Overview

Collective action is a powerful tool for affecting social change. Currently, we have powerful methods for organizing politically and socially, but very poor tools for coordinating economically. Bringing collective economic perspective to bare on our most pressing social and environmental problems will be imperative to solving those challenges.

Red Ink empowers consumers to transform how they think about themselves from: "I am just a drop in a bucket" to "I am a drop in a bucket, and I can see how big that bucket is, how full it is, how fast it is filling, and how effective I am leveraging the participation of my social network.

Red Ink is a Social + Financial Web Platform developed by researchers at MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. The platform is Financial, because it brokers the sharing of transaction data from bank and credit card purchases between consumers and third parties. The platform is Social, because it enables that data to be aggregated and filtered into pools of spending data that can be graphed and analyzed to provide collective perspective on individual behavior. Using this as a base, constituencies of consumers can organize to support common interests by leveraging better information on and increased awareness of their collective economic activity.

Potential use cases supported by the platform are broad: boycott, buycott, business logic, community business development, collective bargaining, collective purchasing, and consumer spending indexes are a few areas it could be applied. The platform is also open enough for users to develop their own innovative uses.