Fair trade Software Development

Although a joke, as is often the case there is a kernel of truth in this: Stephane’s thoughts corner… : Fair trade Software Development.

Comments

[Chris Johnson]

Hi,

I just found your blog and thought I would comment since the subject is pretty close to my work. In fact, it is what we at ifPeople have been working on developing for the last three years. We started our business in Argentina at the height of economic collapse and used FairSource (http://www.ifpeople.net/fairsource) as a way to promote entrepreneurship and sustainable livelihoods. We create an integrated team with our partners (microenterprises around South America's Southern Cone) to provide custom web software, dynamic web sites, intranets, knowledge management, maps and directories. It has been a really interesting experience and in fact we are growing the company and our network of partners (though at this time it is not big enough to support a third-party verifying body). We are currently seeking more microenterprises to provide the open source programming services as part of our projects, so pass the word on :)

We have published a couple papers and spoken a bunch lately on it. Check out the link to see the papers (speaking next at the Green Festival in DC, Oct 14-15, http://www.ifpeople.net/community/news/20060724_gfdc ).

Cheers,
Chris
--
Cofounder
ifPeople - Innovation for People
www.ifpeople.net

[DaveW]

Chris,

Sounds encouraging, all the best in your efforts.

[bummerhan]

ourselves is like a microenterprise over here in SE asia, we aim to develop web software that can be knowledgebases and mashedups

using open source software components really makes all this possible