memespring

I spent the other weekend encamped at the Young Foundation (albeit with forays back to the Albert) messing about with barcodes for Social Innovation Camp.

The idea of sicamp was to get groups of programmers and ideas people (not mutually exclusive) in the same place to come up with some using web tools to solve social problems, or just change the way people live their lives for the better.

My offering was barcode wikipedia. The idea came out of a discussion about food tracing following a talk by Jack Thurston from farmsubsidy.org at Bar Camp, the idea being that if you could link physical objects to the web via their barcode you could give people access to a whole host of info about it at the point of purchase. This could take the form of ethical info, food miles, and customer reviews or price comparisons. With the more ethical style info piggybacking on the more selfish price/recommendation related stuff.

It’s not a particularly new idea, but it didnt seem like anyone had tried it for a few years, so it seemed like it was worth having another go. I wasn’t too sure what could be achieved in a weekend, but it turns out it’s quite alot.

With a small group of developers we managed to get a really basic wiki together with a barcode lookup, links to price comparisons, and photos from flickr. We also got a basic mobile app that scans a barcode and forwards you onto the relevant page on the site. (There was a problem getting the app to focus so we ended up having to sort of hack the barcode instead, but the principle was sound).

Anyway, you can see how far we got here, and there’s an example wiki page here.