How Values Commons works
The sample on the right is a ranking you can change. Below it are the steps behind every ranking, what the site can answer today, what it will not do, and how to check each of those.
Rather be walked through it? Take the two-minute tour.
Want to kick the tires? Drag a slider. Nothing breaks.
Behind this is the sky over your part of the world right now, computed in your browser from the clock.
Adjust a priority and the list reorders at once, computed in your browser.
See every factor, weigh each one, and read what it measures
Each ? says what a factor measures and how to weigh it wisely. The guides go deeper: open the guides library →
- 1Local roaster co-op79member disclosure · strong on fair pay
- 2Fairtrade supermarket line78Fairtrade Intl. · strong on fair pay
- 3Single-origin specialty71Open Food Facts · strong on gentle processing
- 4Global brand, house blend56company filing · strong on price
- 5Budget instant44Open Food Facts · strong on price
Plate IFig. 1. The coffee ranking, one step at a time.
How a ranking is made
The coffee sample above, split into the four steps that produce its order. Change a slider in the sample and these numbers change with it.
1What you care about
Saved as a small file on your device that holds your weights and hard lines. No identity, no account.
Your values file →2What is known about each option
Facts about Local roaster co-op, from its member disclosure
Every fact names its source and the date it was checked.
Where facts come from →3The arithmetic
Each fact times the share you gave it, added up. A missing fact counts as a neutral 50 and is never guessed.
The method in plain words →4Your ranking
Anyone who checks gets the same order from the same inputs, and nobody can pay to change it.
Try it on a real decision →What's happening. The four steps that turn your weights into an order. These numbers change when you move the sample's sliders.
Why it matters. Most rankings you meet were ordered by someone else's priorities, usually whoever paid for the top spot. This one runs on yours, and every step of it is on the page.
Devil's advocate. The coffee is made up. Five types stand in for thousands of real bags. And an average can hide one terrible fact behind four good ones, which is why hard lines exist, and why the app caps a score when something you care about a lot scores 20 or less.
Rabbit hole. How scores are calculated, then the worked formula on the standard's page, which runs the real engine.
Three experiments to run on Fig. 1
Guess the winner before you press, then check the four steps above.
- Exp. 1Make price the thing that matters most.
- Exp. 2Care mostly about the world.
- Exp. 3Care mostly about yourself.
Other tools that use the same files
- Group values
- Put several values files side by side. Everyone's hard lines hold, and where you disagree stays on the page.
- Shared plan
- What a group decides to do. It keeps the reason for each step, and who disagreed.
- Fact repair
- Send a correction with its source. Once it is checked, the fact changes for everyone, and the change stays on record.
- Ownership map
- Who owns a brand is a fact with a receipt too, so a look-alike choice can be traced to whoever is behind it.
Hard lines are checked before any arithmetic, so an allergen or a boycott removes an option outright. Set yours.
Plate IIFig. 2. How many decisions on the map have an answer. The hatched part of each bar is decisions nobody has built yet.
Where it stands
About one decision in six has a ranking today. The map was drawn first, on purpose, so the gaps show.
What it can answer today
The map of everyday life names 1,069 decisions. 179 of them have a ranking you can use today. The rest are named and waiting to be built.
| Food and drink | 83 of 133 | |
|---|---|---|
| Technology | 20 of 100 | |
| Personal care | 18 of 83 | |
| Home | 10 of 165 | |
| Health | 7 of 79 | |
| Transport | 7 of 55 | |
| Clothing | 6 of 67 | |
| Media and culture | 5 of 71 | |
| Family and care | 5 of 60 | |
| Money | 5 of 54 | |
| Learning | 3 of 43 | |
| Animals | 3 of 33 | |
| Civic life and giving | 3 of 31 | |
| Organizations | 3 of 24 | |
| Travel | 1 of 43 | |
| Work and livelihood | 0 of 28 |
has a ranking todaynamed on the map, not built yet
Map of 23 Oct 202616 areas1,069 decisions179 with a ranking865 open22 held back3 out of scope
Biggest hole in the map: Home, with 154 decisions still unanswered.
What changed lately
28 sources marked as due for a fresh check, in bicycles, crowdfunding platforms, e-bikes and 6 more.
New comparisons: Browsers and Messaging. Facts rebuilt in Browsers and Messaging.
Guides rewritten: AI assistants, Clothing, Digital literacy and 5 more.
New comparisons: Direct-drive solar, Federated social servers, Off-grid power systems and Self-hosting platforms. New guides: Credit cards, Direct-drive solar, Federated social servers and 4 more. Facts rebuilt in AI assistants, Banking, Credit cards and 6 more.
