Joanne Jacobs here at the Reuters £1.40 conference. Just setting up before the event begins. I’ve managed to get power (there’s plenty here) multiple internet login accounts, free internet access and tea and sandwiches prior to the event. Good start! Well done Reuters and Amplified team!

I’ll be liveblogging as we go today so keep refreshing this post for details.

I took some time out during yesterday afternoon’s unconference sessions to check in with some of my Twitter followers and get their take on what Fairtrade has come to mean to them and why.

I asked “What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the term Fair Trade?” and here are the responses I got:

- workers/producers wages and conditions
- coffee, chocolate & bananas
- Fair Trade Coffee
- not a great flavour with the stuff I have tried so far but love the cause regardless
- Coffee! I know it’s so much bigger and more diverse than that, but it’s the first thing that popped into my head
- Fair Trade = hope for an alternative way of living and engaging with the world

I continued the interview onwards with a couple of people with interesting results. Click on the image to view full size, read from the bottom in each case and feel free to continue the conversation in the comments:

@Greg_Collins

@gt_p

[collated using Tweet Convo]

This is a summary of some of the open space sessions at the fair trade futures event.

The ‘producer led organization’ open space session: the values of fair trade are the most important thing you have to offer to the world. There is a need to upgrade skills (primarily producers so they can represent themselves). Consumers need to be hit in the face by what fair trade producers are doing.

Faire trade 2.0: technology as data. Big discussion about how is that data used? Changing the supply chain. Also how consumers can collaborate online by amplifying the fair trade message. A woman in the audience thinks that young people are trying to reinvent the wheel by putting debates that have gone before them online (hmm – even if they are simply ‘putting someone else’s ideas online’ surely that’s a good thing if people who would not ordinarily have seen them might come across them online?). Personal relationships that can be built online could have a positive impact in 20 years or so.

Who defines fair trade? Producers should define fair trade and consumers have the power to boycott or not. The WFTO is perhaps already there, and we hope FLO will get there in due course.

Equitable sharing of the labour: producers could work to build the structures of fair trade movement within their own continents. Meanwhile northern fair trade organsations could be lobbying, negotiating to get the fair trade movement forward in governance. The ‘one voice’ (with all working to their strengths, collaborating, communicating).

“Government should…” session. Should it be the government that is responsible? There is a sense of burn out amongst activists; they’re not sure where they’re going next. With issues such as corruption, they have lost a bit of faith. It is not just shopping; ‘don’t just buy, do’.