Purchase Feedback

Project by James Rising:

This project is part research and part social entrepreneurship.  The goal is to construct a software system that can evaluate the unintended consequences of individual purchases, and match them to charities that ameliorate those specific effects.  Using this framework, consumers could get detailed information about the effects of their purchases and have an easy way to respond to that information, just by copying their credit card statements or entering their receipts on a website, or (in collaboration with a store’s customer-tracking system) getting the information immediately when buying their items.

An Open Model of Climate Change Behaviors

Project by James Rising:

The behaviors that produce climate change are overdetermined and systemic, but that fact suggests that there exist “leverage points” within society where small policy changes will have big effects on these behaviors.  The goal of this project is to generate a new style of system dynamical model of society, at a sufficiently high level of granularity to identify those policies and institutions.  Some complimentary goals include the incorporation of fractal networks into system dynamics, producing an online interface for researchers to contribute and run simulations, and develop a numerical framework to analyze the coherence and local-significance of the model elements.