CCB Magazine

Following Wikipedia’s example, WikiRate is mobilizing a community of volunteers to bring all public information about companies together in one place. What are Zalando's or Zara's views on human rights? How does a fashion chain like Benneton relate to environmental pollution, like Facebook in terms of transparency? The goal: to make them transparent by offering the reader all accessible data on their corporate structure and performance. Sounds like a very ambitious goal, doesn’t it? We wanted to know more about it and asked one of the Directors to explain how WikiRate actually works. Take a look!

Interview Boris Messing and Jens Thomas 

CCB Magazine: Hi Laureen, WikiRate is an open, collaborative digital tool for asking and answering important questions on the impact of corporations. What’s the problem?

Laureen: The problem is that, even though corporations affect every area of our globalized society, information about corporate performance is not available in a usable form. Without free and open data on how companies operate, we cannot hold them to account and so the feedback loop between companies and us, their stakeholders, is broken. 

CCB Magazine:And WikiRate can bring a solution? 

Laureen: I think so. WikiRate is working to fix this feedback loop. By bringing all public data about companies’ performance together in one place and then organizing it, we make sustainability data more accessible, comparable, and usable. Stakeholders who want to engage with companies can now do so, using the data to ground their conversations and choices. 

CCB Magazine:The content on WikiRate is researched, reviewed, and organized by a broad international community. How do I know that information on WikiRate is reliable? Are there, for instance, footnotes like in Wikipedia? 

A platform such as WikiRate is needed because information about the performance of large companies is hidden today. We make data more accessible, more comparable, more usable

Laureen: As with Wikipedia, we rely on community contributions, although in our case users must create an account on WikiRate to contribute. And, like Wikipedia articles, data hosted on the WikiRate platform must cite publicly available sources. When exploring WikiRate data you can therefore always find out where the information came from and see which researchers made what contributions. Like that, the history of activities from a particular researcher is an indication for their credibility and when a specific contributor violates our Terms of Use we can take appropriate action. This transparency in itself is a major improvement over the status quo. Whether the information from a source is accurately represented on the platform, is however just one part of data reliability. As you point out, whether sources themselves are reliable, is a whole other question, and a much harder one to tackle. In this way there is a critical difference between WikiRate and Wikipedia. Wikipedia only allows data from secondary sources, but most of the information we target is currently only available from primary sources: the direct reporting of the companies themselves. The WikiRate community (which of course includes our team) is responsible for making sure we accurately reflect what companies are reporting but making sure that corporate reports themselves are accurate is a bigger challenge and requires the influence of a wide range of corporate stakeholders, including investors, policymakers, and consumers.

CCB Magazine:Who is your main target group?

Laureen: WikiRate truly aspires to be a platform for all company stakeholders, in the broadest sense of that word. Depending on the context, the data that is on the platform has meaning for practically anyone and so we strive to serve all these different audiences. Currently, as the platform’s development focuses on data gathering, the stakeholders we work with most are civil society organizations and their volunteer networks, as well as professors and their students. These groups are strong contributors in regard to the research and creative in terms of exploring the analysis potential of an open data platform like WikiRate. Furthermore, civil society organizations and professors have avenues to drive impact with the research due to their experience with publications and advocacy, and so they are instrumental to WikiRate’s growth. Stakeholders that we have started to serve more indirectly over the past year, include policy makers, supply chain workers, investors and journalists. While these groups are not yet active on the WikiRate platform, they are the audiences targeted by our civil society and academic partners when communicating about specific WikiRate datasets.   

WikiRate in Numbers. https://wikirate.org/
 

CCB Magazine:One aim of WikiRate is to include big companies like Intel, Microsoft, or Dell. Are you approaching these companies or are they approaching you?

