Can I see the Sweet Perks?
Yes, they're at the bottom of the page. There's serious stuff before that.
I Didn't Watch the Video. What Is This?
That's fair. We read pretty fast ourselves. BuyBlue is a simple, radically streamlined application, intended to run initially on Android and subsequently on iOS, that will let you know if the items you're shopping for come from companies that mean you harm on one end, or are treating their employees well and supporting a wide variety of progressive priorities, on the other.
What Are You Raising Funds For?
We've built the back end for this application: the funds are to build the shopping application, on Android, and if we meet our stretch goal, iOS. Beyond that, in a broader sense, to create a company and process that will fight the world’s most predatory companies, help companies that are mediocre but not hostile, and get the word out about great companies and their products.
There Are Other Shopping Apps. Why Is Yours Different?
There are three parts to that answer – the time, the company, and the Red Filter.
First, the historical moment is unique. The political energy necessary to make a company like this a success – to attract the enthusiastic support of the activists, of the millions of people necessary to make an impact in the United States – didn’t exist as recently as November 7.
Second, more importantly, this company isn’t just a shopping app. This Kickstarter is for a shopping app: the company itself will build a broader view of who is using our money against us, how they’re using our money against us, and will offer other tools in other financial arenas – investments, banking, mortgages, loans – to help move the needle toward the people and companies who support the things we support.
Third, the shopping app itself is different – better, we’d suggest – than what’s out there at this time. It’s radically streamlined; where setup is required (and there won’t be much) you’ll do it at your computer before going to the store. In the store, it’ll be scan, yes/no, put it in the cart if yes. If you make people fiddle with menus while shopping, they’ll turn the app off and never touch it again.
The critical part of the shopping app is the algorithm that solves the reverse shopping problem. That algorithm, the Red Filter, prevents conservatives from taking our work, as they’ve taken the work of other people who’ve tried to solve this, and using it against us by sorting for the worst products and buying those. We score at 50-100; everything under 50 is UNRECOMMENDED. (There are edge cases, and the algorithm handles those; what if there’s no product of a particular type over 50%? And so on.) Every other attempt at this we’ve seen fails this test. Building a tool that can be used against us isn’t just counter-productive: it’s a bloody waste of the time and energy of the people who’ve adopted that tool. Tools that fail on this metric are broken. Ours isn’t.
We’ve said elsewhere that we’ll be transparent: this is the exception. The Red Filter algorithm won’t be disclosed, to prevent attempts to game it.
Stretch Goals?
Our funding goal is $35,000, for an Android beta of the BuyBlue application. Our first stretch goal is $55,000, for an iOS version.
Beyond that, like everyone, we have plans to conquer the universe. We've planned functionality it will take us substantial time and effort to build ... and we'll talk about some of that functionality down the road.
How Will You Manage User Privacy?
In the data tier, we’re consolidating and scrubbing huge amounts of company data. It’s likely we’ll give that away to some partners – Planned Parenthood or ACLU, for example -- and charge others that are themselves for-profit entities. But this will be non-customer data. If there’s ever a use case where sharing customer data is appropriate, we’ll ask users to opt in – for Planned Parenthood, for the ACLU, for whomever we may partner with. But it’ll be your decision and we’ll ask every time, and not in some monstrous block of end user agreement text that no one will read.
We’ll only store the information necessary to make the application work. While we will use GPS to identify the store you’re in while shopping, for example, we’ll discard the GPS information immediately thereafter. (The store makes a difference: you’ll get a worse score in some stores, based on ownership, and the substitutions we may recommend will be different based on what we know of the products those stores carry.) The important part of this is that we will be transparent: we will report the data we store, and if you’d like the data associated with your account deleted, we will permanently delete it. We will not sell or share user data ever, without your explicit permission. Not the usual boilerplate agreement no one reads: you’ll have to opt in in a clearly written message for us to use your data in any way except in the application.
Will You Take the Fight Outside the U.S.?
As soon as we possibly can. The work we’ve done so far is all architected to handle multi-lingual implementations. The companies doing us harm are multinational: we have to fight them where they do business, and that’s everywhere. We want to go into other countries as quickly as we can ingest product and company data relevant to those countries.
What If You Get It Wrong?
