More Than Living

Ethical shopping goes mobile with Buy It Like You Mean It

Eth­ical shop­ping goes mobile with Buy It Like You Mean It a ser­vice that plans to “change the world, one pur­chase at a time”.

You’re in the super­mar­ket. In front of you, a hun­dred dif­fer­ent kinds of honey. Some are Fair Trade, some organic. A few are in the eco­nomy range, others would blow your year’s honey budget in one orgi­astic, Winnie-​​the-​​Pooh moment. There are squeezy plastic bottles, and glass ones, maybe ones with free toys attached. Ones made in the UK, and ones made in Guatem­ala, Thai­l­and and Tas­mania. The choice is yours. And it’s mind-​​boggling.

Now con­sider another common shop­ping exper­i­ence: shop online for a book and the choice is more stag­ger­ing still, with hun­dreds of resellers and lit­er­ally mil­lions of titles on offer. But our decisions are, increas­ingly, guided by the exper­i­ence of others. On Amazon, many of us will be influ­enced by the star rating, built up by dozens or even hun­dreds of others who have read the book in ques­tion, and by the often pas­sion­ate reader reviews fur­ther down the page.

OK, so shop­ping for honey and shop­ping for books are dif­fer­ent types of shop­ping, but what if you could access the com­bined wisdom of other shop­pers while brows­ing the super­mar­ket shelves? That’s one of the goals of Buy It Like You Mean It, a pro­ject based in Mas­sachu­setts that wants to make a global impact on our shop­ping habits.

The scheme (BILUMI for short) is build­ing a data­base of reviews and user rat­ings that score the way that com­pan­ies make and sell their products. They’ve star­ted with chocol­ate – and have so far accu­mu­lated 160 reviews and twice the number of ratings.

By the end of the summer, they aim to have 200 reviews and 1,000 rat­ings – and then the clever bit kicks in. Once you’ve signed up to their ser­vice, you should be able to take a pic­ture of a bar­code on a chocol­ate bar or input the num­bers into a text mes­sage, and send it to BILUMI, which will respond with an ‘eth­ical score’ for that company.

The score is designed to be respons­ive to your par­tic­u­lar con­cerns. So if your bug­bear is waste, you should see a rating that takes into account the company’s record on recyc­ling. Products might also be rated on their maker’s employ­ment prac­tices, supply chains, treat­ment of anim­als and so on.

There’s more about how the pro­ject works in this ‘infomercial’.

The project’s pres­id­ent and founder is Clay Ward. We asked him more about his ambi­tions for the scheme – and how he plans to make sure it doesn’t fizzle out before it gets really useful.

Where are the chocol­ate rat­ings cur­rently relevant?

Cocoa and chocol­ate are pro­duced in many dif­fer­ent coun­tries and sold all over the place. So we are begin­ning a pro­cess with inter­na­tional implic­a­tions. On the other hand, most socially respons­ible inform­a­tion ser­vices rely on staffers to input inform­a­tion. With lim­ited time, they only review large mul­tina­tional cor­por­a­tions. By cre­at­ing an open system for user-​​generated con­tent we’re open­ing the door to people report­ing on the socially respons­ible impact of local busi­nesses as well as mul­tina­tion­als. We hope that this will help the envir­on­mental, com­munity, and socially respons­ible aspects of locally-​​based busi­nesses be com­pared with those of larger industry.

How com­pre­hens­ive and stream­lined do you think the pro­cess of check­ing bar­codes in-​​store will have to be before it’s prac­tical for the aver­age ethically-​​minded consumer?

Actu­ally, I don’t ima­gine that people will use our ser­vice to check the socially respons­ible score of every product in their shop­ping cart. Instead I ima­gine people occa­sion­ally using our ser­vice to inform their brand loy­al­ties when they have a ques­tion or a con­cern that they want answered. But even for casual use, it’s incred­ibly import­ant to bring all of the inform­a­tion together using one system and to make the pro­cess easy to use. People simply don’t have the time to check a dozen dif­fer­ent kinds of rating guides. So we hope to bring everything together in one con­veni­ent point of access.

By the end of the summer people will be able to use our ser­vice to send text mes­sages with the bar code number of any chocol­ate product to our ser­vice. They’ll get back inform­a­tion about a wide vari­ety of socially respons­ible interests. We think that that’s a good first step.