Laureen: WikiRate is still very much focused on gathering more information about company performance, working toward critical mass to ensure that engagement around the data is meaningful. But we have been testing the water in terms of company engagement. The majority of company representatives that we are engaging with are from our own outreach, though some company reps are going to the site directly to see how they are represented on the platform. We are raising awareness among companies on the need for structured and useful data reporting, alongside reaching out for discussions and interviews which help us better understand the value we bring to companies and the ways in which engagement with the data and the WikiRate community would be meaningful to them. As such, we approach companies not just as the subject of the WikiRate platform, but also as active participants in the community.

CCB Magazine:Big companies spend billions for marketing, advertising, corporate identity – a non-paid researcher on the other hand is likely to make a perfunctory research. How can I make sure that the open data used for WikiRate is not manipulated by companies? Do you check each entry of the researchers?

Laureen: WikiRate is a place for expert and non-expert research and analysis. The datasets that have been generated by experts, like benchmarking organizations, are protected on WikiRate. This means, that these metrics and data entries can only be edited by the organization that designed the research methodology and gathered the information. In our experience, volunteer researchers are often more invested in their research topics and data accuracy than, say, an ESG consultant who only conducts one-off analyses. Supported with a number of mechanisms that improve data quality like double-checks, for instance, our community of volunteer researchers is able to provide incredibly valuable datasets. In regard to company contributions, WikiRate welcomes companies to check and add data themselves, alongside other community members. To do so, they simply must cite sources like all other contributors so that their contributions can be validated. If a company or community-added source is considered invalid, this then opens the door for a discussion around the data, credibility of sources, and ultimately new, potentially contradictory data can be added.

WikiRate is a place for expert and non-expert research and analysis. In our experience, volunteer researchers are often more involved in their research topics and data accuracy than, for example, an ESG consultant performing only one-off analyses

CCB Magazine:Even Zalando, one of the most successful German digital fashion companies with its home base in Berlin, relies on new supply chain transparency via WikiRate via its in-house project zImpact. How great is the danger of green washing?

Laureen: Zalando’s zImpact program sees value in WikiRate and supports many supply chain initiatives that strive to raise the bar of transparency and accountability in the fashion industry. For WikiRate, engaging with companies that want to improve their own transparency, alongside that of others, is a positive thing. Moreover, when working with WikiRate, companies understand that they will be held to the same standards as other companies on WikiRate and will be included in transparency assessments all the same. The emphasis is thus on building meaningful relationships with companies that enable the WikiRate community to engage with them time and again, having critical and constructive conversations to ultimately help companies systematically improve their practices. The more transparent companies are, the more constructive these conversations will be for all sides.

For WikiRate, working with companies that want to improve their own transparency alongside that of others is a positive thing. ns is about building meaningful relationships that allow companies to systematically improve their practices. The more transparent companies are, the better it is for everyone

CCB Magazine:To be honest, I find the platform not easy comprehensible. When is the platform ready to be consumed?

Laureen: We have just released improved navigation on WikiRate to make it easier for people to find key information about the organization itself, as well as allowing users to navigate more fluidly between the data platform and the research tools. The WikiRate platform is however still in Beta, meaning it is under development while already accessible to the public. In the past years we have been focused on growing the data resource and so developing the research tools and partnerships that enabled us to generate new structured and comparable datasets. As such, most of the data impact currently happens off-platform, through data exports and external analyses that feed into publications, reports, and advice. As we are reaching critical mass for a number of datasets, we are, however, now freeing up resources to concentrate on making this data more accessible and discoverable to a wider audience on the platform.

CCB Magazine:Last question: How do you finance WikiRate? And where do you see the future of your platform? 

Laureen: WikiRate has been financed through two different European Commission grants, the second of which was finalized at the end of 2018. Meanwhile, we began to diversify our funding through donations, grants from Foundations, and contract work. As we continue this process, we are also looking towards sustainable models for funding such as offering services and API charges for heavy users. These types of funding alongside grants and donations will allow us to stay true to our values of open, accessible and comparable corporate data. The future that we see for WikiRate is as a thriving open data platform with a large community of informed and engaged company stakeholders. We envision that WikiRate will be part of an expansive network of digital platforms and tools that share data, be it shopping sites, investment tools, job platforms, you name it.