There’s no such thing as perfection. We’ll work in good faith: much as we may personally have issues with the Koch Brothers or Rupert Murdoch, their companies will be graded by the same algorithm we apply everywhere else. (Yes, we’re going to look at media companies, too: we’re going to look at everything that has a financial component, as we have the opportunity to do so.) If a company notifies us that we got something wrong, and we agree, we’ll adjust the data that feeds the scoring algorithm. We’ll adjust the algorithm itself over time, for that matter: the world is complex. As an example, Google’s search algorithm used to be very simple: today people build entire companies around understanding it and its impact. Our algorithms will evolve in the same ways.
How Do You Treat Issues That Divide Progressives, Such As GMO?
We are committed to transparency: and, within some limits, to permitting people to weight the subjects that matter to them most. If we know that a food has GMO within it, we’ll tell you. (We’ll tell you more than that; we’ll tell you how it was grown, where, when, and by whom, to the degree we know that.) Then you can choose to weight GMO, or ignore it. There are other things you’ll be able to weight – but not discount entirely. You can weight POC employment, female executives, LGBTQ rights, more heavily than the other elements in a company’s score: that’s fair. We don’t all care about the same things to the same degree. But you won’t be able to remove those weightings from the score entirely. We are an ideological company: if you really feel that POC employment or feminism or prison labor or LGBTQ rights shouldn’t be in your scoring algorithm … this may not be the application for you.
What’s To Prevent Others From Doing This?
Conservatives won’t. The idea that they’d attempt a consumer-oriented company is fairly laughable, isn’t it? And if they tried to, they’d fail. The energy behind our company relies in good part on the reality that young people run strongly liberal: and that 18-35 demographic is important to companies because old people very rarely change their shopping habits. (And conservatives are old: in the last election, averaging 17 years older than liberals.) Young people are making the purchasing decisions that will influence what they buy for the rest of their lives, and companies will take steps to cater to them. We’re planning to ensure that they’re the right steps. Or the left steps, anyway.
Liberals are likely to try. That’s OK. As we say, this has been tried before, though no one has hit on our solution set so far. If so, we’ll compete with them. Real competition, not crony capitalism, is a good thing.
How Will You Measure Success?
We'll show it by improving the mediocre companies, making good companies great, and running a few bad companies out of business. We’ll show it by changing the balance of donations on OpenSecrets. This isn't going to be hard to measure. A company that preaches virtue? There are a lot of those, and sure, we’d like to be virtuous ourselves. But mostly we want to move the needle, and show the work that went into that move.
Are You Going To Apply Your Algorithm To Yourself?
Yes. Transparency. We’ll hire POC programmers who frequently find a hard time getting in the door in tech companies, and mentor young people to get them up to speed within the tech space. We’ll Look Like America and we’ll report back on our results. We won’t have a perfect result: Barack Obama won’t be writing our code with his own hands. But after the crap this country put him through, we figure he deserves a vacation anyway.
Our Advisory Board has NAACP Image Award Winners Tananarive Due and Steven Barnes. It has David Gerrold, a Jewish pioneer for gay adoption, and Dr. Stephen A Nuño, a Latino journalist, activist, and professor. We'll be expanding the Board to include people with other viewpoints -- Asian, Feminists, Trans, others -- and we'll pay attention to what they tell us.
Founders
Tim Gilmour
Tim is an entrepreneur, web developer, marketing strategist, and artist, with over 20 years experience in the media, internet, and software development fields. Tim has designed, built, and managed hundreds of websites and apps over the course of his career, as well as various marketing campaigns, broadcast TV shows, and art projects. He's done work for every sort of company, from boutiques to non-profits to early stage startups to corporate giants.
Tim possesses broad business experience across entrepreneurship, design and art direction, marketing and promotions, software development, project management, business development, and upper management. His software development experience ranges from BASIC to PHP to C# to several dead languages, across various platforms.
A long-time Democrat, Tim has been involved with a number of causes including women's rights, 1st amendment issues, serving underprivileged communities, and humanitarian causes.
Daniel Keys Moran
Dan is a writer, speaker, and software architect. He was first published at the age of eighteen, and his first programming job came shortly thereafter. Dan has been building complex enterprise software solutions for 35 years, for clients including EMI Music, Launch.com (now Yahoo Music), Zag.com (now TrueCar), Visa, Edgecast (AT&T), Footlocker, Cooking.com, and Amgen.
Facebook quotes him on their Data Science page: “You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.”
Wikipedia credits Dan with coining the word “webcast.”
