In the late 90's student activist from around the country stood up to say they will not allow their university's apparel, from team uniforms to collegate sweatshirts, to be made in sweatshops. With victories across the nation many universities now force their apparel licensees, the companies like Nike that make the clothes, to disclose each and every factory university apparel is made in. This was a crucial step that created the independent factory database and monitor, the Workers Rights Consortium, (WRC from here on) which could now visit and inspect factories making apparel, put pressure on retail corporations, and alert student activists of workers struggles that needed support.

Yet, the apparell industry continues its race to the bottom seeking ever lower wages and closing factories at the first sign workers are organizing. These corporations, and the universities who licence them, must be held accountable and respect workers struggling for a better life, not close their factories and move to China, a country where abuses and low wages are the norm.

With much work ahead, a geographic visualization of the university apparel supply chain could be invaluable to activists and independet factory monitors alike. It could show where factories are in the world, which retailers contract those factories and which universities licence those retailers.

The tool could display changes in factory use over time, for which data exists, it would allow activists to educate their community by showing corporate flight from factories where workers have won stronger protections. It could engage people on the need to force universities and retailers to maintain long term contracts with good factories and galvanize actions towards that end.

Students could easily see who makes their clothes and where, allowing for more creative and targeted tactics as they pressure their universities and retailers.

A geographic visualization would also help independent monitors to make decisions about which factories to report on and maintain corporate transparency.

For more information on the cause please visit, United Students Against Sweatshops.

The aim of Knowmore.org is to raise awareness of corporate abuses and to serve as a catalyst for corporate reform and social change. To accomplish this goal, KnowMore has created an online clearinghouse of hundreds of “responsibility profiles” of large corporations. These corporate profiles address a variety of corporate crimes ranging from environmental destruction to human rights violations to political corruption. As we grow our database, we see a huge potential for harnessing the power of Firefox to raise awareness about these corporate abuses when people go and visit these corporations' websites.

More specifically, we are working on developing a KnowMore Firefox extension that will alert users to corporate crimes whenever they visit company and brand websites. This way, when you visit a company or brand's website that is in the KnowMore directory, the KnowMore extension will automatically display the relevant issues and ratings within your browser. For example, if you were to visit AmericanApparel.net, the statement - "This company has areas of concern around worker's rights and business ethics. Click HERE to Learn More!” would appear over the top of that website.

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 We envision the KnowMore Firefox Extension being the ultimate web app for helping consumers shop ethically online.

If enough people were to add the KnowMore Firefox extension, we would see a radical shift in the number of informed and conscious consumers. In this way, KnowMore.org could revolutionize how people use their purchasing power to encourage corporations to be more accountable to our communities and to our planet.

Shopping for food is a task few people can afford to ignore, and for most, the grocery store is a veritable war zone of persuasive design, with few opportunities for the consumer to recognize the extent of a product's source, or the greater implications of its production. New Clothes is social tool that is designed to enable consumers to crack the carefully crafted veneer of the food industry, by mapping the corporate landscape of the American supermarket.

In its initial phase, New Clothes will act as an interactive database that maps known supermarket brands to corporate holdings, with browsable metadata on their social or environmental impact. Eventually this will be augmented to allow users to search via barcode, paving the way for mobile applications that consumers can run right at the shelf. In this way, New Clothes will be a tool for peering back into the source, bringing a renewed sense of transparency to the consumer in an age where we find ourselves at ever greater distance from the externalities of production.

UPDATE:  See here for more details... Corporations often escape scrutiny of the most eggregious offenses because their actions are not easliy trackable by average citizens. Parent company/subsidiary relationships are often unknown, save to those with access to expensive and proprietary databases. By adapting visualization software such as Prefuse into a Drupal module, a large database of unwieldy government information can be made accessible and intuitive for activists and citizens to interact with.

The visualization would illustrate the relationships of who-owns-who in the global corporate landscape and shed light on the often dizzying maze of shell companies used to displace liability and avoid corporate accountability.

This is an important project to take on as a mashup, because it needs to pull live data as opposed to a static dataset or a well written report. The pace of buy-ins and sell-outs is so high that only a live feed of data could aggregate and track the voluminous sources from regulatory institutions and keep this information up to date.

Because we would devlop this module as part of the popular open source content management system, Drupal, it would be freely available and adaptable to not only CorpWatch, but anyone who wanted to use the software for their Drupal website.

We would also publish our data in a format that allows other organizations to build an API on top of it.