WikiRate.org - leveraging collective awareness to understand companies' environmental, social and governance performance

Abstract. 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 e ffectively mobilised to improve this landscape's fertility. The key requirement identi ed 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 infuential 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

The step project:societal and political engagement of young people in environmental issues

Decisions on environmental topics taken today are going to have long-term consequences that will affect future generations. Young people will have to live with the consequences of these decisions and undertake special responsibilities. Moreover, as tomorrow’s decision makers, they themselves should learn how to negotiate and debate issues before final decisions are made. Therefore, any participation they can have in environmental decision making processes will prove essential in developing a sustainable future for the community.However, recent data indicate that the young distance themselves from community affairs, mainly because the procedures involved are ‘wooden’, politicians’ discourse alienates the young and the whole experience is too formalized to them. Authorities are aware of this fact and try to establish communication channels to ensure transparency and use a language that speaks to new generations of citizens. This is where STEP project comes in.STEP (www.step4youth.eu) is a digital Platform (web/mobile) enabling youth Societal and Political e-Participation in decision-making procedures concerning environmental issues. STEP is enhanced with web/social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualisation features.Six pilots in real contexts are being organised for the deployment of the STEP solution in 4 European Countries: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. Pilots are implemented with the direct participation of one regional authority, four municipalities, and one association of municipalities, and include decision-making procedures on significant environmental questions.</p

Implementation of an Interactive Crowd-Enhanced Content Management System for Tourism Development

This paper investigated the role of interactive tourist mobile apps in tourism development. The researchers presented the e-Tracer application, which was developed taking into consideration the recent advantages in mobile computing, the importance of user-generated content and the needs of northern Greece and the lower Balkan countries. Apart from crowd-based content creation, a new generation of apps for tourism development may include additional components like serious games for tourists, map-based navigation systems and augmented/virtual reality applications, in order to offer memorable user experiences for tourists. An agile content management system design methodology was followed by taking into account the needs of alternative tourist destinations, small to medium sized real-world museums and driver rest areas located around highways which connect cross-country destinations in the lower Balkan countries and Turkey. This work positioned the role of interactive crowd-enhanced platforms for content management of tourist-related information in tourism development, economic growth and sustainability of the Egnatia motorway surrounding areas in Greece. Keywords: mobile computing, content management systems, recommender systems, serious games, virtual/augmented reality, tourism developmen

MindSpaces:Art-driven Adaptive Outdoors and Indoors Design

MindSpaces provides solutions for creating functionally and emotionally appealing architectural designs in urban spaces. Social media services, physiological sensing devices and video cameras provide data from sensing environments. State-of-the-Art technology including VR, 3D design tools, emotion extraction, visual behaviour analysis, and textual analysis will be incorporated in MindSpaces platform for analysing data and adapting the design of spaces.</p

D4.2: Best practice report

<p>This deliverable is the work-product of a cross-field working group effort to bring environmental policy makers in line with the best practices to reach young people where they already are: in social media and communicate with them in familiar settings. To understand how social media and new technologies are able to provide the potential to drive the societal and political participation of young people in the decision-making process on environmental issues, we first studied the demographics of social network users and in particular our target segment ageing from 18 to 29 as well as their current attitudes regarding environmental issues (Section 2), and then compiled a list of existing online environmental platforms and hubs (Section 3).<br> We also collected information on 23 e-Participation case studies in Europe and worldwide (Section 4) in order to glean insights with respect to the most effective practices that are typically followed in such campaigns, as well as insights into what makes an e-Participation initiative successful, what are the problems and how they can be addressed. We also performed structured user studies involving 231 individuals across Europe that were reached through an online questionnaire with the help of the STEP pilot partners (Section 5). Findings from our research indicate that the ideal e-participation platform should integrate social media and gamification features, interesting and shareable content that can be consumed quickly on any device like for example multimedia content (images, videos, animations etc.), useful links and engaging calls to action; content that is tailored to young people and made appropriate for their particular context. Evidence also suggests a more active media campaign that would leverage social media (Facebook in particular), online media and frequently updated and engaging content to bring about increased awareness on governmental initiatives. </p

D4.3: Social media monitoring tool

<p>This deliverable reports on the development and deployment of the initial version of the STEP social media monitoring tool. It describes the usage scenario and functionality together with implementation details. The prototype application targeting environmental policy makers is presented here, whilst a reduced version targeting citizens is presented in terms of the integrated STEP platform in D3.2 Integrated and tested STEP platform. Modifications are continued on the applications throughout the whole lifetime of the project including the improvement of research modules.</p

Financial Metrics Dataset of US companies

Financial Metrics Dataset of US companies obtained from 10-K filings (in XBRL format) from SEC. The dataset contains financial metric answers for 9,263 US companies and in total 800,714 metric answers related to 28 financial metrics

Relationship Metrics DB CERTH

<p>These are supplier networks extracted from the web sites of 8 big corporations resulting in 4,222 relationship metrics.</p

Social Data and Multimedia Analytics for News and Events Applications

This paper discusses a framework enabling real-time multimedia indexing and search across multiple social media sources. It places particular emphasis on the real-time, social and contextual nature of content and information consumption in order to integrate topic and event detection, mining, search and retrieval, based on aggregation and indexing of shared user-generated multimedia content. User-friendly applications for the News and Events domains have been developed based on these approaches, incorporating novel user-centric media visualisation and browsing methods. The research and development is part of the FP7 E