Yesterday afternoon, I visited the Portobello Road Progreso coffee bar, which is located at no. 156, on the corner of Elgin Crescent [location map here]. I was hoping to find Progreso’s General Manager there (Guido Gessaroli, the branch manager at Thomas Neale’s in Covent Garden had said I would), and sure enough, Lewin Chalkley (pictured left with an exquisitely-decorated cappuccino that he made) was there behind the counter.

Lewin and I sat down to chat over a coffee (my latte was really very good, as was the almond biscotti I ate with it—mmm). He told me a bit about the history of Progreso and the people involved in setting it up—apparently Colin Firth helped to fund the Portobello Road branch. I explained my vision of online social networks for social enterprises such as Progreso that recapitulated on a social level their mission of sharing their economic value with all their participants. This would allow all the enterprise’s stakeholder (from coffee grower to bar staff, in Progreso’s case) to tell their own stories in their own space, and yet also to share those stories with each other and with the enterprise’s customers within an integrated online community structure. Not so unlike our own Metblogs, then, but rooted in the specific communities of people that participate in the social enterprise.

Lewin showed me his photos of those people: hordes of bright-eyed kids crowded avidly around a portable DVD player (showing Shrek, apparently!); a coffee grower in the field, showing a freshly-picked coffee bean; shop staff partying wildly; visitors to the Portobello Road bar from Africa. What an amazing variety of humanity! We got talking about how images (and indeed music) transcend barriers of language, and how they could be a currency of interaction within a notional Progreso network. Lewin told me his idea of having customers send photos from their mobile phones and then printing them out to display in the shop. I feel there are so many great opportunities here, and creativity is really the limit! I do hope that Lewin’s very positive response will be shared by his senior colleagues, as I would love to get involved to help make this stuff happen.

I’m sure this kind of project would also be of interest to Global Voices, a Harvard-based initiative that seeks to facilitate access for people in the developing world to online social publishing tools.

And to complete my cafe review… there is table football in the basement and books under the seats (proceeds to Oxfam in both cases), a community noticeboard, and works by young artists are dotted around the walls. Oh, and someone living nearby has left their wi-fi signal unencrypted, seemingly. ; )

Topics: fairtrade progreso community blogs