Consumerium
From Wikinfo
Consumerium is a defunct not-for-profit project, developed under GFDL licence, using wiki software, to develop free software and infrastructure for storage, transport and display of product information to consumers and feedback to the producers to enhance the consumer experience, advance product development and to keep this planet as hospitable as possible in the future.
- http://www.consumerium.org/wiki/ down was the R&D wiki for the project and was running Wikipedia Phase III software
Consumerium was proud to do most of its research work in Wikipedia to avoid redundancy and boost synergy.
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Short timeline of Consumerium
- April 26 2002 Initial website describing the concept was published
- March 10 2003 Consumerium gets wikified and GFDL'd
- March 15 2003 First GPL'd code snipplets are released
- June 8 2003 Preparations for getting registered in Sourceforge get underway.
- July 23 2003 ConsuML gets registered in Sourceforge under GNU GPL
- 2005? Consumerium becomes offline
Wikipedia articles
This section contains a list of Wikipedia articles useful to the Consumerium.
List of Wikipedia articles listed as research work in Consumerium
These need most work:
- List of trade unions (Currently listing only UK, AU, FI, FR, NL)
- List of employer associations (Currently a stub with some info on AU, FI, FR, ME, NL, UK)
- Lists of companies
- List of who owns what (a skeleton at the moment)
- Economy of Earth (contains some interesting stuff, but it's not organised)
- List of company registers
These should be started:
- List of advertisement agencies (by country) (doesn't exist now)
- List of association registers (doesn't exist now)
- List of ethical funds (doesn't exist now)
- List of non-governmental organisations (doesn't exist now)
These are fairly complete:
- List of professions (very complete)
- List of stock exchanges (very complete)
- List of supermarkets
- List of reference tables Please check this out if you can think of some list that is not included here
List of fairly complete wikipedia articles related to Consumerium
(From http://www.consumerium.org/wiki/Wikipedia. If these interest you, you might want to check Consumerium out.)
Understanding buying choices and their effects:
- Conversion of units
- GTIN
- EAN (European Article Numbering)
- UPC (Universal Product Code)
- List of countries
- List of timelines
- List of reference tables
- List of stock exchanges
- List of supermarkets
- Commodity markets - buying on the largest scale
- Money - what it is and how it works, commodifying everything even you
- Arms trade (needs a lot of work!)
Understanding moral choices as expressed in the marketplace:
- list of ethics articles - why would you care what you buy?
- Globalization makes it harder to know what your money does
- Transparency International tries to make it easier to find out
- Greenpeace has six campaigns to affect buying choices, and advocates
- Accounting reform which would make more liabilities visible to you
- Full cost accounting in particular would make waste visible
- Productivism assumes that everything humans make is good
- Consumerism assumes that everything humans want is good
Directly relevant to consumerium mission, making actual moral buying choices:
- Slow Food - tied for third most relevant? buy local, organic, etc.
- Sweatshop - tied for third most relevant? often the target of
- Boycott - second most relevant? usually shorter term than
- Moral purchasing describes most exactly the consumerium.org mission
- local food
External links
- http://www.consumerium.org/wiki/ down was the R&D wiki for the project and was running Wikipedia Phase III software
- http://consuml.sourceforge.net/ up was the web site for ConsuML, a proposed markup language for Consumerium
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Consumerium" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumerium, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
At 2 January 2006, Wikipedia decided to delete its "Consumerium" article.
