Via Worldchanging’s Kirstin Butler, who reports on the Sourcemap project:

“Finally the tools to enable meaningful supply-chain transparency have come of age, and more people than ever before can use them.

Until recently, visualizing global goods’ sourcing was the domain of contemporary artists and technoactivists. Tracing an object back to its origins could be a time-consuming and frustrating process that meant doing solitary research and creating original interfaces. But the increased accessibility of online mapping tools and wiki-style collaborations have changed the cartography of consumption.

Enter Sourcemap, an open-source application for collective supply chain research and mapping. When WorldChanging first reported on Sourcemap last year the project had yet to launch; now its users have already traced the global travels of products as diverse as cars, granola, and lace.”

Video:

Introduction to Sourcemap from Matthew Hockenberry on Vimeo.