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Ethical Consumer AGM and Conference Report

On Friday September 23rd 2011 ECRA held its 2nd annual conference. This year we were lucky enough to be at the Mechanics Institute, Manchester, a building steeped in radical history.

The conference entitled "Collecting Data on Companies and Products - the Potential for Civil Society Co-operation" was a resounding success with attendees enjoying a series of interesting talks and discussions.

The session was opened by two speakers from the NGO sector who discussed their experiences of information gathering and collaboration.
Paul Roeland - Clean Clothes (Netherlands)
Paul's presentation can be downloaded here as a PDF.

Danielle McMullan - (Business HumanRights)
Danielle's presentation can be downloaded here as a powerpoint document (5MB).

After lunch, Ed Mayo from co-operatives UK spoke about the potential for the co-operative business model generally. This was followed by a presentation from Annesley Newholm and Jonathan Melhuish (9 carrots/easyethical UK) on crowd-sourcing websites and ethical rankings.
Annesley and Jonathan's contribution can be viewed as a webpage here.

The final presentation of the day was from Rob Harrison (Ethical Consumer) who addressed the following subjects.

Ethical investment groups - a fully commercial and international model
Ethical Consumer's approach - quasi-commercial data gathering and sale
Ethical Consumer's plans for an Open Database Project.

downloaded here

The afternoon ended with a panel discussion, where the speakers discussed with members from the floor some of the ideas that heard during the day. The Panel (Rob Harrison, Paul Roeland and Annesley Newholm and Jonathan Melhuish) were joined by Luke Upchurch from Consumers' International. He explained some of the challenges that the decline in commercial print publishing were bringing to the wider consumer movement.

We have set up a FORUM on our website called "An Open Database Ranking Companies and Products" to continue this discussion