Consumerium:Brief introduction

Brief Introduction to The Concept of Consumerium

This may eventually go at Main Page Consumer

From the consumption perspective Consumerium is about enabling a shift from affective buying behaviour based on illusions to affective buying behaviour based on information on all social and environmental impacts of the production (often called the "comprehensive outcome") and naturally the perceived quality of the product (often called the "value"). This shift begins with understanding the real possibilities of a world where we know what we buy into when we buy, right at the retail shelf or checkout counter.

This process began long ago with mandatory labels, but these are not fine grained or rich enough for everyone's individual buying criteria. They do not even manage to satisfy all institutional or factional criteria shared by many people. They are just not good enough. We seek to create a Consumerium buying signal that will convey everything that will really influence the decision, to the point of purchase.

Summaries

• Consumerium User Stories are typical cases of things going right or wrong with the Consumerium Services; Over time we hope the best cases are realized and the worst cases are avoided. We gather these more extreme stories for purposes of figuring out HOW to pursue the best, and avoid worst.
• Consumerium:Activist summary outlines our Campaigns and advertising
• Consumerium:Consumer summary explains how the Consumerium buying signal is actually seen and used
• Consumerium:Executive summary explains why this project is necessary and how it fits into other essential projects
• Consumerium:Investor summary explains how self-funding and an eventual healthy buying infrastructure makes it worthwhile to help Consumerium along with financial capital, especially if you sell a green light product:
• Consumerium:Producer summary is for those who sell green light products, to whom, Consumerium buying signal is actually advertising
• Consumerium:Retailer summary explains how friendly retail works, and how offering Consumerium Service access at the retail shelf and checkout counter can expand your social capital and your bottom line.

The implementation plan

We hope to achieve this by building one, two or more wikis and possibly other software for integration with legacy systems, what these are called and what distinguishes these facilities from each other and other issues are attempted to resolve in Consumerium Process-article.

Please note that Research Wiki/Content Wiki, Signal Wiki/Publish Wiki and The Consumerium Exchange are ad-hoc terms which have been coined up to describe some functionality and how to implement it

Note that our approach to "facts" and "opinions" is the opposite of what one would expect semi-intuitively, the scheme being the following:

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Information claimed as facts by anybody

One facility where we hope people will build an abundance of neutral information about products and their production processes and as many involved factors as possible. The integrity of this information will be negotiated and upheld by peer review in a similar manner as in Recyclopedia or Wikipedia.

If this proves unreliable, we may maintain a backend data storage called The Consumerium Vault which mostly validates the existance or non-existance of things the articles in The Content Wiki claim to refer to. The goal of the Content Wiki is to be objective. Content Wiki will draw much of it's product information from existing product registries where applicable to avoid redundancy and error possibilities.

There have been two propositions on how and where to do this Content Wiki and Signal Wiki

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Information claimed as opinions by somebody

One facility where strictly formed datastructures are used to record, archive and enable the aggregation of information on the popularity of different opinions, mostly in the form of competing campaigns on issues related to production and consumption. The Consumerium Exchange is very rigid internally, but the view it provides to consumers and producers alike is very fluid and based on ones subjective preferences.

There have been two propositions on where and how to do this The Consumerium Exchange and The Opinion Wiki

Both of these facilities will be accessible through the Internet, a WikiWikiWeb, such as this Development Wiki, but we hope to work together with the retailers of the world, who seek a competitive advantage by providing a better shopping experience for their clients, to bring access to the shelf front via short-range wireless connections, optimally Near Field Communications + Bluetooth, for zero cost to the consumer.

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