Cotton Dialogues 2011 - The face-to-face meeting of the Global Organic Cotton Platform

After having supported the 2009 World Congress on Organic Cotton, we've recently collaborated with Helvetas for social reporting the Cotton Dialogues 2011, held in the context of the 2011 Sustainable Textiles Conference in Barcelona.

The meeting served as an opportunity for the Global Organic Cotton Platform to meet face-to-face and help improve the future sustainability of organic cotton production and trade through dynamic discussion. Three 'roundtable discussions' took place during the day, addressing the key topics: shaping the future of non-GM seed supply; Developing guidelines for responsible business practice and trade; Supporting sustainable growth.

Each session, featuring world experts from a diverse background and different sectors, saw a rich dialogue and constructive ideas to move from discussion to action.

We supported the event through blipping most of the event speakers and facilitators. After each session we shot short, unscripted video interviews capturing first hand ideas and comments from participants. We edited the clips on the spot and shared them with the broader audience on Blip TV and through Twitter. Ultimately the final product is also shared online with the organic cotton community members by archiving it in the platform library.

The following content is available:

• [Video] Introducing the Cotton Dialogues 2011
• [Video] Increasing support for non-GM seeds
• [Video] Building a new programme for production and distribution of non-GM cotton seeds
• [Video] How and why to train cotton farmers to breed their own
• [Video] Shaping the future of non-GM seed supply
• [Video] Developing guidelines for responsible business practice and trade
• [Video] Building long term relationships between brands and cotton producers
• [Video] De-commoditization of organic and fair trade cotton
• [Video]Supporting sustainable growth through collaboration in the organic cotton value chain
• [Video]Value and future prospects for organic cotton production

World Congress on Organic Cotton

The World Congress on Organic Cotton kicked off in Interlaken, Switzerland today.
Euforic is attending the event and working with our member Helvetas to support social reporting the congress. We organized a training session for social reporters that will be blogging, blipping and tweeting during the conference.

People interested in the topic who do not have the chance to participate, can still follow the congress in a variety of ways:

• the Organic Cotton blog - http://ocplatform.wordpress.com/ - will capture the conversation and ideas that are being discussed at the congress. People can visit it, or subscribe to the event feed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/wcoc09
  
  
• on the blog, people can also find a series of 'blips' - see them all at http://helvetas.blip.tv/
  
  
• @helvetas on twitter will be used to post links and quotes from the different session
  
  
• pictures will be posted on on flickr

We invite social bookmarkers who are interested in the topic to use the congress tag wcoc09 [#wcoc09 for twitter] if they want to share their views using the same web spaces.