Actics: social networking for "ethical" businesses
My friend Jens-Martin Skibsted, co-founder of the amazing Biomega bicycle company, and economist Nicolai Peitersen have launched Actics.com, a site that TreeHugger has dubbed the "ethical facebook." Basically, it allows companies who act right to show off their ethical values and those who might need their services to find them more easily. You can browse members by their values, such as environmentalism, integrity, openness, tolerance, transparency, and confidentiality. Jens-Martin first talked to me about this project two years ago and I'm thrilled that he and Nicolai have brought it to fruition. Here's what TreeHugger had to say about Actics.com:
How does is work? Like with any other social network, you register and define who you are for your profile. Since this one is all about actions and ethics, you get to choose your corporate or personal values and state how you act them out. It is then up to your friends, clients or investors to rate you out of 100 for how true you are to your values. To help you out, they can also send you suggestions and endorse you. A great feature of this software is that a plugin, showing your ethical performance, can be integrated into your website or your company’s intranet if you want to share your results with a bigger network.Link to Actics, Link to TreeHugger post
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My friend Andrew's company The Point is another useful new networking site to encourage/enforce ethical corporate behavior. It's not all about corporate responsibility, it can also help organize any type of group action you are interested in setting up. A very clever idea.
Link to The Point.
I like the framing, and the ability to weight ratings (of yourself) by group. However, even for an "ethical" social network, I'm reluctant to give it my logins to all my other nets and mail accounts for it to slurp out address book contents. I'd be surprised if it went ahead and spammed them, initially or later (as some friends belatedly discovered with at least one service), but I don't want to take the time to create a fake depopulated account to find out.
I like seeing organizations as peers to individuals, unlike most social nets that are person-to-person only.
Interface has some glitches in Safari/MacOS, overprinting in a couple of places like the "definitions" screen after selecting a value.
Like other reputation-aggregation systems, it seems like there is some risk of gaming-the-system and influence, and up/downrating based on other than the named factors... trollrating and friend-boosting, among other behaviors.
i just wanted to say that while Actics looks pretty cool, Biomega bicycles seem to be based on the anti-thesis of good bike design. Non-standard bike design never did anything good for anyone (unless you are one of those pro super cyclists). The classic upright frame http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upright_bicycle form factor built using standardized extruded steel along with rim breaks can't be topped in efficiency, ease of repair/maintaince for the cost.
If you really want something that looks nice, and has strong design esthetic, look to the bicycle designers that know their stuff, there are many independent high quality frame builders out there ie http://www.vanillabicycles.com/
Because an unethical business would never join a network that is only for ethical businesses.
That would be unethical!
ditto @PS re: Biomega. Just a plain - well made - bicycle would be more than enough. Why is this so hard to find these days?
Plus, their site resized my browser. grrrrrrrr.
Biomega, the screen-resizing dimwits, say they 'redefined' the bicycle industry by "focusing on design driven branding and urban mobility."
a) I have no idea what that means
b) You can ride a 12 speed around the world and never be more than one town away from a place with parts. Good luck with that on a shaft-driven Biomega.
you should also check out zazengo.com (seems to be coming soon) looks like a cool hybrid of social network and microsoft office to save the world!
@ Raines Cohen, thanks for your comments re Actics. As you correctly assume, we will not in any circumstance use your login to your email accounts to spam them. We'll state this pledge next to it going forward.
I'm so happy that you remark & like the fact we regard individuals & companies/organisations as the same. In our perspective they're both ethical agents with an impact on on their proximity, whatever that might be. However, we get alot of stick from the business world, seeing it as 'unserious'.
Re. gaming, we do what we can to prevent it, as stated on our profile: http://www.actics.com/actics . Among these are one rating per day allowance; only signed in users can rate; monitoring; and introduction of a symbol next to the ethical price index indicating how valid the numbers are.