So, I went looking online for some authoritative source on corporate responsibility sure I’d find something. I pictured a site which would give a simple numerical or letter-grade rating to companies on some common ethical concerns: labor conditions, environmental impact, animal testing, etc. The evaluations would be backed by links to hard data.

As you may have already guessed, I didn’t find such a site. In fact, I found very little that was truly useful for answering the kinds of concerns our board had raised: some old newspaper reports, a little raw data, a lot of speculation. I started to think that maybe there was no one out there aggregating this kind of information.

I knew there were institutional economic researchers who looked at the masses of hard core financial data these companies generate. And I’d seen some issue-focused ethical watchdog groups that tracked journalistic reports on serious corporate violations of various kinds. But the only people I could think of who would need this type of information in this simplified state for such a broad range of companies would be common consumers. Consumers don’t make the caliber of patrons for serious research that investment banks and crusading foundations do. So, I mostly lost hope in such a service ever coming into existence.

Recently, though, I listened to an episode of Social Innovation Conversations that somewhat restored my hope. Expecting Returns: The Role of Socially Responsible Investments and the Market (mp3) was a panel at Stanford’s Bridging the Gap conference.

Socially Responsible Investment (or SRI) seeks to combine social criteria into the set of factors traditionally used when evaluating companies for investiture. SRI firms take up the philosophy for a broad variety of reasons ranging from religious taboos on investing in alcohol and gambling through a purely economic desire to maximize profit over a longer time frame. And hence different firms consider different non-traditional factors in picking companies to fund. However, all of these firms have a voracious hunger for accurate and comprehensive data on their potential investment candidates, much of which is outside the range of normal financial indicators used by analysts and much closer to the kind of inputs necessary to make the ethical evaluations that matter to consumers.

In fact, the need for “metrics” was the central theme of the Stanford panel. The moderator, Graham Sinclair, works at KLD Independent Research, a financial research firm specializing in putting together exactly this kind of data and the rest of the panel was made up of managers from different funds, each of which consumes it and generates it continuously. One great example was about one of the managers’ investigation of a US oil company operating in post-war Iraq. On first glance, the company seemed to be doing right by local workers and following all the appropriate guidelines. But when the manager called around to local contractors and villagers, he discovered that they were using unfair labor practices and not paying adequate attention to their environmental impact.

Listening to them, it occurred to me that someone might be able to leverage all of this relevant research into exactly the useful customer-facing utility I was looking for to evaluate PDX Pop sponsors. Getting their data out to the public would simultaneously advance the causes these firms care about and raise their own profiles across a broader audience. Also, since the data would by necessity be collapsed into some actionable form for consumer use, the service wouldn’t supplant the firms’ core business, providing reports to serious investors, which requires comprehension, detail, and personal attention.

Whether it happens through the action of SRI firms or not, this kind of data is eventually going to make its way into the public’s hands. As Bruce Sterling has pointed out (along with countless others) we are on a timeline of increasing engagement with the products we buy and the companies that make them. We want them to reflect our values and to have meaning to us. In order to achieve these lofty aims, we’re going to need to know all kinds of gritty details about the conditions of production and the ethics of corporations. And that means data and lots of it.

Tagged: sri, socially, responsible, investment, stanford, siconversations, innovation, conversations, KLD, research, net-impact

Today I had one of the best types of ideas: one that was big enough to be interesting, small enough to be achievable, and that would, if executed properly, change my life in a tiny but worthwhile way. Here’s the idea: I should produce one t-shirt design everyday and make each shirt available in my very own CafePress store. The designs needn’t be complex or interesting everyday. There’s no time or labor minimum. The most important thing is the regularity.

Already, I’m off and running. The shirt you see above is today’s offering. It’s an adaptation of the most recent At Dusk poster. You can’t quite buy it yet (CafePress just introduced their black t-shirts and they won’t actually be available for purchase for a little while), but keep an eye on its CafePress page. Obviously, I’ve also started a new blog T-Shirt-A-Day where I’ll post my shirts (and any other related notes or updates). If you want to subscribe here’s the feed: RSS for T-Shirt-A-Day.

This project seems like it could blossom into another distillation of one of the best things about blogging: you spend a small amount of time making something every day and before you know it, you’ve got a pretty big body of work in the bank. (Speaking of which, I realized today that I’ve written 100 posts here [this one makes 101], so the timing couldn’t be better.)

Tagged: tshirtaday, cafepress, blog, tshirt, design

With more than 50,000,000 Creative Commons-licensed works out there, there is a lot of music, and amongst that music, at least some of it is under the Attribution No Derivatives license, or a weaker one. The Attribution No-Derivatives license “allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.”

That means that anyone can use music licensed “by-nd” in any commercial enterprise they want as long as they don’t allow anyone to alter the music. The weaker licenses (Attribution Share Alike and Attribtuion) even allow you to change or remix works and still use the results commercially. This would make it free of (non-labor) cost to accumulate a library of songs which you could then package and sell to businesses like restaurants and clothing stores and malls. Since these businesses seem to be relatively “quality insensitive” when it comes to the music they play, being able to dramatically undercut the professional Musak services on price might be all that’s needed to win some of the market. This proposition might be especially desirable to small businesses (like the pastry shop where I work) that have been sent nastrygrams by BMI or the other major label toadies irrationally cracking down on normal people listening to music they like. Since the legal fees in even a frivolous lawsuit are such a devastating threat to small businesses that survive from rent payment to rent payment, a cheap and safe music service might be quite appealing after reading a letter from a record label lawyer.

This would also be a total win for the people applying these licenses to their music. Artists pick such a license out of a desire to see their work heard as widely as possible. I don’t think I’ve ever gone up to a clerk to inquire after the great song I’m hearing over the piped-in Musak, but I would definitely be pleaseantly surprised to find myself doing so.

Technorati tags: music, Creative Commons, musak, BMI