For funders · first real use
Vote with your money, and organize with others, on a tool no one can buy or shut down.
Values Commons is live. Conscious Consuming already compares everyday choices on sourced facts; the same open standard also carries personal rules, correctable evidence, and group decisions between compatible tools. What remains unproven is human use. Funding would pay for the first users and groups, careful observation, and improvements drawn from what they actually need.
What sits underneath
The app is one use of an open standard.
Conscious Consuming is the first working app. The Open Values Standard underneath it keeps three things in files people can hold and inspect:
A values file people keep
Rules and close-call priorities can move between compatible apps without an account or identity profile.
Evidence anyone can correct
Facts and ratings keep their citations. A community can review, correct, copy, and combine them without a central platform's permission.
Group decisions without an account
People can find common ground, inspect disagreement, and make a shared plan while the files stay in their hands.
The core runs in the browser and travels as files. Optional discussion can be hosted separately, but choosing, checking facts, and making group plans do not depend on a central service. See how file-sharing works →
The problem
Honest information about everyday choices has no business model.
This is a funding problem before it is a villain problem. Tools that help people choose are paid through advertising, affiliate commissions, brand relationships, or user data, because those are the models that work, and each one puts a thumb somewhere near the scale. Anyone building in this space faces the same pressure, and most respond the way the incentive rewards. Groups face a second version of it: acting together usually requires someone else's accounts, database, and off-switch. What is missing is not good intentions. It is a way to pay for information that answers only to the person reading it.
People already want to choose by their values. What's missing isn't willingness, it's trustworthy, unsponsored information, and rankings that aren't for sale.
What exists now
The reference app is live.
Conscious Consuming lets a person set durable rules, make a practical trade-off, and compare real products, services, media, organisations, and causes. The facts keep their sources. The app is static, installable, and works offline.
Where the evidence is strong we say so precisely, and where it is thin we say that too: the awards ledger gives a top mark on 329 well-evidenced measures and openly lists the 220 it will not award yet. Your values and saved choices live on your own device. There is no server holding them. The same unedited engine also runs a learning atlas and a messaging-choice guide, showing that another subject does not require another platform.
Latest updates
What's new, most recent first.
A running log of shipped progress and findings, updated as they land. Every entry is dated, so reviewers can see the pace.
Ownership graph, live. On any product you can now boycott its parent company and every brand it owns in one tap; those brands then vanish from every ranking, on your device, with a receipt for why.
Navigation rebuilt. The flat category wall became a real branching tree, from area of life down to kind, and region became a single global control that applies across the whole app.
The lines model shipped. Plain rules you set once, diet, allergies, boycotts, now filter across every category at once, and only where the data supports them.
Why grant funding fits
It won't sell ads, data, or rankings, so it needs funding instead.
Private by construction
The core needs no accounts and no central store of anyone's values. Nothing is uploaded.
Open to inspection and reuse
Others can check the engine, copy the file formats, and build a guide for another subject without asking permission.
Rankings are not for sale
No ads, affiliate ranking, brand payments, dark patterns, streaks, or engagement farming.
Useful alone or together
One person can make a choice; a group can reach a decision without handing control to a platform.
It won't sell attention, data, rankings, or brand access, the usual ways recommendation software pays for itself. A grant funds that independence directly.
The equalizer case
The tools that shape choice are concentrating. This one is built not to.
Search, recommendations, and generative AI are concentrated in a small number of companies and countries. These figures show why a decision tool should be able to run almost anywhere.
Values Commons is deliberately the opposite shape: static files that work offline, need no account, run from a flash drive, and can be forked by anyone. It costs almost nothing to serve, nothing to join, and no data centre to own. Choice infrastructure that the excluded can hold in their own hands.
What support strengthens
More people can use it, check it, and adapt it.
The reference app proves the engine on real choices. Support would help people use it in earnest and help another community apply the same rules to a subject it understands.
Values remain portable
Rules and priorities travel between compatible apps without an account or central profile.
Evidence remains correctable
Sourced facts can be inspected, corrected, copied, and combined with a visible trail.
Groups keep disagreement visible
Shared decisions preserve dissent instead of manufacturing unanimity.
Another community can build
A new subject can use the same standard instead of starting from scratch. The in-browser instance press makes it a ten-minute start: name a decision, add options with sources required before scores, then download a working guide.
What we would test
Three questions for six months.
Can one person use it for a real choice? Can one group use it without losing dissent? Can another community plan a useful app for a subject it knows?
Individual use
Invite 20-50 people to use a live app for real decisions and report what helped, confused them, or remained missing.
One shared decision
Take one group from personal rules to a shared plan, recording dissent and any blockers plainly.
One new subject
Help an outside community name the decision, audience, starter facts, correction route, and values that truly belong.
Six months of work
Use it, learn, and fix what matters.
The grant would not fund speculative features. It would fund real use, careful notes, and improvements tied to what people actually encounter.
Invite the first users
Name the decisions, invite 20-50 people, and ask for feedback without accounts or tracking.
Observe real choices
Document where the live instances help, where people get stuck, and which sourced lenses need the most careful improvement.
Try one group decision
Work with a real group, then publish the blockers, disagreement, and reasons behind the decision.
Plan one new app
Help an outside community describe its subject, starter facts, privacy limits, and correction path before code begins.
Improve the adoption guide
Revise the public guide using what the first users and outside community needed. Read the current guide.
Publish what happened
Share the findings, group result, new-subject brief, and open questions without inflating the outcome.
What a grant would fund
Six months to reach first real use.
$35,000
Over 6 months. Running costs are near zero by design, the grant funds time, outreach, validation, and documentation, not servers.
- Reach the first users. Invite 20–50 people to make real decisions with the reference app and learn whether it helps.
- Test one shared decision. Work with one or two real groups and keep disagreement visible.
- Make adoption clearer. Improve the standard, values-file, and new-app guidance using what an outside community actually needs.
- Improve what real users touch. Deepen evidence and usability only where the first users and groups actually need it.
- Stay independent. Fund focused maker time so the project never needs ads, affiliates, sponsorship, or surveillance.
What we will report back
- A live, free tool used by a first cohort, with honest evidence of whether it helped them choose more by their own values.
- At least one real group using the tools for a shared decision, or a clear account of what blocked them.
- Improvements contributed back to open-data sources where possible.
- A clearer public path for others to use Values Commons, fork the standard, or build a fourth instance.
Who is behind it · why now
Built independently; ready to be tested in public.
Bentley Moon-Perkins is a solo maker building public-interest software. He designed and built the flagship app, two illustrative apps, the shared engine, the guides, and the group-decision tools independently.
The same maker runs the other half of this work in the open: an AI-evaluation lab at bentleymoon.com, where the standard of evidence is the same one applied here. Four of its own headline results have been refuted by its own harness and the retractions are published beside the survivors. That is the practice behind the withheld column above.
The app works and the evidence behind it is strong enough to show. What's still untested isn't the technology, it's whether real people and real groups will actually use it. A modest grant moves the project from a finished build to infrastructure people have used in earnest, without giving up the independence that makes it worth trusting.
To continue the conversation: reply to the email that shared this preview. We're glad to give a live walkthrough, answer diligence questions, or hand over the full written brief and the deployable preview to host yourself.