I’m wrapping up a fantastic in Chiapas, Mexico, where Ariel Chait and I participated in the annual meeting of CoopSol. Small scale coffee producers from around Latin America got together with the roasters and retailers of Cooperative Coffees to talk about the current state of Fair Trade, best practices in Fair Trade and organic coffee production, and where the future of specialty coffee is headed. Based in San Cristobal de las Casas, we held meetings at CEDECI, a training center for local indigenous people; in the mountains near Acteal, the home of Maya Vinic coffee; and around the picturesque city of San Cris. For Ariel and me, it was a great opportunity to meet a lot of good people and talk about Acopio Movil, the project we’ve been working on at Cal.
Check out the gallery below for some pictures from the week and a video featuring fellow participants.
Here at Cal I’m working on an exciting project called Acopio. Acopio, which means “harvest” in Spanish, is creating and deploying tools that employ leading information management practices to increase the profitability and influence of agricultural producers in the developing world. At the moment our team is working with several coffee cooperatives in Latin America to pilot test software designed to help cooperatives manage data collected during the harvest process. The software runs on PCs and mobile phones and we’ve designed a data workflow that does not rely on connectivity, as internet connectivity is often unreliable in the locations where cooperatives work.
We see a range of opportunities made possible by this technology, including the possibility of sharing producer data with consumers that buy the coffee at retailers elsewhere. We’re very interested in knowing what people think about their coffee, how much source information they’d like with their coffee, what specifically they would like to know more about, and so on. We’re also considering how we might create a mechanism (an online platform of some sort) to allow consumers to contribute more directly to the farmers that produce the coffee that they love.
In November we launched a small survey to begin to gauge opinion on these questions. We used e-mail mailing lists and social media to get the word out and offered no reward for completing it. More than 135 people responded to the survey and though the sample size is small, we believe some of the findings reaffirm our suspicions about people’s love for coffee and thirst (ba-dom-chh) for more information about it. Below we’re sharing some of the key findings.
First, though, a profile of our respondents:
The majority (80%) of respondents are between 26 and 35 years old.
The majority (83%) of respondents have some graduate level education.
The gender breakdown of respondents: 52% male – 48% female.
On a scale of 1-5, 87% of respondents said their coffee knowledge could be ranked between a 2 and a 4.
60% of respondents said they had between 6 and 15 coffees a week. 12% said they had more than 15 cups a week.
Respondents came from urban centers across the U.S.:
Selected findings on coffee generally:
Participants overwhelmingly (92% of respondents) selected flavor as the most important characteristic of coffee. Participants selected price as the second most important characteristic (63%). Fair Trade and organic designations were selected by 42% and 36% of participants, respectively.
Only 6% of participants require that the coffee shops they purchase from carry Fair Trade products, with 44% saying that it’s “Not that important”.
Participants expressed a slight bias towards paying extra for Fair Trade over organic. Twice as many people said they would not pay extra for organic as said they would not pay extra for Fair Trade.
Participants want more information. 79% indicated that they would like to know more about coffee production. Each option for the following question, which asked about specific kinds of information, was chosen by >50% of respondents.
On producer wages:
48% of participants said they did not think coffee farmers earn a livable wage while 47% said they weren’t sure.
61% of respondents who say they would pay extra for Fair Trade coffee don’t believe that coffee producers make a livable wage.
63% of respondents who say it is somewhat or very important for coffee shops to carry Fair Trade products don’t believe that coffee producers make a livable wage.
68% of respondents who indicated that they are somewhat or very familiar with coffee cooperatives don’t believe that most coffee producers make a livable wage.
On giving:
40% of respondents give less than $150 a year and 45% of respondents give between $150 and $500 a year.
Respondents overwhelmingly said that they give because “it’s the right thing to do” (73%). A distant second reason was giving after disasters (30%) and guilt was the third (24%).
Respondents suggested a number of other motivations for giving, many of which involved specific causes that they are passionate about or the activities of friends (e.g., giving to friends running for charity).
89% of participants said they give directly to the organizations that they support.
More than half of the participants had never used an online platform for giving.
20% of participants had given to Kiva or Kickstarter, and participants who had given to one had often given to the other.
Feel free to leave a comment if you’d like to know more about Acopio or the survey. In the coming months I and the team will be sharing more about out work – stay tuned!
