Scrambling Eggs

Welcome to the final in a series of three posts looking at how Lantana can explicitly and implicitly share some of the information Shelagh gathered while researching and setting up the cafe. Otherwise known as the CafeCommons initiative.

Since starting this short series I* have come across GreenXchange; a similar initiative from Nike and Best Buy. GreenXchange is, at this stage, an intention from these companies to release into the public domain data, documents and practices that can help companies operate more sustainably. They are making them available to the world to use by releasing them under a ScienceCommons license (a derivation of the very interesting CreativeCommons).

While cynics may view Nike’s involvement as a self interested PR exercise, as with XBRL that I mentioned in post one, I think GreenXchange is a harbinger of the move towards transparency that the recent financial fiasco and the ongoing environmental debacle is going to force organizations to embrace.

The last post was an example of explicit sharing; we asked Shelagh a series of questions on the issue of food sourcing with the benefit being that the answers to the same three questions could be compared across a number of interview subjects. In this post we introduce you to the Lantana Online database of useful web sites, or our Delicious bookmarks.

(Note to the uninitiated: Delicious is a social bookmarking service. The bookmarking bit: you can bookmark sites that are of interest to you and tag them with your own usefully descriptive words that will help you to find them later. The social bit: these bookmarks can be searched by every Delicious user and users can subscribe to each others’ bookmark collections. There are a few other social elements to the service but go and try it to get the real deal on it.

So please take a look and if you like what you see, join our network.

The author's Delicious bookmarks can be found here.

*Leo Ryan works as a digital planner, helping businesses to optimise their use of social media technologies. He is also known as big red vis a vis me, little red.

Shelagh has asked me* to write a guest blog on something that interests me and that will be of interest to you, her readers. So I'm going to attempt a small experiment to do with explicit and implicit data. No wait...bear with me; food data.

In the wake of all of the financial and environment shenanigans of the recent past we have seen the development of a number of innovations in information transparency. I'm particularly interested in the development of XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) which essentially allows for the easy extraction of vital financial information from enormous and dense financial documents by 'tagging' key pieces of data. If you're still awake and interested in reading more; there's a very tidy overview here.

If the XBRL tags were applied universally to all financial documents, say all SEC filings, then anyone would be able to search across all of the annual reports of every listed company for a specific piece of information. So the process of tracking down quite detailed and specific information from thousands of companies buried deep inside complex documents becomes as simple as using Google search.

To think about the potential of this initiative just imagine that Parliamentarians' expenses were all released in a tagged and easily searchable format. In seconds any member of the public could see what was claimed for in any category: search: "Moat". Or more usefully :"Maintenance"

But that's looking at ways of making available information that perhaps the owners are reluctant to share. What about the reverse; when we have information that we think is useful, important and that we actively want to share? What kinds of ways can we use systems such as tagging to make our information more available?

And so my experiment.

Watching Shelagh develop the idea and the reality of Lantana it is obvious that she has done a lot of research. And in particular she has done lots of research around the area of good food: ethically and sustainably produced, organic and locally sourced, fair trade, delicious food. Quite a quagmire to navigate and perhaps one that, now she has invested her time, she can help others to understand.

So in the interests of promoting good food we're going to make that research available in two formats.

1. Explicit: I'm going to ask her for her top 3 things she's learnt about sourcing 'good' food for a small independent cafe, in the hope that the information will be of use to others attempting the same. We'll just put these in a blog post here. But the clever thing we're going to do here is to start a regular format, sort like the Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire. So next time we interview someone form the world of good food for Scrambling Eggs we can use the same format and then start to compare and contrast the answers. Fun, no?

2. Implicit: we're going to share the Lanatana del.icio.us page for useful links. These can be found here.

For those of you who haven't used Delicious its simply an online bookmarking service, but at its most rich and useful, its a directory of what people find interesting (online). The user saves a page they want to retrieve later (yes I know that's bookmarking) but the user can also add a series of tags to make it easier to find the page and to group it with other pages that are similar in some way. Because your bookmarks can be made public, Delicious can show you not just the pages that you have saved and tagged as 'recipes', 'cajun', shrimp', but also all of the other pages that other users have saved with these same tags.

To be continued...

*Leo Ryan works as a digital planner, helping businesses to optimise their use of social media technologies. He is also my big brother.

The other night I had a dream that two uniformed policemen came to the café to question me about my blag. "Do you mean my blog", I asked? "No, it’s your blag we are interested in. We’ve heard from various sources that you’re a blagger".

I kept insisting that I have been blogging, not blagging, but they wouldn’t believe me and as they threatened to close down the café I awoke in a sweat. True story. What is my subconscious trying to tell me?

This week there is to be no blagging, barely any blogging, just a bit of baking: a less offensive use of hot air.

Orange and Cranberry Torte (serves 10)
From the December 2008 issue of delicious. (Thanks for the magazine freebies and this damn fine recipe which is definitely going to become part of my repetoire).

350g ground almonds
350g castor sugar
3 teaspoons cinnamon
3 teaspoons baking powder
8 large free range eggs lightly beaten
400ml sunflower oil
Finely grated zest of 1 lemon and 2 oranges
200g dried cranberries
3 cloves

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C

In a bowl, combine ground almonds, 300g of castor sugar, 2 teaspoons of cinnamon and the baking powder. Make a well in the centre and add the eggs and oil. Mix together then add the dried cranberries and zest. Combine.

Pour into greased and lined springform cake tin and bake for 50 minutes to an hour- until skewer comes out clean.

Meanwhile gently heat the citrus juices in a pan with the remaining 50g sugar, cloves and remaining cinnamon until sugar dissolves. Increase heat an simmer for 3 minutes.
Remove cake from oven an pierce a few times with a skewer. Drizzle cake with the syrup and leave for an hour to soak in. Transfer cake to wire rack and decorate with extra cranberries.