Thursday, April 17, 2008

Transparentization and Freebase

I recently realized that ethical information is pretty much nothing more than making value chains transparent. Karl Tuhkanen and I were thinking of a term describing this and came up with the word transparentization. I got so excited with the word, that I went and registered domains for it! I also found a nice slogan: Globalization 2.0 is Transparentization.

In the perfect world we can track every product back to their components, to fields, mines and factories. In the real world this is not even closely possible, since the manufacturers themselves may not know the origins of their raw materials or even labour. We can go around this problem by adding propabilities to value chains. Thanks to Kalle Määttä for the genious idea. I remember reading that 75% of all cocoa production happens in West-Africa and that it is not rare there to see child labour, even child slaves. If a chocolate manufacturer doesn't know or doesn't want to tell where their cocoa comes from, it comes from West-Africa with a 75% likelyhood and possibly made by children. Propablities can be expressed using percentages, or what I like more, using unambiguous words. "May contain small traces of nuts" goes ethical: "may contain small traces of child labour".

The problem with this is the execution. Creating a data model that supports every possible link in the world of value chains is hard. It is even harder to communicate the idea to users through an understandable user interface. And finally, it is almost rocket science to make all information editable by the users themselves, keeping track of changes, managing administrative rights and keep the user inferface usable.

Luckily, yesterday I found Freebase. It a database, very much similar to what I have been thinking for Consumer Gadget. Freebase is a semantic database containing similar knowledge to Wikipedia, but that is computer readable. This makes Freebase poor compared to very nicely formatted Wikipedia articles, but powerful to applications that want to filter the information. I hope Freebase has a bright future, because my thought of Transparentization and Freebase can work well together. Let's see how the discussions with their developers go. I hope the word "ethical" doesn't scare them.

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

About the next version of Consumer Gadget

A couple of words of what I have been thinking about for the past month or two.

Ethical information is rarely about products. Instead it is about factories, materials, company policies, countries or other geographical areas. It is important for Consumer Gadget to know these "abstract elements" behind the products, so ethical information experts can focus only on their area of expertise, but still grow the Consumer Gadget database.

This sounds simple, but requires that we explain the structure of our world in a language that computers understand. Computers make the connections from barcodes to the abstrat elements, which trigger the actual ethical information. In contrast, Wikipedia is a huge database of interlinked information that is only readable by humans. It propably contains all neccessary information for any ethical shopper, but it does not help Consumer Gadget at all. We need to be able to automatically generate an ethical report, tailored for mobile screens.

Semantics is the important word here. I am at the moment designing a system that can handle multiple levels of computer understandable ontologies. The problem is, that the ontologies must be also human readable, because they are updated by the public, who don't have a degree in information science. What is the best format for both computer and human readable information? I believe the answer is "tags". Every product is a tag, every factory is a tag. If you tag a product tag with a factory tag, it creates a computer understandable connection between a product and a factory, meaning that the product is manufactured in the factory.

Now the biggest problem is the user interface. Tags are easy UI-wise, but because of the semantic meaning between the tags, the freedom of tagging whatever with whatever must be removed. Also, how do we educate the users to see everything as tags, not only concrete products and companies, but abstractions like "manufactured in unknown Nokia factory".

Global Democracy and Emotions

Today I was looking for buzzwords describing this project. I came up with Global Democracy, had a laugh and a coffee break.

Global democracy, what is that? Global common understanding is propably impossible to achieve, but globalization does make issues global. Global markets, global consumers... can global consumer intelligence help in global democracy?

Too complex to understand. Does not compute. Still, there is something in it, I am sure about it.

I also started wondering what is the role of lawmakers and what is the role of consumers? The difference in my opinion is facts and intuition. Decisionmaking based on facts is what politicians do. Consumers can listen to their hearts. Politicians are affected by lobbyist, providing biased information. Consumers are affected by marketing people, providing mental images.

Child labour can be a very complex issue in some regions and all related facts must be laid out before making political decisions. But on the other hand, when we don't have to make decisions, we don't have to see the big picture. I believe consumer gets better view on the subject by closing eyes on some facts: children getting education wins over child labour, no matter what.

Consumers have the opportunity to think with their hearts and it should be embraced. The facts are also out there, but they can be complex. The decisions based on complex facts scatter statistically like decisions based on randomness, watering the idea of consumers having the power. I see that if consumers make decisions based on simple emotions, they will be statistically similar and thus affect the businessess.

The question is, what is too complex fact, and what is a simple emotional issue? And how these thoughts come alive in the next version of Consumer Gadget, I don't know...