A recent incident of mistreatment of cattle at a slaughterhouse illustrates, I think, an opportunity to use a strategy of webcams, information transparency, and public participation (i.e. crowdsourcing) to improve slaughterhouse practices.

On January 30th the Humane Society released undercover video content of "downer" dairy cows - too sick or injured to be able to walk - being mistreated to get them onto their feet and into the Hallmark Meat Packing Co (Chino, CA) slaughterhouse. "Downer" cattle are at increased risk for bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow disease") and other foodborne pathogens, and so the USDA regulations prevent the slaughter for human consumption of crippled cows.

The Humane Society video shows sickening treatment (cattle prods, forklifts, water hoses) of obviously injured or unhealthy animals. The video led to the "voluntary" recall of 143 million pounds of raw and frozen beef products by Hallmark. More on the outcome of the investigation on the HSUS blog.

USDA's Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) does have inspectors and veterinarians who work on site at slaughterhouses to inspect and enforce the regulations, but in this case the video was captured by an undercover Humane Society investigator .

I think some low-cost internet technology could really change the regulatory regime for slaughterhouses. I suggest that live webcams be used to show a video feed on the web of the walkway which cattle use to enter the slaughterhouse. I think this could work with slaughterhouses because:
-there are finite number of known facilities, and USDA already has inspectors at these facilities permanently (or often) and so ensuring that the webcams are in place and working would be simple.
-visual inspection is valuable in identifying if cattle are sufficiently healthy. This is a key tool that on-the-ground inspectors reply upon.
-"noncompliance" is a major risk - to public health, and to public trust in the safety of the US food supply.

The webcams could provide a live feed to the internet, where the public could observe what is the visual condition of cattle being led into the slaughterhouse. This concept of using webcams was suggested on the food safety BarfBlog (International Foor Safety Network, Kansas State University), which noted that bars are increasingly using webcams to allow potential patrons to check out the scene before heading to a bar(!)

What BarfBlog did not talk about was the power of such a crowdsourcing approach to make possible the participation of a large distributed group of interested people. Slaughterhouse webcams would not replace FSIS on the ground inspection, but could would enable interested citizens to watch for potential problems and "tag" the video to raise issues to USDA. USDA might argue that they'd face a lot of problems with untrained viewers and false positives... but that can be addressed - just set up an online training program and give special "reporting" privileges to people who have gone through that "webcam inspector" training. This would not replace USDA's on the ground inspectors, but supplement their work, and probably change slaughterhouse performance by raising expectations.

A secondary benefit of the process of engaging the public to watch and track these webcams would be to raise public awareness of the food chain - where does our food come from and how, for better or worse(!)

Crowdsourcing inspection of food safety like this is in line with prior work on regulation/business behavior in World Bank research on information disclosure as a regulatory strategy, and work by the Center for Global Development (Forum One client) in using information transparency as a tool to address carbon emission via the Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) web site (and blog).

We're pretty excited about the "Global Development Commons" concept that USAID's Administrator Henrietta Fore is recently promoting (see her video on this below). And an upcoming "Document Freedom Day" I think shows a key potential path to build the GDC with a focus on open standards.

The GDC concept is, in brief, for virtual (and physical) infrastructure to enable efficient sharing/collaboration among various players in global economic development - government and public sector, private sector, academics, etc.

The virtual aspect of it is where I see the most potential - to create a framework which allows multiple global actors to create and share tools and information. USAID writes:

The GDC builds and improves on the existing development information architecture (websites, portals, blogs, chat rooms, conferences, gatherings, etc.) to create a comprehensive network that allows users to search for information, facilitate dialogue, and trade or exchange products and ideas.

USAID is playing an important leadership role here, which is great to see. But USAID seems to envision a strong role for major IT infrastructure, major IT players to create the GDC, as discussed at their November 27th event? We're hoping that the role of these major IT players (Microsoft, Google, Cisco, etc.) is to help provide leadership, and not pieces of infrastructure. We're more convinced that the GDC will succeed with an open-standards approach. An open-standards approach will lead to more robust and innovative efforts than an approach which is specific to certain platforms.

And an interesting example of an open-standards approach is the upcoming "Document Freedom Day" on March 26th. DFD seeks to raise awarness of, and adoption of, the ODF (Open Document Format), as a way to enhance access to and the flow of information across platforms. The siloed nature of online information in the development business (see separate web sites and services of the World Bank, Development Gateway, DfID, USAID, GTZ, ADB, IADB, PAHO....) is a prime example of the problem that ODF can help solve. The ODF site explains:

ODF(OpenDocument Format) an ISO standard created with the aim to provide an open XML-based document file format for office applications to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements. ODF is defined via an open and transparent process at OASIS and has been approved unanimously by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as an international standard in May 2006. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel ODF reuses established standards like HTML, SVG, XSL, SMIL, XLink, XForms, MathML, and Dublin Core.

Another example of valuable sharing and collaboration which will be enabled via open standards is the Grants Fire initiative, which Kurt Voelker blogged about here. From GoogleCode:

GrantsFire is a searchable database for philanthropic grants. It aggregates data from foundation web sites published in the hGrant format (http://hgrant.org/). The code is written using the Perl Catalyst framework.

What do you think? Interested to hear more about how the GDC can get up and going.

More info:

USAID Advisory Committee On Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA) meeting on February 28th which will discuss the GDC

Sun's Simon Phipps blog post on ODF





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Nice article this morning in the Washington Post about a local D.C. startup Razoo which uses social networking to benefit social causes. The article also mentions Kiva and other services which harness networking or individual action for social causes.

This whole realm -- social networking, social media, leveraging individual efforts online, all for social good -- is going to become a huge part of cause-based organizations' online strategy in 2008.

Related - we're hosting one of our Web Executive Seminars on "Social Sites for Social Good" on Thursday February 28th at the National Press Club in DC (8-11 AM). We'll have a great panel of experts and audience discussion around these issues. (Tip - you can already register!)

The Center for Global Development launched yesterday its remarkable new online database that shows how much individual power plants around the world are contributing to the total 10 billion annual tons of CO2 from that sector. The CARMA web site, which we're proud to have worked with CGD's David Wheeler to conceive and develop, allows users for the first time to explore, on an interactive map, where individual power plant sources are, who are their operating companies and how much do *they* contribute in total, how much are emissions by country, and more. Also very remarkable about the service, we think, is that the online data service was built with the intention of being an open source which others can build off of - using the open Application Programming Interface (API). CGD very much wants others to take this data and run with it - layer onto it other kinds of information and services, and the open API is to encourage and enable that.

The service has already been written up in the Washington Post, New York Times, and National Public Radio's Climate Connections


New developments will be noted on the CARMA blog.

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