The conversation touched on a wide range of issues we all face in communicating ethical information to consumers.  We webcast the panel discussion live – you can watch the first 45 minutes below.  Alternatively you can download a higher-quality mp4 video.  The second part of the discussion is available only as an audio mp3 file.  (If these files do not display correctly in your browser, right-click, save link and then open in a media player).

I asked Al to share his thoughts about how publishers and retailers alike can benefit from building an online community.  You can download an Mp3 version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get the audio of these interviews as soon as they’re published.

In this short video, I focus on an useful technique for deciding how to organise the content on your site: Card Sorting. By getting several customers to group the content and label it in a way that makes sense to them, you’ll come up with a scheme that’s likely to make sense to everyone – not just you.

Online card-sorting and analysis tools: Optimalsort, Websort
Windows-based tool (and card templates): SynCaps

Of course, as Richard Pope emphasises in the video, the beauty of this technology is that it’s really flexible – you’re just using the barcode as an entry point to related information.  As it’s user-editable, people can put anything there.

Still, I thought it’d be interesting to have a vague idea of what people might use such a device for, i.e. what unsatisfied informational needs they are aware of during their shopping process.  So I gathered a team (including ethnographer Charles Armstrong) to go to the local supermarket and pounce some unsuspecting shoppers!

Here’s the presentation showing some of my research results, followed by a live demo of the software:

Thanks to The People Speak for shooting the original footage and patiently transferring it all to my laptop for me.  Here’s their video of me attacking one of the techies and trying to pin down some use cases for this technology, and then going on to explore the potential for promoting ethical information.  Here’s my photographic exploration of ideas surrounding attaching objects to information.  The source code for this project is still available for anyone to build on.

You can download an Mp3 version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get the audio of all these interviews as soon as they’re published.

As well as publishing a series of podcast interviews with many of the projects, we’ve been organising online teleconferences almost every week.  In December, we organised a couple of general conferences to allow everybody to get to know one another.  These were very successful and gave us an idea of the topics we needed to discuss.  In the New Year, we’ve so far run two conferences, both addressing specific topics.

The first of these conferences dealt with data collection, representation, summarisation and presentation.   It uncovered many of the fundamental issues that we all face in implementing these systems, and led to useful discussion of different approaches. Some were in favour of a very quantitative, algorithmic approach whilst others considered that only qualitative analysis can do justice to the complex issues under examination.    The key issues of transparency and trust in relation to data sources was also discussed.

The second conference (video) looked at how we could make our projects financially sustainable.   A commercialisation consultant, Gbenga Kogbe, kindly gave us an overview of the main options for generating revenue around a free product.   It seems that there are a plethora of  opportunities that will arise when an ethical information system becomes successful,  but nevertheless we need to focus on developing a convincing business case in order to convince funders and existing businesses to get on board.

The next conferences will focus on involving the academic members of our community and keeping up the momentum we’ve developed in the early conferences.  This collaboration seems to be off to a promising start, but there is still a long and winding road ahead!

Recordings and transcripts of previous conferences, dates of upcoming conferences and other related information can be found on the conference information page.

Download the Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get these interviews the moment they’re published.

You can download an Mp3 audio version or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all these interviews as soon as they’re published.

Untitled from Jonathan Melhuish on Vimeo.

Guardian podcast excerpt:

The fact that there were significantly less people at the second CarrotMob than the first supports our suspicion that perhaps CarrotMobbing is a bit of a fad and that the attraction will fade over time. The Porkkanamafia have been having a lot of success in Finland recently, it’ll be interesting to see if they can repeat that success in the same city or whether it’s a one-off that succeeds mostly due to the novelty of the idea.

Meanwhile, we’re working on ways to take the core ideas behind CarrotMob and form it into something more sustainable, effective and less labour-intensive. Not as fun, perhaps, but less of a passing fad and more of a useful weapon in the battle against climate change. Watch this space.

You can watch the interview below, get the Mp3 audio file or subscribe to the the podcast feed to get all of these interviews as soon as they’re online.

I recommend also watching the short demo video and accompanying article on TechCrunch, both of which provide a good introduction to GoodGuide.