Barcode wikipedia
The idea
Create a site for storing user generated information to be stored against a product, identified by its barcode number. People would be able to access the info by entering/scanning the barcode number. The kind of information that would be stored against the product would be things like reviews, manufacturing conditions, news stories about the product/manufacturer, farm subsidies paid to the manufacturer etc. All entered in wiki form by end users.
What social need does it address?
Allow people to make informed choices about what they are buying, allow the pooling of product related info.
What’s new about it?
Linking it to barcode information. Its an idea that has come up before from lots of people, but (I think) has only been possible since the publication of http://directory.gs1.org
Idea submitted by Richard Pope
For my day job I work at moo.com as Lead Interaction Designer. I’m also an active volunteer with mysociety.org and helped build planningalerts.com and groupsnearyou.com
This is a great idea. The quick access to a wide range of information would be really powerful. It simplifies the task of judging a product based on its quality AND the ethics of the company who made it. And the set of data the system would build could also be reversed, allowing you to look at a company instead of a single product and examine how all of its items have performed over time.
The challenge of this project will be to present a report card that makes it quick and easy to view all this complex info on a product.
What a love about this idea most: ordinary folks doing everyday things will stumble upon ideas of more importance. millions of people’s desire to find a good deal on a digital camera suddenly has the potential to profoundly shape business ethics internationally.
Keep me posted as this project develops. I’d love to contribute the design of user-interface and presentation of date. here’s my work: http://theCoup.org
Cracking idea. If you haven’t already seen it take a look at How Stuff is Made for one take on this idea. The difference is that HSIM is restricted to students of the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at NYU. Something that was wide open and wider ranging would be fantastic.
I wrote a very early stage (and somewhat overambitious) proposal for a business plan competition along these lines a year or two back… and am aiming to blog it shortly…
I also came across this: http://consumergadget.net/ on recent travels online.
This from the FairTracing project may also be interesting:
http://web4.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/C.Wallenta/fairtracingblog/?p=223
The idea has clear potential to better inform moral purchasing decisions. I’m wondering if the work myself and others have been doing over at Consumerium might be useful. The plan was to have a handheld device, probably a mobile phone, that scans the barcode of a product and provides information about the environmental costs, humanitarian costs and other morally-relevant information about the product.
If we are going to make this at SI Camp, I think it would be good to do it using java for mobile phones. This way people will have the information when they actually need it: in the shops.
A similar idea was developed by students on the Royal College of Art Computer-Related Design programme five or more years ago, with a specific ‘ethical’ agenda. I am not sure where it went, as it was only a degree show project, but the course administrator could update you. There are also practical functions such a model could support: linking the product user to the only product manual; linking them to online information about support, including discussions fora; and linking them to places to post feedback about the product and suggestions for new features.
Great idea.
You might want to contact this lot and see if you can get some of the data to start things off
http://www.seecompanies.com
http://www.ethical-company-organisation.org/
http://www.alonovo.com/
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/
Great project, good luck!
The most awesome thing would be to take a photo of the barcode with your camera phone, this then converts it to the barcode number, and that then downloads the info.
Couple of links may be of use to you guys…
http://www.semacode.com – creates new style 2D barcodes which also link to a URL. Being used a lot on US and Japanese advertising.
http://www.mperfect.net/barCode/ – one guys attempt at creating a barcode reader. It is a bit old, so hopefully camera phone tech has improved since…
I look forward to seeing the end result!
This is a fantastic idea. Three areas in particular spring to mind as useful environmental information to include on Barcode Wikipedia:
1) Carbon footprint of the product. We already have carbon labelling on the way – see http://www.bsi-global.com/en/Standards-and-Publications/How-we-can-help-you/Professional-Standards-Service/PAS-2050/ and http://www.carbon-label.co.uk/. But there are only a few carbon labels currently on products, and it’ll take a while for more to appear. It also would be very useful to have a tool whereby the consumer could check the carbon labelling claims of companies. The trouble with carbon footprinting on a product level is that it’s very, very complicated. It requires some fairly specialist information and isn’t the sort of thing that many consumers can reasonably input to. But there *are* increasing numbers of academic studies, which Barcode Wikipedia could draw upon to get the raw data. I can gladly help with this.