You have set tar­gets of 200 reviews and 1,000 rat­ings for chocol­ate by the end of August. What are your tar­gets for growth beyond that?

Yup. We’re start­ing with chocol­ate as our review focus. So our goal is to have 200 reviews and 1,000 rat­ings about chocol­ate by August so that we can have a solid body of know­ledge to offer before we move to our next focus.

Your read­ers can go to our web­site and add their own per­spect­ive to help us achieve our goal! They can also vote on what we should research next.

There have been some prom­ising web-​​based power-​​to-​​the-​​consumer ideas over recent years that haven’t taken off. How are you going to make sure BILUMI isn’t one of them?

We’ve learned from some of the hard les­sons of other sim­ilar services.

–We are doing more than build­ing a tech­no­lo­gical solu­tion to this

prob­lem: adopt­ing this idea will be as much about person to person organ­iz­ing as technology.

–We’re a non-​​profit, volunteer-​​based organ­iz­a­tion. The enthu­si­asm and sup­port that we’ve received is over­whelm­ing. The only sub­stan­tial fund­ing we’ve received has been from indi­vidual con­trib­ut­ors. So we run a tight ship and have shown how much we can accom­plish with so little. In short, we’re a very low risk ven­ture. Once we’ve secured sub­stan­tial fund­ing we’ll be able to bring this pro­ject into main­stream usage. But even then we don’t want to rely on found­a­tion sup­port for too long. We’re invest­ig­at­ing half a dozen poten­tial fund­ing streams so that we will be self suf­fi­cient in the long run.

–We’re open source and open con­tent. That’s more than just a way to attract tal­en­ted developers to help us (but please do help us!). It also means that even if we get sued by some liti­gi­ous cor­por­a­tion and are forced to dis­solve, our tech­no­logy and data will still be avail­able for the next organ­iz­a­tion to pick up where we left off!

–We have cre­ated a model that reflects the actual struc­ture of the cor­por­ate supply chain. Too many respons­ible shop­ping tools rely on a model of con­veni­ence that doesn’t really give com­pan­ies the chance to demon­strate and be rewar­ded for incre­mental change.

–We’re open to col­lab­or­a­tion in a very real way. We’re already provid­ing our tech­no­logy to the MIT Media Lab’s Com­put­ing Cul­ture Group so that they can build a ser­vice to help ranch­ers com­mu­nic­ate about the effects of gas frac­ture mining in Colorado.

–We’re not going any­where. We are determ­ined to stick with this pro­ject and to update its tech­no­logy in response to the con­cerns of our users.

Anyone trying this else­where in the world?

I have a spread­sheet of 60 dif­fer­ent sim­ilar pro­jects that have come and gone, are in use, or are just being developed. No one else is aspir­ing to giving users the abil­ity to access cus­tom­ized inform­a­tion about a product’s supply chain in just a couple of seconds. So I think that we’re ahead of the curve. But I hope that we can part­ner with as many sim­ilar ser­vices as pos­sible since shar­ing inform­a­tion is the name of the game.

If someone wanted to do this in the UK, could they use the tech­no­logy you’ve developed?

Abso­lutely, our license will allow them to use our tech­no­logy so long as their improve­ments are also freely avail­able. We’ve already offered our ser­vices to eth​is​core​.org to give their read­ers the abil­ity to add to the con­tent provided by their pro­fes­sional research staff. So per­haps you’ll hear more about that soon.

But there’s no need to rein­vent the wheel: there are already UK based chocol­ate com­pan­ies that need review­ing and rating on our cur­rent site! Your read­ers can go online right now and add their own per­spect­ive by rating reviews of those com­pan­ies or using our research guide to add their own reviews.

If Google said they’d like to take on the idea tomor­row and roll it out on a global scale, would you think ‘Job done!’?

No way. There’s too much at stake to assume that a for-​​profit organ­iz­a­tion (no matter how help­ful and power­ful) could get this right on their own. But we’d be really happy to get that phone call and would work with them certainly.

http://​www​.Buy​ItLikeY​ou​MeanIt​.org

IMAGES by Flickr users

Chiara Marra and jim snapper

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​06-​​19 19:05:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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