When Apple’s iPad was launched early in 2010, its competitors did what they always do. They went out and bought iPads and tore them to pieces to analyse the product’s design, identify its parts and calculate how much one would cost to make. In the electronics industry, this routine is called a "teardown".
As we see clearly with the panic surrounding WikiLeaks, the web makes the actions and, inner communications and deliberations of any company potentially open to similar inspection and accountability.
Cloud Citizen is going to apply the same principles to investigate companies and their decision-making processes as they affect us all: in their impacts on climate change and environmental depletion.
We call this a “sustainability teardown”, and Cloud Citizen will use social journalism to apply it to some of Australia’s best-known retail brands.
Social journalism allies working journalists with non-professionals in the connected web audience to draw on and promote the knowledge of informed citizens in developing stories that need to be told. This information may not be readily available to mainstream media at the time of disclosure. Someone, somewhere, holds everything the media wishes to find out – and someone else wishes to hide.
Its application in a sustainability teardown is not a violent, sudden act but one that is executed patiently, methodically, and deliberately. It can provide new leads. The audience contributes answers to precisely targeted questions, and presents new questions of its own. It is a guided social investigation.
Here, the purpose is to use David Jones’ example to educate all who are interested in the ways in which the actions of a business under scrutiny is contributing to the depletion of the shared natural environment.
A guided public teardown therefore equips the community with tools to tell any business precisely on which environmental metrics it expects them to make progress, and on which of their impacts it expects them to act and report.
And David Jones’ business model provides the perfect example because it is built not on necessity but on the perpetuation of unsustainable consumption.
As we see clearly with the panic surrounding WikiLeaks, the web makes the actions and, inner communications and deliberations of any company potentially open to similar inspection and accountability.
Cloud Citizen is going to apply the same principles to investigate companies and their decision-making processes as they affect us all: in their impacts on climate change and environmental depletion.
We call this a “sustainability teardown”, and Cloud Citizen will use social journalism to apply it to some of Australia’s best-known retail brands.
Social journalism allies working journalists with non-professionals in the connected web audience to draw on and promote the knowledge of informed citizens in developing stories that need to be told. This information may not be readily available to mainstream media at the time of disclosure. Someone, somewhere, holds everything the media wishes to find out – and someone else wishes to hide.
Its application in a sustainability teardown is not a violent, sudden act but one that is executed patiently, methodically, and deliberately. It can provide new leads. The audience contributes answers to precisely targeted questions, and presents new questions of its own. It is a guided social investigation.
Here, the purpose is to use David Jones’ example to educate all who are interested in the ways in which the actions of a business under scrutiny is contributing to the depletion of the shared natural environment.
A guided public teardown therefore equips the community with tools to tell any business precisely on which environmental metrics it expects them to make progress, and on which of their impacts it expects them to act and report.
And David Jones’ business model provides the perfect example because it is built not on necessity but on the perpetuation of unsustainable consumption.
