On the simple user level people will use the site to search for products from their shopping lists, and companies they are interested in or recognize as the manufacturers of the said products. By submitting querries on certain products and companies, users will give us an indication of where research is needed, and become integrated into a community as they receive prompt feedback and see the new information incorporated into the database. On the research level we will welcome submission of new data as it comes along - news items, financial info from less accessible local sources (other than the SEC and other government sources that make financial data public), and anything else that might prove helpful. The two categories of information on the BMP site are articles of critical nature with a business element, and financial affiliation networks.

People will interact with a browsable world map displaying the locations of factories making university apparel. The map will also be browsable by entities in the supply chain, which will become visible by mousing a factory icon. Such entities are: the factory, its city, its country, its region, the retailers contracting it, the universities licencing those retailers, and the date the information was submitted. The map will also indicate labor conditions in a given country. A feature will be built that shows the changes over time in the number of factories for a given geographic area. This is extremely important as it would illustrate the race to the bottom.The data will come from: the WRC's Factory Disclosure Database and its Historical Search. They are organized and searchable by the entities in a given supply chain and the dates licenced retailers listed their factories. the International Labor Confederation and the International Trade Union Confederation. Both have good annual reports on labor conditions in many countries.

For each company that is in the KnowMore directory, there is an overview of the concerns KnowMore users have found that are relevant to that company. These broad concerns are broken down into Worker's Rights, Human Rights, Political Influence, Environmental Issues, and Business Ethics. Our extension alerts people to the corresponding concerns when they visit company websites.   We also integrated our ratings into Google -- and have plans to integrate with other search engines. When these concern overviews and ratings are presented, users can click through and visit the full KnowMore profile for that company. Once there, they can read the entire corporate profile, discuss the page, edit it, and even add to it. KnowMore is powered by the same open-source software as Wikipedia.

A surprising amount of information can be found on brands and their manufacturers by searching Wikipedia. What this project will do is to index as much of this information as possible within a particular environment – the supermarket – so that this process can be make automatable, and eventually mobile. I envision a future where shoppers can put store-bought items under the scrutiny of collective knowledge, and put their true social and environmental aesthetics in full view.

Information sources such as the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database (see, even the names are inaccessible) are excellent sources of raw data, but because they are created by government departments they often do not do much to contextualize the data they collect.  Traditionally making sense of this information has been the territory of investigative journalists, academics, computer scientists and other "experts." Though the NetSquared Mashup Challenge, CorpWatch hopes to build an application that will provide context to the vast amount of information available and make it open and accessible to everyone.