Supply Chain Transparency: evolving Online Tools
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on October 6th, 2009
Source: Worldchanging
Image: Sourcemap
From Kirstin Butler’s The Backstory of Stuff: New Sites Enable More Transparency in the Supply Chain
Until recently, visualizing global goods’ sourcing was the domain of contemporary artists and technoactivists. Tracing an object back to its origins could be a time-consuming and frustrating process that meant doing solitary research and creating original interfaces. But the increased accessibility of online mapping tools and wiki-style collaborations have changed the cartography of consumption.
Enter Sourcemap, an open-source application for collective supply chain research and mapping. When WorldChanging first reported on Sourcemap last year the project had yet to launch; now its users have already traced the global travels of products as diverse as cars, granola, and lace (even though the site is still in beta mode). An MIT-based team built Sourcemap’s applications around Google Earth, and its geotagged food, travel, and product maps will look familiar to anyone who has called up a set of road trip directions. Still, while not the exclusive province of programmers, Sourcemap does require some skill with computing language to manipulate data. Most visitors to the site will probably gain the most from viewing supply chains in progress.
Even the pinpoint accuracy of a global map, however, can lack the immediacy of a human story. That’s where high-profile advocacy can take up the charge of transparency for more just and sustainable sourcing practices. A great example is the Enough Project’s Come Clean 4 Congo campaign, which seeks to connect the points between your cell phone and conflict minerals.
Where Sourcemap will tell you the carbon footprint of your computer’s production, the Enough Project will show you the Congolese miner who gathered minerals for its motherboard. It’s one thing to be aware of the abstract threat posed by your devices and gadgets, and quite another to know that they directly support global conflict. The Enough Project’s strategies include urging companies to pledge that their products are conflict free and providing letter-writing and petition tools for congressional lobbying.
Now that crowdsourcing models, data-driven applications, and social media tools are being widely embraced as ways to tell the supply-chain story, the next step is to integrate these developments into public awareness of the things we buy.
Read Kirstin Butler’s The Backstory of Stuff: New Sites Enable More Transparency in the Supply Chain on Worldchanging
