Crowdsourcing Corporate Transparency

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• Richard Mills (University of Cambridge); Milena Marin (Amnesty)
• Wednesday 22 February 2017, 12:00-14:00
• Room SG2, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Olivier Driessens.

Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act introduced a legal requirement for companies that file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to report on their due diligence to ensure that their sourcing of certain minerals does not fund armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The publication of such reports represents an opportunity to increase corporate transparency, but to validate and realise this potential, the reports must be analysed. Organisations like Amnesty International, who campaigned for the legislation, are keen to understand its practical effects, but do not have the resources to analyse the thousands of Conflict Minerals Reports that have now been filed. WikiRate.org is an open public platform for the collection and analysis of data on all aspects of corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. Amnesty and WikiRate are collaborating on a project to crowdsource the analysis of Conflict Minerals Reports, by inviting volunteers to answer a set of questions about individual reports on the WikiRate platform: http://wikirate.org/Investigating_Mineral_Sourcing_Practices In this session, we will be analysing Conflict Minerals Reports to generate new data about their contents – so please bring a laptop! A new iteration of the project will be piloted in the session, and we will be seeking feedback from participants that can help us to improve the project before rolling it out at a larger scale. Richard Mills will introduce the WikiRate platform and its approach to corporate transparency. Milena Marin will present the Investigating Mineral Sourcing Practices project, and some of Amnesty’s other initiatives to integrate crowdsourcing approaches in their research. Around one hour will be spent working on the project, and the session will close with a 30 minute discussion of corporate transparency, the utility of mandatory non-financial reporting, and crowdsourcing as an approach to leveraging this.

This talk is part of the Politics and Paradoxes of Transparency CRASSH Research Group series.

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