sales which feeds through to giving producers a fairer price for their work, and a social premium to invest in social projects. Indirectly it works to improve global awareness in consumer communities - and could provide a route into wider social action for development by Fair Trade consumers.
Quantitative Impact: 
We propose to develop this application in Oxford. Oxford has 100s of Fair Trade outlets, and over 100,000 residents. We would hope to reach 1000s with this application to improve their global awareness, impacting directly on 1000s of producers worldwide through increased Fairtrade consumption. It created to work more generally, the quantitive impact could be far greater. Right now Fairtrade impacts up to 6m producers worldwide.
Problem Definition Category: 
Trade
Event: 
Oxford, United Kingdom

Comments

Is anyone currently working on this? Clearly there's a database or flat file list of these towns for the map on http://www.fairtradetowns.org/about/ to be generated. Does anyone have access to it without the need to reverse engineer the google map?

 

-Skram

skram Nov 13, 2011

Tim, it would be great to have that data in advance of the RHoK event.  If you can ask for it and perhaps provide a link to it in this problem definition, that would be fantastic. 

Elizabeth Sabet Nov 16, 2011

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