Posting here on behalf of Petia’s team from the hackathon. We had our first hackathon event in Lisbon on May 7th and one of the teams latched onto this proposed solution. They came up with a clickable prototype for a browser extension that would allow a shopper to immediately see a list of any articles implicating the brand in human trafficking so they could make a more informed purchasing decision. Here is the Figma file they produced.
It’s a good start towards making this idea more real. Open questions at this point are:
- How structured to make this list? Initially the idea was to jumpstart a database of offenders but there was concern around legal exposure and also the grunt work necessary to get that to a usable state (enough listings, all coded against brand names, etc). The epiphany was that we could just make the extension run a search in realtime to pull articles on the internet. This solves two issues:
- legal-wise: there should be no exposure since it’s just essentially executing a google search by brand (ie. “nike human trafficking”) and just returning a list of results.
- grunt-work-wise: there is no need to build up that database before launching the extension. It works immediately out of the box once it’s launched
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They did have the thought that there should be some crowd-sourced curation of these articles. Perhaps a mod wherein the shopper can give a thumbs up/down on “how helpful was this article in making your purchasing decision” type rating. In that way the grunt work of building the data repository is crowdsourced to shoppers using the extension
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Once that repository exists, it can be exposed via API and other things can be built atop it (mobile app for the equivalent here for IRL shopping). Is there a way to decentralize the database in such a way where it can live on the equivalent of a BitTorrent? So it’s out of our hands in terms of curation. In otherwords the crowd-sourced ratings and reviews live on a database that’s out of our control and there’s a credibly-neutral appeals process for taking down search listings that appear in the browser that doesn’t involve us in any way?
Anyways very proud of this team and their efforts on Saturday. Here is a shot of the magic happening:
