The Wikirate Project

Wikirate has the vision of helping consumers express themselves as ethical economic citizens. The objective of Wikirate is to be the ‘go-to’ place for information on companies’ social and environmental practices, allowing consumers and stakeholders such as policymakers or the media to be better informed. Ultimately, the project will provide companies with additional incentive to act sustainably. We will achieve this by developing and maintaining an open social networking system that allows Internet users to cooperatively create and share knowledge on company behaviour. The information may come from public sources, or from “sensors” such as webcams or individual user uploads of videos or images or from separate whistleblowing websites – a real-time gathering and management of information from people and their environment. The information will be accumulated and appropriately visualized on the website to allow users to compare and rate such companies. We will foster and empower the community to act on sustainability topics such as climate change or natural resource management and specific markets or companies. This thriving community will create relevant and quality content. Further, these engaged and involved users will change their behaviours, providing significant incentive for companies to follow sustainable societal, environmental and economic methods. The website will be based on an open-source software platform called “Wagn”, and any improvements to the platform will be freely available. Further, we will offer an open data infrastructure by supporting an application programming interface (API) that allows anyone to access the website’s data.

Consortium

Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (Greece)
University of Cambridge (UK)
Grass Commons (USA)
Fondazione AHREF (Italy)
Kaleidoscope Futures Lab LTD (UK)
University of Abertay Dundee (UK)