Grass Commons, a 501(c)3 public interest charity, is building pipelines between those who can generate information about products and companies and those who can use that information to build a more sustainable economy and a better world.
Founders Ethan McCutchen and Lewis Hoffman, both accomplished software developers with extensive experience in large-scale web applications and database management, saw a gap between the information we need to shop ethically and the information we have when we shop. Grass Commons was formed to prove the Information Age consumer could do better.
Currently we’re focused on developing Wagn, a wiki which handles more structured data and more complex relationships than other wikis. We’re already using it to host Hooze, which has some product information. As Wagn matures, our attention is beginning to back to nurturing Hooze into a thriving community of people sharing their experience with different companies and products.
Eugene, Oregon is home to a community of active citizens and organizations working toward sustainability with drafting boards, paintbrushes, hoes, calculators, hammers, microphones, spoons, pencils, and rubber boots. We’re adding a few more tools to the mix.
Ethan McCutchen co-founded Grass Commons to cultivate the Network of Integrated Consumer Knowledge (NICK), a fusion of his interests in sustainability and software. Having majored in music composition, taught English in Russia and Japan, studied cognitive neuroscience in Scotland, researched primates in Thailand, volunteered in several Latin American countries, and backpacked wherever else he could, Ethan now does most of his exploration online. He’s into system architecture, sustainability indicators, human and computer languages, collaboration, community music, voting systems, and incessant bad jokes.
Lewis heads all of Grass Commons’ software development. Previously with Two Radical Technologies (1998-2004) he led development on a powerful, modular, integrated suite of web applications called Advocacy Central. During that time he also completed his master’s in Computer Sciences from George Mason University, focusing on artificial intelligence. He’s also received degrees from Davidson College in German and Physics. An avid outdoor enthusiast and student of sustainability thinking, Lewis was drawn to the NICK project by both its technical challenges and its social and environmental importance. His current software interests include information retrieval and extraction, data integration, and the semantic web.