Market and price decision enhancement services for farmers in Uganda

Door kleinere winstmarges en steeds grotere beperkingen op markten en productprijzen is besluitvorming in de agrarische sector in ontwikkelingslanden niet alleen belangrijker maar ook uitdagender geworden. Het doel van dit onderzoek is “het ontwikkelen, implementeren en evalueren van een decision enhancement studio op het gebied van markten en prijzen voor boeren in Oeganda”. De belangrijkste onderzoeksvraag luidt: “hoe kunnen Oegandese boeren hun besluitvorming aangaande markten en prijzen verbeteren?” Op basis van verkennend veldonderzoek en literatuurstudies is een artefact ontwikkeld in de vorm van een Farmers’ Decision Enhancement Studio (FDES), die bestaat uit een Market Identification Suite, a Price Determination Suite en een Communication Suite. De studio met bijbehorende services is geprototyped en geïmplementeerd in de Oegandese districten Gulu en Soroti. De implementatie vond voornamelijk plaats aan de hand van open source tools en van de beschikbare middelen en capaciteiten van de boeren. Er werd een open source sms gateway gebruikt om de studioprestaties te verifiëren en te testen. De resultaten laten zien dat de boeren die voor uitdagingen op het gebied van markt- en prijsbesluiten staan, baat hebben bij de studio

Ensuring Economic Viability and Sustainability of Coffee Production

Coffee, the world’s favorite beverage, provides livelihoods for at least 60 million people across dozens of countries. Yet this beloved drink is experiencing a sustainability crisis. A sustained decline in world coffee prices has squeezed coffee producers, and thrown a tremendous number of producers below the global extreme poverty line. This report presents our research into sustainability within the coffee sector, including the results of our analytical and empirical modeling, and provides several recommendations

Urban food strategies in Central and Eastern Europe: what's specific and what's at stake?

Integrating a larger set of instruments into Rural Development Programmes implied an increasing focus on monitoring and evaluation. Against the highly diversified experience with regard to implementation of policy instruments the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework has been set up by the EU Commission as a strategic and streamlined method of evaluating programmes’ impacts. Its indicator-based approach mainly reflects the concept of a linear, measure-based intervention logic that falls short of the true nature of RDP operation and impact capacity on rural changes. Besides the different phases of the policy process, i.e. policy design, delivery and evaluation, the regional context with its specific set of challenges and opportunities seems critical to the understanding and improvement of programme performance. In particular the role of local actors can hardly be grasped by quantitative indicators alone, but has to be addressed by assessing processes of social innovation. This shift in the evaluation focus underpins the need to take account of regional implementation specificities and processes of social innovation as decisive elements for programme performance.

Ensuring Economic Viability & Sustainability of Coffee Production

For this report, we developed a new economic model of supply and demand in the coffee sector, which forms the core of our quantitative analysis. The model simulates a global price equilibrium between 136 consuming countries and the farming decisions in 3024 coffee-growing regions. Our report is also grounded in extensive desk research and at least 72 interviews with 86 people, representing producers, small and large companies, civil society organizations and multi-stakeholder platforms, research institutions and academics, and others. It has also been strengthened by feedback we have received through other channels, including via email and particularly in response to public presentations at events organized by the ICO and the European Coffee Federation in June 2019 and by the World Coffee Producers Forum in July 2019

Interrogating Datafication

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices

THE VARIETIES OF USER EXPERIENCE BRIDGING EMBODIED METHODOLOGIES FROM SOMATICS AND PERFORMANCE TO HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

Embodied Interaction continues to gain significance within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Its growing recognition and value is evidenced in part by a remarkable increase in systems design and publication focusing on various aspects of Embodiment. The enduring need to interact through experience has spawned a variety of interdisciplinary bridging strategies in the hope of gaining deeper understanding of human experience. Along with phenomenology, cognitive science, psychology and the arts, recent interdisciplinary contributions to HCI include the knowledge-rich domains of Somatics and Performance that carry long-standing traditions of embodied practice. The common ground between HCI and the fields of Somatics and Performance is based on the need to understand and model human experience. Yet, Somatics and Performance differ from normative HCI in their epistemological frameworks of embodiment. This is particularly evident in their histories of knowledge construction and representation. The contributions of Somatics and Performance to the history of embodiment are not yet fully understood within HCI. Differing epistemologies and their resulting approaches to experience identify an under-theorized area of research and an opportunity to develop a richer knowledge and practice base. This is examined by comparing theories and practices of embodied experience between HCI and Somatics (Performance) and analyzing influences, values and assumptions underlying epistemological frameworks. The analysis results in a set of design strategies based in embodied practices within Somatics and Performance. The subsequent application of these strategies is examined through a series of interactive art installations that employ embodied interaction as a central expression of technology. Case Studies provide evidence in the form of rigorously documented design processes that illustrate these strategies. This research exemplifies 'Research through Art' applied in the context of experience design for tangible, wearable and social interaction

Interrogating Datafication: Towards a Praxeology of Data

What constitutes a data practice and how do contemporary digital media technologies reconfigure our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures, and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in and by data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? The volume collects theoretical, empirical, and historiographical contributions from a range of international scholars to shed light on the current shift from media to data practices