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This is my favorite feature yet: leveling up animations! As users express their opinions via Quick Rate and other Do Good Quick areas of bilumi.org, Munin drops pebbles into a water bottle. Contributors can watch the water level rise with every pebble until they reach the next level… and Munin takes a drink! (more…)

We just rolled out a pretty neat feature: anonymous users can now rate, evaluate and write reviews in the Do Good Quick part of our site. Their contributions are only saved when they login or register. Screen shot below: (more…)

We are proud to announce the next release of the bilumi platform and website. Have a look and let us know what you think! (more…)

The Computing Culture group at MIT’s Media Lab is publishing an information sharing service that extends the Buy It Like You Mean It open source code. The Landman Report Card will allow land owners to negotiate with oil and gas companies (more…)

This is a scrambled (family friendly) version of what appeared on the front page of the Browse results section of Buy It Like You Mean It yesterday. The hacker responsible only changed one company’s description: alerting us to a security hole without causing real damage.

The problem is now fixed. We treat our website’s security seriously. (more…)

Check out the new demo we built for AccountAbility, a project led by Nate Greenslit at the MIT Media Lab. AccountAbility aims to put socially responsible information on online bank statements.
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The dev flock just whipped out our first external web API, bringing BILUMI closer to expanding how and where people get information. Try it!

Why is this cool? Now it is easier to mash BILUMI data with other data. Mashups can lead to insights and utility not available to a narrow data view. Plus, they’re hella fun.

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Last night was our launch party! Taza hosted us at their Somerville chocolate factory.

As a surprise, we presented a working demo of our text messaging service. Here’s how it works:

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Want to get product and company information while in the store? Text message a barcode, eg 18675309, to

score@bilumi.org

to find out what our database has to say.

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I presented an overview of the technology to Ignite Boston 3. The best part was engaging with the crowd. People laughed at the Willy Wonka example, cheered when I said we were an an open source non-profit, and congratulated me afterwards on a great presentation.

Click the >> arrows below the following image frame to page through the presentation.

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Our dev team has been working their feathers off putting together an interactive online database for collecting socially responsible product information. Compared to that, giving text message access to the database was easy! Check back soon for more details.

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Today was the first of our every-other-week Sunday Jam sessions. These will serve both as informal work sessions and informal planning and presentation meetings. Formally, they are an excuse for the team to hang out and eat dinner together. Clay takes his Chef title as seriously as one might expect.

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The back-end is bulking up considerably (tags, API, solr faceted navigation) and the front-end is being improved to show all these features. Dan and Eggar continue to impress.

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Dan and Eggar worked diligently right up to the last minute to get the site in order for the festival. Chia, a peer from MIT and friend of Marcos and Sam, joined the team in the fall, too, and did great work getting the volunteer packet together. It turned out that laptops are hard to read on sunny days, and people are not too interested in entering data at festivals, either. The kids liked our commercial, though. Talking to people was valuable for general feedback, though, as well as being kind of fun.

Check out the dev flock’s open source trac dev nest.. Use the dev nest to find out more about the design and implementation of our system, track our progress against milestones, report bugs and request features in our soon-to-be released prototype.

Click to play movie

Our very first commercial! Sooo exciting I can’t even wait to start gushing till it finishes uploading. Big ups to Luke Sullivan, Becca Nesson, Wayne Marshall and of course the lovely Lucy Mendel! Nice work team!

Today was the last dev team meeting. We presented to ourselves our accomplishments. Ale showed off the web app, Sam the cellphone proof of concept, Peddie the firefox extension he consulted on, Clay the front end design proposals and I the graph modules.

I wish I could have showed off how much we all learned, both technically about web dev, as well as in understanding what we are building. We are making a new kind of collaborative software, like a wiki, but with tools for helping the group decide the trustworthiness of each contribution. Controversial information is distilled into quantifiable numbers, efficient for SMS and powerful for third party applications. We’ve done good.