Yesterday I spoke on a panel about mobile data integrity. The idea was to have a conversation about how international development projects using mobile phones for data collection can ensure that the integrity of the data they collect isn’t compromised in any way. Many people in the information and communications technology for development (ICT4D) community are focused on security challenges related to technology: phones that can be remotely wiped, devices that help you avoid government detection, and so on. These are hard engineering problems and deserve attention from computer scientists right now.
At the same time, there are many use cases where people are implementing these projects in contexts that aren’t politically or socially repressive, where they aren’t necessarily under surveillance or participating in anti-government protests. They need guidance on how to implement their projects safely, guidance on how to use today’s tools right now.
During the discussion I focused on how to think about data integrity during program design, training, and implementation. A few key themes from the talk:
Design for openness: begin the design process with the default position of open. Taking this approach will force hard questions about what should be protected, what can be in the public domain, and so on.
Find the right partners: select partners that have a genuine stake in the outcome of your program. An MoU or partnership agreement will help lock up organizations and teams, but at the end of the day you want partners that understand your long term objectives and take the integrity of your data as seriously as you do.
Expose your data: use today’s wide variety of free and opentools to expose and visualize as much data as you can. You’ll spot patterns, uncover vulnerabilities, find mistakes, and catalyze action.
Document everything: define terms, document processes, describe everything from the workflow to the icons. This is critical for the longterm sustainability of the project.
Iterate: don’t stop improving. The best actors in the software development / web development communities relentlessly improve their products. International development should take M&E a step further by importing this mentality and continuously surface and improve their projects.
More below. Audio to be released in the future via FrontlineSMS and Internews.
Today at lunch I read that DC is one of the geekiest cities in the country. Now that I’ve spent a couple months with Development Seed I can’t help but see one of these “top 20 cities” lists (or any other list) and wonder where the data comes from, if it’s open, and what I can do with it. It turns out that the NSF data driving that list is released on their Science and Engineering Indicators: 2010 site. I grabbed the data, ran it through TileMill, and uploaded the map to TileStream Hosting. Now I can see the NSF’s data in a more geographic, visual format that I think is easier to digest.
For the first month of the summer I worked with Plan Benin on their effort to use Ushahidi to collect and visualize reports of violence. Ushahidi is great for crowd-sourcing reports via a variety of channels and offers visualization capabilities for browsing data on the deployment’s website. I thought it would be neat to visualize the VAC Benin data on a custom map that isn’t on the list of supported basemaps in Ushahidi, most of which don’t provide very good local data for Benin. While it’s possible to add map overlays to your Ushahidi deployment, I decided instead to run everything through through MapBox, which provides a suite of tools for creating and hosting custom maps. MapBox comes from the team at Development Seed, where I’m spending the remainder of the summer break.
Using TileMill, MapBox’s open source custom map studio, I created a map that includes only the data relevant to Plan Benin’s activities on this project. In particular, it includes GIS data for Atacora and Couffo, the two “Program Units” where Plan operates. Those are in light blue on the map in the northwest and southwest corners of the country, respectively. I also included labels for the important cities in both Program Units. The red dots indicate the reports of violence and if you mouse over a dot you can see a summary of the incident. If you click on the incident, you see more information. This interactivity is baked right into TileMill. The reports were geolocated by hand using information in the text messages. The map also incorporates the World Bright basemap, which includes country borders, custom labels, population centers (in light yellow/brown tones), and other information.
Though this is really the tip of the iceberg in terms of what TileMill can do — it would also be possible to add multimedia-rich interactivity, use a choropleth scheme to indicate hotspots of violence, cluster reports, etc . — I think it is easy to see how this custom map improves the experience of interacting with data collected through Ushahidi. Highlighting the Program Units draws the eye to the important areas, adding custom map labels solves the problem of local data being absent from the major map providers, and the built-in interactivity means that visitors don’t need to browse to multiple pages (a killer in low-bandwidth environments) to view information on individual reports. Plus the map is super fast!
Finally, TileStream hosting makes it easy to host the map and generates embed code so the map can be widely shared. Take a look at the map below and feel free to click over to the VAC Benin Ushahidi site to see the difference for yourself.
VAC Benin Data Collected via Ushahidi and Visualized via TileMill:
