Ethical Consumption Information System (ECIS) collaboration


Story: Wesa Aapro

Ethical consumption is very interesting but insanely difficult field. Customers want to buy greener and socially more sustainable products, but don't know which one to buy. Many innovative online projects provide ethical information, even ethical online shops, but none of them seem to really attract the consumers. Yet.

Demola project 45: "Ethical recommendation engine Firefox extension" is building a tool that injects ethical information to Amazon pages, giving the ethical information in the easiest possible way. The project group is attempting to build bridges to ethical information of external sources. There are already a handful of open ethical information providers and the list is growing all the time.

Jonathan Melhuish and Annesley Newholm from easyethical.org have been arranging a series of online conferences between different projects around the world during the past six months. The ultimate goal is to find a way to get the scattered resources work together, to build something (a lot) bigger than individual projects can achieve. Jonathan has made a Skype interview with many of the participants and published them as a podcast series in his blog: http://jonathanmelhuish.com/category/ethical-consumerism/

"This category features a series of interviews with many projects around the world that deliver ethical information to consumers. These podcasts are designed to give some background information on each project to help identify potential for collaboration between projects. We are also organising regular teleconferences aimed at sharing knowledge and facilitation collaboration."

We'll be following the collaboration and hopefully someday contributing to it in various TAMK or Demola projects.

Photo by Jonathan Melhuish: Interview with Jake de Grazia from CarrotProject

Open doors at Demola during Tampere Art Factory festival May 15-16