2) Palm oil. Something like one in ten products on a supermarket shelf now contains palm oil – and hardly anyone realises. And yet palm oil is one of the most destructive of commodities, contributing to massive deforestation in SE Asia, the approaching extinction of the orangutan, illegal land seizures by plantation companies, and the release of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases from draining tropical peat swamps. Several retailers are also planning palm oil labelling – but we can doubtless beat them to it. Unlike carbon labelling, it’s pretty easy to find out whether palm oil is in a product – sometimes it’s listed under the ingredients; othertimes it can be worked out fairly easily (e.g. PalmOlive soap…).
3) Provenance and food miles. Ok, so most fruit and veg now tell you where they’re sourced from, but no packet translates that to food miles. It’s important to note that the sheer distance a product has travelled isn’t the best indicator of its overall climate impacts (e.g. beef from just down the road will still far outweigh green beans from Kenya) but it all adds up. Perhaps the Barcode Wikipedia could include a map to show users where the product’s travelled from and whether it’s been by air or freight.
I should be coming to the SI Camp so look forward to talking about all this there!
A much more obvious piece of information would be PRICE, possibly combined with geodata to figure out where to buy it cheaper nearby. Shoppers can also enter the price that they see in the shop to keep the database updated. That would really drive shoppers to the tool, where they will also learn other information about the product (ethical, nutritional, health risks, etc).
Reading this reminded me of the semapedia project I discovered at What The Hack a few years back. http://www.semapedia.org/ The semapedia project uses barcodes to link people to wikipedia information. Semapedia is really cool:
“In order to scan Semapedia with your mobile phone, Semacode.org and Gavitec AG provide their respective Reader softwares for your use. Since mobile clients require mobile versions of websites, we are happy to be using Sevenval’s ingeniously usable mobile Wikipedia to redirect client requests to.”
I like the idea of gathering ethical consumer type information. Could this project replicate the semapedia model giving mobile access to ethical consumer product information?
It’s definitely worth checking out Bruce Sterling’s work on Spimes – I think there are some really obvious crossovers here.
Presentation here: http://www.toshare.it/spime/
I’m going to try my hardest to get down to the SIC – hope to see you there!
http://wikinear.com/ – combining wikipedia and Yahoo Fire Eagle (“secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy”).
In an age of spimes — products with websites and bar codes — we can and will make the right decisions about what to purchase and produce.
—Susan Salter Reynolds, “When worlds collide,” Los Angeles Times, January 29, 2006
Spimes are actually gps enabled devices able to communicate, including sensors. But, it is a nice quote nevertheless.
For more inspiration, see cuejack, … ” the CueJack software helps consumers learn about boycotts, safety recalls and questionable corporate practices. The CueJack software gathers information from all kinds of sources, including news stories, pressure groups, consumer activists and disgruntled individuals.”
http://rtmark.com/presscue.html
A great idea – combines the best parts of Internet shopping and high-street shopping. I’m very interested in helping out – I’ve only just come across this site but hope to be along for the weekend.
I’m aware that the Japanese are ahead of us in this game: they use QRCodes – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code – which are embedded URLs that can be read by camera phones. They’re common on billboards etc. A company called Denso Wave has the patent but chooses not to exercise it.
Indeed it is a great idea. Is it different from http://en.barcodepedia.com/ ?
When the iphone comes out, we have an idea to use iphone’s camera take a scan on books’ isbn barcode, and redirect user to amazon.com to get that book reviews, however some limitations on iphone sdk, we have to give up that idea….. Hope next version of iphone sdk will provide more feature on camera.
We are providing barcode for asp .net, barcode for java library to generate barcode images in .net and java projects and also provide barcode reading library.
I’m glad there’s still interest in this idea. I finally got around to editing and uploading the video of our final presentation. I’ve posted it, and a bunch of links to other things related to this project on my blog: http://jonathanmelhuish.com/2009/02/barcode-wikipedia/
You may also be interested in the wikichains website (www.wikichains.com). The project uses the mediawiki framwork to allow for the peer production of information about any node on any commodity chain: the ultimate goal being to encourage ethical and informed consumption.
We are several students in Belgium doing our Master thesis on a similar project.
Currently team members consist of: two business engineer students, one computer science student, one computer engineer and one nutritionist.
contact: jisibt@gmail.com
Hi there, we’re working on a very similar project at the moment called blinked.in – https://blinked.in – at the moment we’re building up the basics in terms of data structures and collation – simple stuff at the moment really. I’ve found a lot of the ideas on here thought provoking, inclusion of details such as CO2 footprint, conditions of production, etc weren’t something I’d thought to include.
However… I think they’ll be making an appearance some time in the future.
Regards
Daniel Gray