Partners
Cambridge will take the lead in WP2 (Research Informing Design) and will work closely with DELAB under WP7 (Evaluation). Cambridge will also provide input in the preparation of reporting campaigns (WP4 – Soliciting The Whistle Reports).
Previous Experience:
- The Department of Sociology’s key research groups, ‘Economic and Political Sociology’ and ‘Media, Culture and New Technologies’ represent a wealth of knowledge and experience that would support this project.
- The Department of Sociology has significant synergies with respect to accountability-focused research. These include:
- The EC Horizon 2020 (Innovation Action) funded ‘The Digital Whistleblower: Fiscal Transparency, risk assessment and impact of good governance policies assessed’. This project, led by Larry King and Mihaly Fazekas, also aims to support accountability through open data.
- ‘Social Media, Human Rights NGOs, and the Potential for Governmental Accountability,’ which is Ella McPherson’s current ESRC-funded research.
- ‘The Whistle,’ funded by Cambridge’s ESRC Impact Acceleration Account, which is a digital reporting platform for civilian witnesses of human rights violations that supports the accessibility and verifiability of this information for human rights NGOs. Ella McPherson is developing ‘The Whistle’ with a small team, and this experience will directly inform the shape of the The Whistle platform.
Previous Experience:
The CERTH research involved in SocialSensor focuses on the following R&D areas: semantic multimedia analysis, indexing and retrieval, large-scale and social media analysis, knowledge structures, languages and reasoning for content analysis, personalisation and knowledge discovery for Semantic Web applications. The team has participated in more than 50 EC IST and 85 National projects and subcontracts. Over the last eight years, the CERTH team has authored over 200 publications in journals, 65 books and book chapters and over 500 presentations to international conferences.
Decko Commons will lead all software development work packages (WP3 - The Whistle Design and development, and WP5 – Corporate Network Mapping – Design and Development).
Previous Experience:
Decko Commons was founded in 2014 with the vision of cultivating a rich and productive creator community for Decko. It is currently being added as a partner to the Wikirate consortium and will lead development on Wikirate-related Decko improvements for the remainder of the current Wikirate grant. Ward Cunningham, the inventor of the original wiki, described Decko as “one of the most exciting contributions to wiki since I coined the term”.
DELAB will lead WP7 (Evaluation) and will participate intensively in WP2 (Research Informing Design). Further, DELAB will support WP4 (Soliciting The Whistle Reports) by facilitating reporting campaigns in Eastern Europe.
Previous Experience:
DELab, as a new interdisciplinary unit of University of Warsaw, builds on the vast previous research experience of its founding faculties (The Faculty of Economic Science, The Interdisciplinary Center of Mathematical and Computational Modelling and Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics). It also hosts researchers from other departments – sociologists, physicists, lawyers – synergising and focusing their experiences onto the field of socio-economical impact of ICT.
OpenCorporates will use its expertise in corporate networks and existing corporate structure data to provide a solid start to the project. Further, it will add supplier relationships to the OpenCorporates data model and database, extend the API to support the functionality required by the other partners (potentially including the ability to support ‘write’ requests, so that the data can be enriched by users of the other platforms), work with the partners to extend the network data to the core corporate entities featured in Chain React, and work with Wikirate to support linking of ‘brands’ to corporate networks. OpenCorporates is thus heavily involved in WP5 (Corporate Network Mapping – Design and Development).
Previous Experience:
Over the past two years, thanks to a grant from the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, OpenCorporates added corporate relationship data using only public sources, and using an innovative and significantly more detailed model than proprietary sources of such data. Crucially, like all OpenCorporates data, the relationship data includes full provenance, detailing where and when it was sourced, and makes all this information public and as open data. This brings multiple benefits. First, it allows the data to be checked against the original source, increasing the quality of both the data on OpenCorporates and the original source data. Second it adds essential context to the data, allowing it to be combined with other data and in other contexts in a much more granular and accurate way, compared with so-called ‘black-box’ data (i.e. data that has no provenance). Third the open licence allows the information to be used freely by NGOs, journalists and citizens, for the public good.
WikiRate e.V. is the project coordinator of the Project (WP1 - Project Management) in regards to non-financial aspects, and will lead WP6 (Soliciting Disclosures for Corporate Network Maps) and WP8 (Dissemination and Exploitation).
Previous Experience:
Wikirate e.V. is a consortium partner to Wikirate, one of the first CAPS projects. It is actively building community on Wikirate.org, and is actively establishing relationships with activist organisations to use wikirate’s tools to rate companies.