I’m spending this weekend with fellow enthusiasts at the Social Innovation camp in east London. This group of around 60 developers, designers and campaigners have met up to work on technologies that build social capital. One of the six ideas being developed is Barcode Wikipedia, described by the Guardian as follows:
The basic idea is to build a system that lets people quickly identify information about products they find in the shops; particularly things like ethical information, news items about it or reviews. Ideally this would work through a mobile phone – you could snap a photo of your product’s barcode or tap in the numbers and get back information that helps you decide whether it’s good to buy.
I’m trying to feed in everything we have learned so far on Fair Tracing, which focuses more on information from producers, distributors and retailers. Barcode Wikipedia should generate some extremely useful ideas on incorporating user-generated content from consumers into product information systems.