The Network of Integrated Consumer Knowledge (NICK) is organizing information so that citizens everywhere know what they’re buying, whom they’re buying from, and how their decisions affect the world around them.
The first major application of the NICK will be providing social and environmental information to online shopping sites. Today all major e-commerce players maintain their own databases in their own structures. Few give users any information at all about the broader impacts of the shopping choices they make, and the researchers that can provide that kind of information have no easy way to share it with consumers while they shop. To publish information about products and companies on these websites, you’d have to knock on a thousand virtual doors, many of which won’t open at all.
With the NICK, you won’t have to knock twice. Any information published according to NICK standards can be served to any website on the network. Users will be able to access an unprecedented depth and breadth of consumer information through any NICK network client. As shoppers grow accustomed to this luxury, there will be increasing pressure for major online retailers to join the network and give users a fuller sense of the consequences of their decisions. The competition between the big web stores today focuses largely on the size and scope of their collection of hoarded data. With the NICK, the focus will largely shift to competing on searching, sifting, sorting, and showing information that comes from a much richer, larger, common pool.
The feedback loops so crucial to a sustainable economy rely upon informed, ethical consumers. The NICK will provide the technical underpinning to help those consumers know they are using their economic strength to good ends within a dauntingly complicated marketplace.
Today consumer information gets heaped in an unloved attic.
Sure, there are valuable things around, but you have to hunt. To feel like an informed buyer, you drudge through countless websites (or magazines or books or news clippings), and even then you rarely feel like you have the big picture.
This is one of the key problems with consumer-based efforts today. It is not enough for information to be vital, reliable, and thorough. It must also be organized and convenient.
Tomorrow the NICK will turn the attic into a well-loved library.
The key is standardization. Publishing information in a common format (OCKL) will let NICK sources share their data with any website, desktop application, handheld, or other software on the internet.
Currently, if you provide a review or a rating on a website, it will show up on that website and that website alone. With the NICK, loads of websites (and other webtools) will share those reviews and ratings, so your contributions will appear throughout the network. Having information all over the place has failed. Trying to put the information all in one place has too. The NICK’s solution is to serve data from anywhere to anywhere: any information any place.
Better still, this sharing will make it possible (and worthwhile) to produce and publish much more flexible sorts of reactions to products and companies than just paragraphs and one to five stars. Yardsticks (height, diversity policy, toxics, median wage, location of operations, LEED ratings, ecological footprint, recent news…) of various types (numbers, dates, times, text, multiple-choice, true/false…) will allow not only greater voice to network contributors, but also much enhanced possibilities for searching, filtering, and sorting.
NICK contributors will include nonprofits, merchants, manufacturers, academic institutions, government agencies, private research bodies, and individual users of NICK client websites. As these sources cultivate ever more thorough, reliable data, we can rely less and less on marketing and more on trusted third parties. And we can begin to mean what we pay.
Economic theory generally presumes a perfectly informed consumer. Even the NICK can’t make that happen, but the more consumers understand, the more wisely they can choose, and the healthier the economy as a whole. Informed consumers improve feedback loops and force businesses to think in broader terms.
