The Carrot Project

We want more info on brands and companies as well, and we’ll keep chipping away, trying to paint as complete a picture as we can.

As for presenting what companies do in a uniform format, that’s one of the things that’ll be a big ongoing challenge for us (and has been a big challenge for everyone that has ever attempted to compare companies on their relative social and environmental responsibility).

There’s not a whole lot of uniformity in the information available. Every company operates differently. Every company discloses different information. Different experts evaluate different companies. All the experts evaluate differently.

That set of carrots that you see now is the beginnings of our first step toward finding some kind of uniformity.

The idea behind the carrots is that they each represent an opinion, a thumbs up, a vote of confidence in a particular company. They each represent an expert (some kind of expert in some aspect or set of aspects of social and environmental responsibility) telling us that a company is worthy of our support.

So we figure we’ll collect as many carrots as we can. And then we’ll show them to a community of interested people. Then the community will vote on which carrots they trust and which they don’t. And then we can adjust carrot weight based on trust.

And then, if we want to get into criteria (the different aspects of social and environmental responsibility), we can tag all our experts with their areas of expertise, tag all the carrots based on which experts awarded them and for what, get our community members to tell us which criteria they consider most important, and give everyone personalized, trust-weighted, criteria-weighted ratings and rankings.

Yikes. That’s a rave for you, Doug. A rave that only answers part of your question and might not even answer it all that well.

Please let me know what’s not clear or where questions remain.

And, again, you are absolutely right to question the substance of our information at this point. It should be questioned. And we’re working on giving it more substance.

And as for more order in this forum, is there anything in particular that you don’t like, that feels particularly disorderly?

Perhaps you could have different varieties of carrots. Energy carrots Social responsibility carrots Sourcing carrots …….

Each variety grows in its own patch

Companies could be viewed by the number of carrots and carrot patches that they have. An instant view on what that company is doing in the different aspects of sustainability. Once a company has achieved a certain number of carrots it could achieve “farm” status or some other collective term that links into the whole feel of the site…

Gotta love it when metaphors run wild. And there very well may come a day when we have carrots of all shapes and sizes. The key is maintaining an easy visual impression for the people that aren’t going to dig deep and figure out what exactly everything represents.

I agree with the point that keeping it simple is crucial. Once you start labeling carrots one way or another, it will get hard to keep things uniform. What I would really like to see, though, i still some sort of distinction between the topics at hand. I read through the justification for each carrot on all the coffee, but wasn’t sure if there was overlap, or to what extent I cared about the topic they received the carrot for. It would be cool to see (maybe above the source, on the left panel) a one word reference. If I am really into environmental sustainability, seeing that a company has done a lot of different things that illustrate they care might really influence the way I buy.

Based on that last comment, it seems like you’re raising two issues:

(1) Some carrots aren’t important to you.

(2) You don’t have a quick way to see which aspects of social and environmental responsibility were taken into consideration when an expert gave its vote of confidence to a company.

And they’re two good ones.

(1) All I can ask you to do right now is vote the bad carrots down. We want to know what you do and don’t trust. We want to know what you do and don’t care about.

Eventually, you’ll be able to turn the bad carrots off and turn the possibly bad carrots down and turn the best carrots up. Eventually, you’ll be able to adjust your own rating system based on which experts you trust most and which carrots you think represent the most important things.

And, eventually, we’ll count all user votes and weigh some averages and give you the option to see ratings that we’ve adjusted to reflect user trust.

(2) We think we can bake this into the aforementioned system by way of tagging.

All experts will get tagged with the crunchiness aspects they consider (the aspects in which they are experts, hopefully). All individual carrots will get tagged too. And users will then be able to adjust their personalized rating systems based on which aspects of social and environmental responsibility they consider most important.

…

All this is in the works. But it’ll probably take a while to get it done and out and working properly. Any criticism or suggestions for adjustments are welcome.

Since product are ranked by the amount of carrot they received, even if all carrots have been voted bad, big brands will always have a lot of carrot when little ones will struggle to get a few. I carrots represent awards (so say, proof of crunchiness), not having award doesn’t mean you aren’t crunchy. There should be something ranking above the amount of carrot, a ranking that’d be first seen by the user and that would represent Carrotproject opinion/recommandation on the product. (it’s been mention in other feedbacks).

Nike vs New Balance is a striking example in that respect. Nike has an amazing total of 16carrots! Does it makes it a crunchier company than New Balance? What we’ve learn section o Running Shoes seems to indicate that it doesn’t.

You’re absolutely right Jean.

The next sizable item on our to do list is adjusting our system to translate carrots (awards) into an “expert approval rating.”

We’re going to build it step by step (organizing the individual carrots was step one), so we won’t have this whole system built right away, but, eventually, we want that “expert approval rating” to take into consideration more than just how many awards/carrots each company gets. We want it to take into consideration which companies qualify to earn particular carrots (small companies that don’t get consideration for certain awards should not be punished for not getting them) and to what extent our users trust the experts and individual carrots.

That system won’t entirely eliminate the Nike vs. New Balance problem, but we hope it will start to push in that direction.

In order to really get a complete picture, we’ll need much help from the community to tell stories and share information; we’ll need to actually talk about this stuff with experts and not just gather the information that they publish; and we think we’ll need to engage with the companies as well.