The Carrot Project

Have you guys thought of adding product discussion forums to the site? It could be nice to allow people to discuss their upcoming purchases in a way that doesn’t distract from the site’s main content.

Every time I log into the site, I think about the chemicals necessary to make our upside-down grass so monoculture perfect. Yuck.

I like the look though. Especially the upside-downness.

Can’t say it’s going to be a priority, but we have talked about replacing it with some kind of biodiverse prairiescape.

What do you think? Other ideas?

Make up and facial products have been infamous for being very socailly unethical and irresponsible. I think this addition would be quite helpful for people who want to buy these products, but don’t want to put something so unethical on their face.

For a while, I’ve only been able to log in with my email address. Might make sense to either change the label to ask for email address only, or change the login process to allow for either.

Apologies if this was brought up elsewhere and I missed it.

I was looking at the “salty snacks” this morning and noticed that very many of the products listed are from Frito-Lay, and therefore have the same carrots attached.

This has the potential to make things a little cluttered. But I’m not sure if it would be best to have more finely grained categories (“BBQ Potato Chips”) or simply focus on the companies active in the salty snacks market (Frito-Lay, Herr’s, etc…).

The former would give you more actual pages for people to look at, but the latter seems a more efficient way to deliver the information, and foster the kind of company (not individual product) comparison the site seems to be all about. Maybe different products they produce in the area (in this case salty snacks - Doritos, Lays Stax, etc…) could be listed with the company entry, so that there is still a thorough listing of choices, but a tidier look when viewing the man page where the carrots are shown.

Jake, Can you also put negative carrots, maybe sticks and show us who got dinged. It seems like maybe a lot of the biggest companies could end up getting the most carrots because they have the most attention paid to them. Overall though I like the site.

chocolate

I’d like to hear about socially responsible production

Here’s a paraphrased version of a comment Steve made over on Flying J’s carrot:

When a carrot is applied to one gas company, is it also applied to any of the other gas companies? Doesn’t seem like it. I don’t see negative carrots or blank carrot in anyone’s profiles.

I haven’t poked around the site too much yet, but my initial feeling is that the companies in the same sector need to be compared on the same criteria, rather than just a raw number of positive awards.

Could you educate my lazy brain on how the carrot comparison works?

It seems like people would be most inclined to give their money to a company when the amount of money they are spending is a relatively large amount. As is such, a car is a hefty investment, and having a place where consumers can see which car companies are really leading the way on making the world a better place would be truly valuable.

In the “subscriptions” section of the “my account” page, there is the option to subscribe to “New Feedback”.

What does this do?

My first thought was that I would be notified of new feedback threads, which I thought was kind of cool because I could follow the new conversations.

But I don’t seem to get those notifications.

I learned a good deal about the brands themselves, although it seems like a lot of what I saw was more of a reproduction of the image that the companies seek to project of themselves than anything. I would like to see more substance relating to what it is that the companies do to have a positive impact on the society around them, presented in a uniform format. I want to see things that will make me want to buy their product over another, and I want to see these things in a consistent order so that I can quickly and easily sum up different companies based on different criteria. I like the forum discussion, but I would like to see more order in the forum. A graphical comparison chart (beyond the carrot award comparison) on specific topics (environment, equality, etc.) would be great.

And one last thread pulled out of Oliver’s Scoring manifesto:

You may also want to consider a local, national and international league. Knowing where to get the freshest local vegetables is just as important as finding out where to buy your “carrot” running shoes.

I’d like to know that the comments etc are markdown enabled and either have a tiny cheat sheet or a link to a more complete one.

I just finished stringing up lights on a ginormous xmas tree at my friend’s house. This year he got GE LED lights. He has a wattage meter and we checked the power draw on the GE strand vs. the filament bulb strands he used last year. GE clocked in at 2 watts for 50 bulb strand. Filaments drew 5-10x more power for the same number of bulbs.

Could we get a category for xmas tree lights, or is that too specific?

I was giving feedback to a comment made in the laptop section and before I was finished writing, I hit something, or did something where I lost all my text. I was automatically taken back to the home page.

I do believe it was user error and i will try to recreate the event so this information could perhaps be more helpful. But, in the meantime, it might be something to look into.

as i am writing up my feedback, other than at the top of the page where it says my name, I am not sure if this is going to be anonymous feedback or feedback from me. It might be nice to see something like: feedback from Katie?

Another thought imported from Oliver’s multi-pointed Scoring post:

I would also like to be able to see the companies that are making the biggest overall improvements. Ultimately one wants all levels of involvement and participation. Not just those that caught on early and are leading the pack.

I love what you’re doing. I really like that you are presenting the information into a context that delivers the best information. So that one carrot doesn’t mean bad, it means one good piece of information. All of this reflects the “Polly-Anna” side of me that every so often needs to play the Glad Game.

And….

I also was hoping to make a comment about all the laptops or all the athletic shoe companies. You know, some of my thoughts weren’t all that “polly-anna-ish” either. Rude, I know.

And I, like many others, go through Amazon’s review tool and look for only the negative comments because sometimes that one negative thing can be so overwhelmingly bad. And then I found myself wanting to stick up for Apple because I just love Mac’s and I am horrified that they haven’t done more for the sustainability movement.

So, it’s information like this that just happens to be my random thoughts and not all that factual. And I do understand that it’s thoughts like this that can clutter the site and make it hard to get to all the valuable information that is currently posted.

So, there you have some hopefully valuable yet conflicting thoughts.

Since Oliver’s last feedback post actually included multiple pieces of feedback, and since we’re still discussing his first point in the original thread, I’m pulling his second point out and posting it in its own thread.

Hope that’s cool with you Oliver.

Here it is:

There has to be a balance between economic and environmental growth - sure we can all do the right thing with an unlimited budget.

As we all know, business is competitive and this site presents a great opportunity for an open discussion forum to rank businesses in their degree of sustainability. Ultimately sustainability is a measure of efficiency and in the end its the most efficient companies that win.

Couple of initial comments… Its not clear to me how the carrot scoring works…is it just the number of posts or clicks on agreeing with the post ? You might want to consider a scoring mechanism across a number of variables (waste reduction, materials sourcing, energy consumption, renewable energy usage, employee incentives) . I appreciate that this may get a little complicated, but nonetheless I believe that some form of target needs to be defined.

There has to be a balance between economic and environmental growth - sure we can all do the right thing with an unlimited budget.

I would also like to be able to see the companies that are making the biggest overall improvements. Ultimately one wants all levels of involvement and participation. Not just those that caught on early and are leading the pack.

You may also want to consider a local, national and international league. Knowing where to get the freshest local vegtables is just as important as finding out where to buy your “carrot” running shoes.

As you can see … I love the site and see this as the beginning of something very special. More will follow I’m sure….