The Wikirate project: Crowdsourcing Better Companies

With the upsurge in interest in sustainable finance that integrates ethical, environmental and governance factors, investment bankers are increasingly turning to the new breed of
e-psychometricians to provide the necessary assessment expertise. Hence the Wikirate Project, funded by the European Commission 7th Framework Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Programme.

Wikirate is a collaborative project between the The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge, Wikirate e.V. (Germany), Grass Commons (USA), Fondazione Ahref (Italy) and the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (Greece). Its objective is to develop a website that will become the ‘go-to’ place for information on companies’ social and environmental practices, thereby allowing consumers, policymakers and the media to become better informed.

In the process the project will provide companies with additional incentives to follow sustainable societal, environmental and economic methods. This will be achieved through an open social networking system that allows Internet users to cooperatively create and share knowledge on company behaviour. The information will come from public sources, “sensors” such as webcams, individual user uploads of videos and images, and from separate 'whistleblowing websites'. It will allow users to compare and rate companies.

The website will be based on the "Wagn" open-source software platform that offers an open data infrastructure that supports an Application Programming Interface (API), allowing anyone to access the website’s data.