WikiRate is a Collective Awareness Platform for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPS) project with the aim of "crowdsourcing better companies" through analysis of their Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) performance. Research to inform the design of the platform involved surveying the current corporate ESG information landscape, and identifying ways in which an open approach and peer production ethos could be effectively mobilised to improve this landscape's fertility. The key requirement identified is for an open public repository of data tracking companies' ESG performance. Corporate Social Responsibility reporting is conducted in public, but there are barriers to accessing the information in a standardised analysable format. Analyses of and ratings built upon this data can exert power over companies' behaviour in certain circumstances, but the public at large have no access to the data or the most influential ratings that utilise it. WikiRate aims to build an open repository for this data along with tools for analysis, to increase public demand for the data, allow a broader range of stakeholders to participate in its interpretation, and in turn drive companies to behave in a more ethical manner. This paper describes the quantitative Metrics system that has been designed to meet those objectives and some early examples of its use.
Communication via digital means, such as mobile messaging applications (apps), plays an increasingly important role in everyday life. However, most messaging apps employ centralized computing principles that relinquish control of their users' personal data to social network platform providers. Decentralization has been proposed as an alternative that provides trustworthiness and data confidentiality, but this comes at expense of fewer provided features and non-intuitive user experience. To address this issue, we hereby present two interconnected decentralized messaging tools, developed in the scope of the HELIOS platform, which can support new decentralized social networks. The first tool is a framework that supports the development of context-aware decentralized messaging apps in mobile Android devices by organically tying together many of the platform's standalone decentralized operations. The second is a decentralized messaging app, called helios.TALK, that builds on the framework but accommodates additional design considerations from the perspective of end-users.
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