22nd
Buy It Like You Mean It: Enabling socially responsible spending
How to live life in a socially responsible way without having to give up a modern lifestyle?
Without the means to check the products that you buy at the point of purchase, it’s a near insurmountable task to know if you are buying in a socially responsible way. Every time you purchase goods there is an inevitable information gap between what the goods are, how exactly they where produced, from what, by who & where.
The group behind BuyItLikeYouMeanIt.org (also known as thought & memory) are intent on helping people solve some of these issues. They are a non-profit organization & their technology and content is open source. Currently they are looking for more developers and contributors.
Their mission statement is: “To provide collaborative tools for educational discovery and communication about the real world impact of product supply chains”
To for BuyItLikeYouMeanIt.org to achieve their goal, they will need to provide provide customers with trusted information on how their purchases effect the world. This information will need to be personalized & available at the point of sale. This means that they have to build up a massive wiki style collaborative database with aggregate social responsibility ratings of different products & companies the world over. A massive task for a non profit group such as this.
In order for the end user to get information about a product, the plan is to allow them to send barcodes in the form of a picture or number to the bilumi.org system which will then text back a various ratings. For more in depth info please visit their website or see the video below. I wish them the best of luck with this noble cause.
