Jonathan Melhuish

Today I interviewed Stéphane de Messières from Citizens Market. He told me about their focus on the content creation process, their nine-strong team of volunteers and his thoughts on collaboration.

Download the Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to stay up to date with the interviews as they’re published.

Annesley has interviewed Rob Harrison from Ethical Consumer (although no podcast this time, sorry).

Ethical Consumer have the most comprehensive high quality researched company information database in the world. They have been going for 20 years using a subscription model, magazine and extensive B2B work and are extremely well known and connected in the UK. They cover 50,000 companies, take articles from over 50 publications and use around 10 researchers / investigators.

Rob Harrison, a founding member of Ethical Consumer, has now stated that they are “genuinely considering moving into a Web 2.0 model with free content (for not-for-profits and non-commercial use), community contributions (continuing with the researchers as well) and commercialising around the data”. And furthermore that they are “extremely interested in joining with an international Web 2.0 collaboration on ECIS”.

My fourth interview is with another academic who is conducting research highly relevant to ethical consumer information, Nate Greenslit from the MIT Media Lab. I asked Nate to talk about his current research project, Accountability, which provides consumers with ethical information about the companies they buy from and investigates whether this knowledge influences their future spending behaviour.

Download the Mp3 version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all future interviews as soon as they’re online.

My third interview isn’t actually with an ethical information system project but with somebody very involved in the field who is keen to help. Dr Terry Newholm is a lecturer in Marketing at the University of Manchester in the UK and a co-author of the book “The Ethical Consumer“.

I asked Terry to give a brief history of ethical consumerism, and problems that it faces, such as the “words-deeds inconsistency” and whether a purchase is really a vote.  I also got him to talk about his current areas of research and give some advice on how we can encourage consumers to shop ethically.

Download the Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all future interviews as soon as they’re online.

In my second interview in this series, I interviewed Wesa Aapro (in Finland) about his work on Consumer Gadget.  After an ambitious attempt to build a barcode-scanning device for providing ethical guidance to shoppers, Wesa is currently focussing more on the design of data formats for ethical information.  In January, he’ll lead an exciting project with students of Tampere University to look develop a browser plugin for delivering ethical information, building on the existing KnowMore and EasyEthical plugins.

Download the Mp3 audio version or even better, subscribe to the the podcast feed and get all future interviews as soon as they’re published.

In order to give a bit of background to the various projects that are looking at how to provide ethical information to consumers, I though it would be good to do a series of interviews and release them as podcasts and online videos.  I don’t know about you, but I spend almost all my days reading and writing, so I always appreciate when I can get a break from that.  Plus I think seeing an interview can communicate a lot more, including styles and personalities, which can help in future collaboration.

The first interview is, naturally, talking with Annesley about our own project, EasyEthical.  I also mention the CarrotMobs that we’ve organised.  It was recorded in a noisy cafe with my digital camera but hopefully the audio is clear enough for you to decipher our ramblings.  The video was shot using Annesley’s Microsoft webcam on his Windows laptop, which probably explains why it randomly stopped recording for about a minute

Video version is below (feel free to embed elsewhere / re-distribute).  Alternatively you can download the mp3 audio version for your portable listening pleasure.  Even better, subscribe to the podcast feed and you’ll get each interview as soon as it is published.