Each line comes from the data itself, tied to the change that made it. Sources get marked for a fresh check when they pass their review date.
If you read four guides, read these, in this order
- 1
Vote with your money: where to start
What your spending pays for, and a plain place to begin.
- 2
Which purchases carry the most weight
Why a bank account or a phone plan matters more than a chocolate bar.
- 3
How scores are calculated
Exactly how a number is made, so you can trust it or argue with it.
- 4
Leaving locked-in software
How to get your things out of a service that makes leaving hard.
Plate IIIFig. 3. The three apps and what they share.
The apps and what they share
Values Commons is this site. It holds the open standard for values files and the tools that use those files, alone or in a group. Three apps use the same engine and the same file formats, so a values file you make in one works in the others.
Apps you use
Conscious Consuming, the app that ranks what you buy, where you bank and what you give to by your values, also at consciousconsuming.org·Kosplora, learning routes from your own question, at kosplora.org. Its reading shelf ranks places to learn by your values·Where to Message, a demo: which messenger·See other apps built on it →
Shared by all of them
Your values file (step 1)·Sourced facts (step 2)·The engine (step 3)
The rules underneath
Your values file follows an open standard, so any app can read it and anyone can build another app on the same files. For builders: The Open Values Standard.
Bentley Moon makes it, at the Futurism Institute.
What it will not do, and how to check
| The promise | How you can check it |
|---|---|
| No ads and no pay-to-rank | The order is facts times your weights. Step 3 above is the whole formula, and the app shows it for every score. |
| No account and no tracking | There is no sign-in anywhere. Your values file stays on your device unless you send it to someone. |
| Every fact shows its source | Open any score in the app and each fact links the page it came from. Every release is checked for a fact without a source, and fails if it finds one. |
| It says when the evidence is thin | 424 measures are published as withheld, next to the 466 that earned a top mark. |
| Same inputs, same result | The code and data are public, so anyone can rerun a ranking and compare. Source, data and audits. |
| Yours to keep | It works offline and fits on a flash drive. If you dislike how it is run, take a copy and run your own. |
If you catch it breaking one of these, write in.
Why it matters for security
A data breach needs somewhere the data is kept. Values Commons keeps nothing about you on a server: no account, no password, no history. What you set stays in your browser.
| What protects you | How you can check it |
|---|---|
| No account to break into | There is no sign-in, so there is no password to steal. Your values file holds weights from 0 to 5 and nothing that says who you are. |
| Your browser blocks sending your data elsewhere | Every page comes with a security policy (the Content-Security-Policy header) that lets it connect only to this site. Open your browser's network panel, click the page, and read the connect-src line. The one exception is the barcode scanner. If a barcode is not in the app's own files, the app asks Open Food Facts about it, and the barcode is all it sends. |
| No code from other companies | The app uses no outside libraries and loads no scripts from other sites, so a hacked package somewhere else cannot reach it. package.json lists no runtime dependencies, and the same policy refuses scripts from anywhere else. |
| Security choices, compared with sources | The app compares password managers, VPNs, messengers, browsers and email, each fact with its source. The ownership map shows four VPN brands that look like rivals and have one owner. |
Devil's advocate. Your values file is not signed, so a file someone sends you could have been edited and you would not know. The site runs on Cloudflare, so it is up only when Cloudflare is. If you find a way past any of this, report it privately.
Run your own copy
A household, congregation or co-op can run its own copy, because the whole thing is a folder of files anyone can copy. What funding would pay for.
Values Commons is one project of the Futurism Institute. Why it exists, and how it fits with the others, is on the Institute's design page.
Further reading
Other people working on the same questions: rating what we buy, keeping our own data, and running things together.
Rating products and their claims
- Open Food Facts. A free, open database of food products, built by volunteers. Most of the food facts on this site come from it.
- Ethical Consumer. A UK not-for-profit that has rated companies on how they behave since 1989.
- Green claims, European Commission. Its study found that 53% of green claims on products in the EU are vague, misleading or unfounded.
Keeping your own data
- Local-first software, Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan (Ink & Switch, 2019). Why an app should keep your data on your own device and still let you share it. The values file here works that way.
- The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok, Cory Doctorow (Wired, January 2023). How platforms get worse for their users once those users cannot easily leave.
- Solid, started by Tim Berners-Lee. People keep their data in stores they control, and apps ask to read it.
Running things together, and attention
- Beyond Markets and States, Elinor Ostrom (Nobel Prize lecture, 2009). Her evidence that communities can look after shared resources themselves, without a company or a government running them.
- Center for Humane Technology, co-founded by Tristan Harris. Work on how apps compete for people's attention, and what to do about it.