New online platform to advance corporate accountability in Latin America

The Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research (PODER) has launched a new open data platform “Who’s Who Wiki”, which means to address the lack of transparency and advance corporate accountability of the private sector in Latin America by monitoring companies, corporative elites, and their government counterparts, in order to empower citizens to become guarantors of such corporate accountability.

As a response to the opacity in which the Latin American private sector makes business transactions and the lack of an effective legal framework, "Who's Who Wiki" combines business intelligence with transparency technology and network visualization to facilitate the access to symmetric information of corporate stakeholders. The platform aims to generate and make available to the public new information tools for understanding the interconnections and the influence of corporate elites in public decision-making processes, exposing the totality of corporate practices, exposing state capture and strengthen corporate and government accountability.

The platform has a semantic database, which includes profiles with information about businesspeople, companies trading on the Mexican Stock Exchange and state-owned companies. It also allows users to edit and create new pages so the information is increasingly expanded through crowd sourcing. The platform also has a tool for the analysis and visualization of existing networks between businesspeople and companies, allowing us to better understand the links and influences within the Mexican corporate world. The other functions include an editorial function and a safe whistle blowing mechanism, which minimizes the risk of facing situations that threaten their personal safety.

The platform can be found in the website.

More information on the project here.