Wikirate are one of the exhibitors at this year’s Open Knowledge Festival. This is a guest post by Lucia Lu of Wikirate.org, letting you know more of what they have planned for the event.
What is Wikirate.org?
Wikirate.org is a community-driven initiative to “open companies up” by providing a wiki platform for corporate sustainability – what companies are doing well and badly. The information is created by and for anyone who interacts with companies: consumers, employees, investors, management, regulators, competitors… in other words, it’s for all of us.
Collaboratively-edited content on Wikirate.org focuses on companies, sustainability topics, and where the two meet. Any given company page will feature several articles for topics and vice versa. Every article is supported by Claims, and the Claims themselves must cite external Sources.
What are Claims, exactly? And why not cite sources directly? The answer is that Claims are Wikirate’s building blocks; they break information down into bite-sized pieces that can be reviewed, discussed, challenged, defended, and honed. In an era suffused with advertising and advocacy, we all hear many strong claims made about Companies every day. Wikirate provides a mechanism for looking closely at this deluge of Claims and bringing greater attention to Claims that are valuable and credible.
#openfashion14
As a 100% user-powered platform, Wikirate depends on its community to become the go-to place for transparent and reliable information on corporate sustainability. To get there, the platform will be launching its first content-drive campaign #openfashion14 at the Open Knowledge Festival in Berlin.
Focusing the attention of current and new contributors on the fashion industry, the campaign's goal is to demonstrate that collectively, the crowd is even able to make sense of what’s happening behind-the-scenes of an entire industry, if it is provided with the right tool, a space, where they can interact with big data.
Wikirate.org intends to be that space; and by choosing the fashion industry, the campaign not only addresses products that literally touch us all, but it also has the potential to cover a broad spectrum of diverse sustainability topics, ranging from natural resource use to working conditions. Participate in the campaign and you will be surprised how a fashion company's way of managing animals rights can affect how sustainable they are, just as much as their behaviour regarding waste management!
Here’s how you can get involved
1) Share a Source via Twitter
Tweet the URL of an article concerning a fashion company’s sustainable activities and add @wikirate and #openfashion14. If there is space, feel free to also tag it with the company’s name (e.g. #H&M) and topic (e.g. #animalrights). Your tweet will be shared with other Wikirate members through the Twitter feed on the #openfashion14 page.
2) Add a Claim on Wikirate.org
After signing-up on the platform, make a Claim based on a Source. You can either check the campaign's Twitter feed for Sources; or other external websites, like online newspapers platform, company’s CSR reports or other publicly available studies.
3) Start a new Article on Wikirate.org
If you are signed-up, you can also help writing a short article about a fashion company’s activities by summarising existing Claims. You want to write about something else that's not related to any of the Claims on the platform? Go ahead, but don’t forget to back it up with new Claims.
To find out more about Wikirate.org, you can visit their booth at the Open Knowledge Fair and during the rest of the festival. If you'd like to get more hands-on, check out their fringe event, an edit-a-thon on July 16th at LIV Feinkost & Wein from 19:00-22:00.
