There is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.

Recently Google staged the beginning of a contest. They call it "10 to the 100th." They accepted submissions for ideas that would "change the world by helping as many people as possible," and they've put up $10,000,000 to make the winning ideas a reality. I submitted one.

I'm finding it hard to get around the notion that the force shaping today's world more than any other is the rich, Western consumer market. That is, when you or I run to the local Target, we are exercising our share of the world's most powerful aggregate force. Think about it - we're busy making money to buy things, and the rest of the world is busy making those things. More lives are shaped by our collective purchasing decisions than by any other identifiable factor.

The problem is, this power is not recognized by the public, the consumers, us, and so not used intentionally. Those who have recognized it are large multinational corporations, who realize that they can drive down costs by forcing poor people to work in poor conditions, and reap huge profits by advertising their cheaper products to rich people as cool, new, expensive.

And corporations are far more flexible than the governments that regulate them. They can work in many countries at once, while any one government may only govern one. The drive for profits in this void of accountability has led companies to despicable business practices, taking advantage of workers and the environment in countries where the government is unable or unwilling to effectively regulate them.

So now an American mother buying back-to-school clothes for her daughter might be buying clothes made by a little girl who will never go to school. And when a little boy pulls a Christmas chocolate out of his stocking, there's a good chance a little boy in West Africa was enslaved to make that chocolate. And yet still we buy.

We base our purchasing decisions on what will benefit us and our families - what will look good, taste good, feel good, etc. Our main source of information on new products is the litany of commercial advertisments we are subjected to.

But this barrage of ads is a slight of hand, a painting over, a curtain falling between us and the reality of the products we are buying. The truth is that they came from somewhere, they were made by someone, and this history matters far more than whatever version of hip the advertiser wants us to associate his product with. And it's only if we care about and act on this history that we can harness the power of our own purchases and make the changes we'd like to see in the world.

After all, the ultimate power lies with us. We have the money. And if we won't buy it, companies won't make it. Collectively we have the power to improve millions, if not billions of lives, simply by making more informed, more intentional purchases.

So what has kept people from doing that so far? At first I thought it was lack of information, that no one knows where and how products are made, or who makes them. But I have come to learn that it's not that the information isn't out there, it's that it's not accessible. It's spread out across 100 books and 1,000 websites. Many don't know how to go about learning all that would be necessary to make proactive purchases. So what do we do?

This is what I proposed to Google. Create a wiki-based website, like Wikipedia.com, that collects all the information about the ethical practices of all the companies that we buy from. So if all you want is to buy an ethical toothbrush, just do a search on the site for 'toothbrush,' and the five most ethical options will pop-up. If you want to go deeper you can type a company name and read through the collective knowledge of its ethical practices, good and bad. And you can search for an industry, like chocolate, and find out what is happening in the chocolate industry that you might want to consider before buying chocolate.

I call it WikiChoice.com. If Google likes it as much as I do then it will be entered into a round of voting in January, and I will need your help to make sure that this idea is chosen.

Truly, there is no information on earth whose accessibility will improve the world more than this.

Phone for the Homeless

My good friend Aaron sent me this story about Google giving free permanent phone numbers to homeless people in San Francisco. They operate like standard voicemail boxes, accessible from any phone, and will allow these people to include their callback numbers on job applications and the like. If it works in San Francisco Google plans to scale it to other major cities.

Great idea.

I was thinking about how to capitalize on this. Why not offer these newly-phone-numbered folks the chance to sign up for a call list. Or several lists. Then aggregate the most applicable job openings and send them out via voicemail to each person. It's practically no marginal cost once the infrastructure is developed. You can do this with health information, housing opportunities, etc.

One thing I learned while traversing skid row in Los Angeles is that, more than money, hope is often the greatest need among homeless people. What better way to start rebuilding hope than by presenting opportunities directly to people over and over again.

It's a new era in addressing homelessness, because never have homeless people been so easily addressable.

Any other ideas?