Institutional buying criteria
Institutional buying criteria are those applied by any group entity (as opposed to individual buying criteria). Most government, union, political party and corporate buying actually already has such criteria, and usually they are stated in terms of standard labels, e.g. unions tend to insist on buying union made goods or at least no sweat.
Because any such criteria are required by an organization, and the individual spending doesn't make this decision, this is an ideal place to begin our work, and an ideal starting point for any Consumerium Credit type of scheme that would make it possible to actually track and forbid unauthorized buying.
Because it is so strategic, we should list any such criteria we find right here:
- Many Institutional Buyers have mandatory public bidding rounds, either by law or by internal orders to try to ensure that corruption is kept as low as possible.
- Most have moral purchasing criteria for environmental and labour standards, especially if they have internal unions
IMPORTANT: a faction applies a flexible set of such criteria that might vary the way a parametric license does - suggesting that a faction license should be parametrized to vary the way the criteria do. Such a license aggregates the individual buying criteria of those who trust the faction, and tries to apply them also to the conditions of sharing data in the Research Wiki. Done this way, all Distributed Consumerium wiki management is by contract between factions, just as the Consumerium maintenance of the healthy buying infrastructure would have to be. A whole healthy signal infrastructure could be managed ONLY by one method of expressing buying criteria, which would apply to infrastructure decisions too.