Dan's classic novel “The Long Run” is one of the highest rated SF novels on Goodreads, and his original story about Boba Fett appears in the best-selling SF anthology of all time. His Star Trek story “Hard Time” is one of the best-regarded episodes of all the Star Trek television shows -- Playboy ranked it 16th out of 695. He is a professional speaker whose work has broadcast on NPR, and has covered topics as diverse as genetics, computing, space travel, medical technology, and the Pony Express.
He is a yellow dog Democrat who has done volunteer work with the homeless, and clinic defense for NOW.
Advisory Board
David Gerrold
David is a writer whose work is famous around the world. His prolific output includes teleplays, film scripts, stage plays, comic books, more than 50 novels and anthologies, and hundreds of articles, columns, and short stories. He has worked on a dozen different TV series, including Star Trek, Land of the Lost, Twilight Zone, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, and Sliders. He is the author of Star Trek’s most popular episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” In 1995, Gerrold's novel “The Martian Child” won the science fiction triple crown: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Poll, and in 2007, it was adapted for film starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. David has also been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards ten times, and has received the Skylark Award for Excellence in Imaginative Fiction, the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Horror, and the Forrest J. Ackerman Lifetime Achievement Award.
Gerrold has also been a longtime activist for a variety of progressive causes including gay adoption. “Life is messy everywhere. Our job is to make it better.”
Steven Barnes
Steve is a NY Times bestselling author who has written more than thirty science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels, as well as numerous television scripts. His “Stitch in Time” episode of The Outer Limits won an Emmy for star Amanda Plummer. The NAACP Image Award winner also has written for The New Twilight Zone, StarGate SG-1, and Andromeda. He has been nominated for Hugo, Nebula and Cable Ace Awards.
Steve has lectured at UCLA, Mensa, and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, taught at Seattle University, hosted the Hour 25 radio show on KPFK, been Kung Fu columnist for Black Belt Magazine, been a “Starred Speaker” at the L.A. Screenwriting Expo, and profiled in countless magazines, newspapers, radio shows and webzines. An avid yogi and martial artist with three black belts, Steve is also a pioneer in the human potential movement, creating the groundbreaking “Lifewriting” creativity system, making writers the heroes of their own stories.
Tananarive Due
Tananarive is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter who teaches Afrofuturism at UCLA. She also teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles and for Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA). She was the former Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Spelman College. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient is the author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus and has been named to the Grio100 and Ebony Power 100. Her short story collection “Ghost Summer” won a British Fantasy Award and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award.
In 2013, Due and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes co-wrote a short film, “Danger Word,” based on their novel “Devil’s Wake,” co-produced with director Luchina Fisher. Starring Frankie Faison (The Wire, “The Silence of the Lambs”) and Saoirse Scott, Danger Word was nominated for Best Narrative Short at the BronzeLens and Pan African film festivals.
Stephen A. Nuño, PhD
Stephen is a Political Science professor at Northern Arizona University, as well as a Research Associate at the Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. Dr. Nuño is a frequent contributor for NBC News-Latino, where he focuses on national stories that have an impact on the Latino community. Stephen has written over 200 pieces for NBC, as well as numerous articles for Reuters, TPM, MSNBC, and The Monkey Cage Blog for Washington Post.
Stephen holds a B.A. in Political Science from UCLA, and a Political Science M.A. and Ph.D. from UC Irvine. His current research includes work on Political Behavior, Race and Ethnic Politics, Latino Politics, Mobilization, and Partisanship.
NOW Can I see the Sweet Perks?
You betcha. Here's the ANTIFA perk:
Don't they? We got Fighting Red, Fighting Rainbow, Fighting Feminist Pink, Bold Fighting Pink, and three shades of ever-loving Blue.
Hostile? And yet, from the heart.
Show me the T-Shirt
Damn straight we'll show you the T-Shirt:
And the Print?
“Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth.” - Archimedes
Risks and challenges
Software development is hard. Not too many years ago, more products failed than succeeded. Scrum and agile development have helped bend the curve on that one, but still, even today, a lot of programs fail to deliver, or fail to adequately solve the problem they're designed for, once delivered.
Our core team has been developing software for a very long time. We have built and architected for some of the largest and busiest websites in the world. You can never say you won't make a new mistake, but we won't make any of the common mistakes. We'll project plan, spec, test, and run our project in open sight, in plain view of the world: the $10 perk includes access to the planning forum where we'll be documenting what we're writing, what works, and what doesn't work yet, until we're into our beta. We've already built much of the back end: what's left are not too many web pages, and a fairly simple pair of apps for the phone, Android and iOS -- the iOS app only if we reach our stretch goal.
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Funding period
- (31 days)