All of a sudden, I’ve seen the hechsher shown in these photos popping up on various products. I’ve never seen it before, and I don’t see it listed on any of the usual online hechsher lists.
Have you seen this mark on any products? (Pics please, if you have!)
Do you know anything about who’s behind it and in what ways (if any) it differs from other hechshers?
Have any recognized authorities commented on its reliability?
I visited the link shown on that symbol (http://is.gd/ocmon) and discovered the following FAQ written by the hechsher’s originators (copied here with permission):
The O-Cmon is the world’s first crowd-sourced Kosher certification. Like Wikipedia or Mi Yodeya, we take advantage of the wisdom, efforts, and interests of the crowds to generate high-quality kosher certification on a wide variety of products with very low organizational or procedural overhead.
Unlike the legacy hechshers, which flow halachic authority down from centralized posekim to professional field personnel to products to consumers, the O-Cmon flows the authority sideways, from consumers, or rather, pro-sumers to products and each other. Instead of relying on expensive inspection processes and time-consuming Halachic research, the O-Cmon takes advantage of each prosumer’s God-given common sense and Jewish knowledge.
The O-Cmon symbol can be read in either English or Aramaic to pose two questions that it empowers you to answer:
Oh, c’mon! How could this not be kosher? Of course, it is!
?כמאן - Says who? Says me!
You, the prosumer, are behind the O-Cmon. You decide what to apply it to, and why.
The team facilitating the great certification work that you do for the O-Cmon is:
Rabbi Benny Neviim, Chief Rabbinic Visionary Officer
Rabbi Chezzi Polk, Chief Rabbinic Crowd Instigation Officer
Rabbi Neviim is a big fan of the crowd-sourced Jewish Q&A site Mi Yodeya, where a crowd of people who base their lives on Jewish law and tradition ask great questions and provide each other with fast, interesting, well-sourced, peer-reviewed answers. The main problem he sees with that site is its old-fashioned insistence that it “does not offer professional (particularly rabbinic) advice” and that users should consult their own Rabbi for personal, practical guidance.
Rabbi Neviim saw the need to go one step further in taking advantage of the wisdom of the crowd. Instead of just getting discussion and information from other prosumers, he reasoned, why not get full-fledged Halachic decisions from them? Rabbi Neviim then joined up with Rabbi Polk, a world-renowned expert in empowering members of the community to make and promulgate their own decisions.
1) Download any of the following graphics.
NOTE: If you have labels bearing our old web address, which started "jewi.sh", please discard them, as that link doesn't work anymore.
2) Find products or services that you feel aren’t getting the kosher certification they deserve. This includes products or services that you produce yourself, and that the legacy hechshers would therefore never touch. One example of this latter category would be your home-made Mishloach Manot packages.
3) Affix the O-Cmon label to these products and services.
4) (Optional, but recommended) Post a photo of the newly-certified product to the O-Cmon’s home page and to your social networks, so that your friends can benefit from your applied expertise.
Unlike the typical legacy hechsher, which wraps its symbol in trademark protection and hires aggressive litigators to hound anyone who uses the symbol without the Draconian rules handed down from on high by the hechsher’s central authorities, the O-Cmon promotes public sharing of its certification by:
Releasing all of its materials under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. That means that prosumers are welcome to reuse and remix the O-Cmon as long as they acknowledge where it came from (which the link to our home page on the bottom of the symbol takes care of) and agree to share their work with other prosumers.
Making its home page a community-editable wiki, so that even the information about the O-Cmon itself can benefit from the wisdom of the crowd.
Please do not adhere O-Cmon stickers to products that you do not own. Unfortunately, the prosumerist movement that we are trying to promote has not yet been adopted widely enough yet, so your educational impulse is likely to be considered vandalism by the products' owners. In addition, consumers who encounter the product may mistakenly think that it's certified by an actual hechsher, rather than a Purim joke.
It's not only on stickers. I recently saw it preprinted on the label of a soda can:
I've since seen it on these non-food items:
It says O K'man - Like Who.
You are supposed to find out who says this product is kosher and go to the link to publicize that Man Deamar
