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- Hooze & Wagn: Organically Grown Public Data on Products and Companies
Hooze & Wagn: Organically Grown Public Data on Products and Companies
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
Hooze.org and its Wagn underbelly are for collaboratively gathering and broadcasting convenient, trustworthy public data about products and companies. With wiki spirit and database power, Hooze gives citizens a new economic voice.
Supporting organization:
Grass Commons
URL:
http://www.hooze.org
City:
Eugene
State/Region:
OR
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Our goal is to make it practical and rewarding to align money and values.
Today, it's a huge challenge. Who can keep track of the human rights records of millions of companies? Or the fossil fuel spent on billions of products? So incredibly much to know, and yet we're usually forced to rely on (1) sales pitches and (2) our memories.
Hooze was started by social-minded geeks whose heads couldn't hold enough info to make ethical choices.
That's a data problem.
We believe we as citizens should have access to information about a product's impacts on the things we care about when we're shopping. We believe it should be simple to learn about companies' practices before we support them. Cellphones that scan barcodes, widgets on websites, browser add-ons, in-store displays, social impact receipts. responsible investing, institutional purchasing, screening sponsors and suppliers... it all hinges on credible, meaningful data.
Hooze.org is for gathering and sharing that data. We're about helping individuals and organizations present information about products and companies in a way that makes it easy to find, filter, and use. We believe this information should be public, and must be ubiquitous if we are to build a sustainable economy. To realize this vision, we need to be able to create and arrange information collaboratively, as on wikis, and then retrieve it precisely, as with databases. So we built Wagn.
Wagn powers Hooze by letting communities of users organize information on-the-fly. Its innovative design infuses wikis with database power, giving it great flexibility. Conceived a year ago, the open-source tool is already used for knowledge management, meeting records, documentation, personal information management, and, of course, building a sustainable economy ;)
Sustainability (financial) model:
Bringing economic data to a wide audience opens up a host of revenue opportunities. Our favorite of these is making Hooze useful for collecting private data in addition to public data. While it will remain free to create and share public information, attaching private data will cost a small fee.
Surprisingly, supporting privacy can actually make more data available. If there's no way to keep data private, many sources won't share any at all (eg., if I can't omit the Bangkok stories, you can't read any of my diary). But when Hooze sources can integrate public and private data, many new opportunities arise. Merchants reviewing suppliers, purchasers reviewing products, businesses reviewing competitors, and investors reviewing investments will all be able to share some things and protect others.
Notice that, while supporting privacy, this price structure offers incentives for bringing ever more content to the public -- adding a clear economic push for transparency.
Until this model can be implemented, Grass Commons will fund Hooze by promoting Wagn as a knowledge management tool, as it's already being used by Oregon's largest private foundation, Meyer Memorial Trust.
Potential obstacles:
- Credibility of source. In consumer information, source matters. Hooze's success will depend upon the community's capacity to filter and attribute information. Moreover, we must let primary sources decide who edits their data.
- Reluctance to share data. Hooze will promote sharing by visibly crediting and linking to sources, and by offering them new channels of data distribution (for example, to mobile phones and ecommerce widgets).
- User interface. Hooze's interface must be kept simple for new users and powerful for advanced users, lest it impede adoption, retention, or both.
Resource Needs:
We need a champion: someone focusing the bulk of his/her energy on Hooze.org. A great tool is not enough for a great website -- it takes a community. We want to fund a full-time position to nurture Hooze community so that we can begin promoting the site in earnest.- We need collaborators. Hooze is intended to help other organizations to deliver their messages to buyers when they're buying, investors when they're investing, and merchants when they're... merching. Help us connect to them!
- We need to keep developing. We've got a wonderful software team, but we need to fund it and grow it. Ruby-on-rails developers welcome.
Key Milestones:
Wagn: Our next Wagn release ("0.9: Deeper Community," due June 30), will focus on facilitating greater social interaction and offering rich new ways of arranging "cards" of information. The following release ("1.0: Broader Community" due August 31) will emphasize interconnectivity among wagns. We're also plan an early summer release of a prototype of "Wadget," a widget that will make it simple to plop wagn content on any webpage.
Hooze: We hope to fund and hire a champion for Hooze and begin cultivating data by summer. With that in place, we believe we can rapidly assemble seed data on 10,000 companies and about 100,000 products, announce our first "Hooze Diggin" Research Challenge, formalize our first inline data agreements with ecommerce outlets, and introduce our first primary sources.
Project Summary:
Hooze.org, and the open-source Wagn software running it, are designed for cultivating and broadcasting concise, trustworthy, personalizable, public data about products and companies.
Whose head can hold the hiring practices linked to 10 million different brands? The environmental impact of a billion different products? Not ours! So we're working on ways to make it practical and rewarding to gather, share, and use information vital to making choices that promote a just and sustainable economy.
The task requires both the collaborative spirit of wikis and the organizing power of a database. Enter Wagn. Wagn helps communities of users arrange data on-the-fly. Structure is neither fixed nor forgone: it emerges. Just one year after its conception, it's already being used for knowledge management, contact info, workflow, documentation...
...and, of course, for Hooze.org. By bringing together the voices of consumers, employees, nonprofits, producers, investors, merchants, entrepreneurs, and community members, Wagn and Hooze are offering citizens new ways to shape our economy and our world.
Comments
You got my vote and a place in my blog!
michael gibbons buttons of hope
You are the inspiration for "Transparency is the new black!"
In Transparency is the new black, I wrote...
OK name runner up! I need this site (Hooze&Wagn) NOW! It is about time someone "...adding a clear economic push for transparency." Yes I want to know the human rights record of the company I buy my shirts from -- given this info I can and will choose to buy from an ethical company --so will others -- and you guess what ethical companies will flourish --market forces for good, for a change! There that was easy! Transparency is the new BLACK!
You have my support --I hope you will consider a vote for buttons of hope!
Hooze and co.
I have blogged about Hooze and WagN at wrythings.
Best of luck!
Cool
On my list as well, and on the list of suggested projects Grassroots.org will be sending out in our mailings (check out the Grassroots.org Nonprofit Toolbox).
Good luck with it!
Dave.
Innovative and meaningul
This is one of my top 7
This is one of my top 7 proposals. Good luck!