Who can keep track of the human rights records of millions of companies? Or the fossil fuel spent on billions of products? So incredibly much to know, and yet we’re usually forced to rely on (1) sales pitches and (2) our memories.

Grass Commons was started by social-minded geeks whose heads couldn’t hold enough info to make ethical choices.

That’s a data problem.

We believe we as citizens should have access to information about products’ impacts on the things we care about when we’re shopping. We believe it should be simple to learn about companies’ practices before we support them. Cellphones that scan barcodes, widgets on websites, browser add-ons, in-store displays, social impact receipts. responsible investing, institutional purchasing, screening sponsors and suppliers… it all hinges on credible, meaningful data.

Hooze.org is for gathering and sharing that data. We’re about helping individuals and organizations present information about products and companies in a way that makes it easy to find, filter, and use. We believe this information should be public, and must be ubiquitous if we are to build a sustainable economy. To realize this vision, we need to be able to create and arrange information collaboratively, as on wikis, and then retrieve it precisely, as with databases. So we built Wagn.

Wagn powers Hooze by letting communities of users organize information on-the-fly. Its innovative design infuses wikis with database power, giving it great flexibility. Conceived a year ago, the open-source tool is already used for knowledge management, meeting records, documentation, personal information management, and, of course, building a sustainable economy ;)