Overview:
Global business currently operates without effective accountability. This has led to a proliferation of unfortunate and unethical business practices, like sweatshops, child labor, and reckless environmental destruction. Without an easy way to access information about these business practices, consumers are unable to effectively align their purchasing decisions to their beliefs, and this may cause consumers to support businesses practices that they may not wish to support. At the same time, the markets for fair trade, organic, ethical and environmentally friendly products are major growth markets. As consumers demand more products that meet their values, the market will change to meet that demand as socially irresponsible businesses lose customers to more responsible businesses.
EthiCheck is a tool designed to expose the ethical and environmental impacts of companies to consumers in the most accessible, actionable way. This will allow consumers to quickly make small decisions regarding whether to buy a product or not based on their values. As millions of these small decisions are made, companies will change their practices for the better in order to take advantage of a market that is willing to pay a couple of extra dollars for ethical products. Since global business is one of the most powerful and pervasive forces in the world today, this change could improve millions and perhaps billions of lives.
EthiCheck will be developed as a Windows 7 phone application (mobile platform) and a website (desktop) that will enable shoppers to enter product information by scanning a barcode or by entering the name of product/company. The software will have a database containing information about companies in order to determine whether a product is an ethical and environmentally safe choice to purchase.
The development of EthiCheck will be divided among the following technological components: 1) bar code reading, 2) website crawling, 3) data classification using Naïve Bayes classification algorithm, 4) information retrieval, and 5) the GUI for the website and the phone application.
Problem Statement:
Design and implement a Windows 7 mobile application in conjunction with a wiki website for the EthiCheck project.
The team proposal should address:
- How will the application be used? Include a user scenario that provides insight into the application's functionality.
- What will be the main affordances of the mobile application?
- How will people add information and interact with the EthiCheck website?
- Where will the information on various companies be gathered from?
- How will you construct the algorithm for determining the social responsibility of a company?