Abstract
WikiRate is a Collective Awareness Platform for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPS) project with the aim of “crowdsourcing better companies” through analysis of their Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) performance. Research to inform the design of the platform involved surveying the current corporate ESG information landscape, and identifying ways in which an open approach and peer production ethos could be effectively mobilised to improve this landscape’s fertility. The key requirement identified is for an open public repository of data tracking companies’ ESG performance. Corporate Social Responsibility reporting is conducted in public, but there are barriers to accessing the information in a standardised analysable format. Analyses of and ratings built upon this data can exert power over companies’ behaviour in certain circumstances, but the public at large have no access to the data or the most influential ratings that utilise it. WikiRate aims to build an open repository for this data along with tools for analysis, to increase public demand for the data, allow a broader range of stakeholders to participate in its interpretation, and in turn drive companies to behave in a more ethical manner. This paper describes the quantitative Metrics system that has been designed to meet those objectives and some early examples of its use.
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Notes
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e.g. Kinder, Lydenberg, Domini Research & Analytics (KLD) Social ratings, Dow Jones Sustainability indices.
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Corporate Knights Capital also produce Newsweek’s Green Rankings – http://www.newsweek.com/green/worlds-greenest-companies-2014.
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Mandatory for companies that file with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the 2010 Dodd Frank Act.
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A Metric’s full name is of the format Metric_Designer+Metric_Title, this allows metrics that share the same name to exist independantly in the system.
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Companies can answer questions about their own performance directly through the same mechanism, but must declare that the account used to add this data is operated by an official company representative.
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Metric names are of the format Designer+Title, the URL for this metric is http://www.wikirate.org/Ranking_Digital_Rights+RDR_Total_Score.
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There are 290 metrics already available on the platform.
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It is up to users whether they identify themselves or how they describe themselves, with the exception of users who have the authority to speak on behalf of companies or other registered organisations.
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Acknowledgement
This work is supported by the WikiRate FP7 project, partially funded by the EC under contract number 609897.
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Mills, R. et al. (2016). WikiRate.org – Leveraging Collective Awareness to Understand Companies’ Environmental, Social and Governance Performance. In: Bagnoli, F., et al. Internet Science. INSCI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9934. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45982-0_7
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