Gabe’s recent post on the MCC’s change of criteria raised some familiar issues for me: it demonstrates how the qualitative aspects of selecting quantitative criteria can introduce bias to the very structure of analysis. It seems to me that, if you’re going to change the criteria, you should at least keep the option to examine the data by the old criteria so that you can keep at least the option of consistency.

These are issues for any business, individual or government - measurement and analysis form the backbone of strategy for anyone concerned with making or monitoring change. On the positive side, there are a number of organisations who are active in monitoring and reporting the social and environmental impact or status of both businesses and governments (and a number of services which allow you to monitor you own impact - check out 100 Sites for Green Living for a whole host of ways to green yourself and others, and Socially Responsible Shopping for a useful, if slightly out-of-date, collection of inventive ways to consume more ethically. Even more positive, there is a growing handful of mobile apps which allow the integration of this information more easily into your shopping (or more general meatspace-inhabiting) life. Watch this space for my top recommendations.

However, on the negative side, there are A NUMBER OF THEM - this makes it hard to make genuine comparisons, even if you are in a position to read through the methodological guidelines of a plethora of organisations (how can Starbucks, for example, make it onto The Ethisphere Institute’s “World’s Most Ethical Companies” list, as well being Ethical Consumer magazine’s “Most Unethical Coffee Chain in the UK”? Where this broad variety of information exists, quantitative analyses can, in theory, be helpful: suddenly a chaos of facts becomes a system of comparison. However, it also adds the potential for biases inherent to the rating system - these are potentially more dangerous than the bias inherent in a qualitative analysis, because in presenting numbers they give the impression that they are absolutely objective fact.

So how do we move past this quandry of relativity and subjectivity? When I find myself going round in circles like this, I tend to think that the solution must be to emphasise the value of crowd sourcing in combination with expert opinion. I’m a constant advocate of the idea that everyone’s ethics are different, but also of the idea that there is probably someone, somewhere, whose job it is to know more about these issues than I do.

What I’m saying, in less theoretical terms, is that if you want to talk about what you SHOULD do with your time and your money, it makes sense to not only pay attention to independent advisors like Goodguide, but also to crowd-sourced sources of information like Barcoo and bLeaf. What none of these existing apps do adequately, in my opinion, is collate the available information in a way which is both comprehensive and able to maintain a degree of subtlety. This is still, however, a relatively young area of app development, and I look forward to testing the apps which come out from the websites listed by mashable.

Jack Dentith is the Social Impact Director at Ethicodes. A fellow at the Emerge Venture Lab, Jack has worked in research and development at several London based charities including the Facial Surgery Research Foundation. He holds a master’s degree from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He lives in London.

Related articles

• Mobile Phone App Helps Ethical Shoppers (prweb.com)
• The Race to Decide Who’s Greenest (businessweek.com)
• GoodGuide’s Transparency Toolbar Tells You When You’re About To Buy Something Toxic (fastcompany.com)