Connecting datasets and scaling impact: Fashion Checker and the Fashion Transparency Index

Last week Clean Clothes Campaign launched the updated version of their Fashion Checker tool — a campaign that seeks to shine a light on living wages and transparency in apparel supply chains.

WikiRate powers the tool through our open data platform which acts as a public backend for the data collected by Clean Clothes Campaign on brand policies and wages in apparel supply chain facilities.

This year for the first time Clean Clothes Campaign were able to bring data collected by Fashion Revolution through their Fashion Transparency Index into the Fashion Checker. The connection was made possible by the WikiRate open data ecosystem which allows users of our platform to combine datasets and scale the use and impact of their data.

Earlier this month we also published a new report giving insights on how we can build an integrated and open labor data ecosystem. An important element identified in our research was a lack of connectedness between organizations collecting data on labor rights in supply chains.

This has hindered the ability of organizations to extend the lifecycle of their data collection efforts and thereby conserve resources, maximize impact and, ultimately, make the gains needed to improve the lives of workers in supply chains around the world.

Building consensus amongst organizations on the sharing and re-using of data is crucial if we are to make datasets more accessible. Both Fashion Revolution and Clean Clothes Campaign took the important step of making their data available under an open data license — thus allowing others to use and re-use their data.

Once the two organizations had made their respective datasets available as open data on WikiRate, we were able to collate the data on supply chain transparency and living wages into one place and pull it into the Fashion Checker using our API infrastructure.

This linkage between the Fashion Checker and the Fashion Transparency Index has allowed Clean Clothes Campaign to include an additional 180 brands in their campaign. They have also been able to redirect resources that would have been used to survey brands towards training workshops for worker representatives on how they can use the Fashion Checker tool for advocacy.

As we outline in our report, building an open data ecosystem of labor rights data will take time and resources are needed to improve the data management and sharing infrastructure of organizations. But the interplay between the Fashion Checker and the Fashion Transparency Index already gives us an insight into just how powerful our efforts can become when we bring our datasets together for the common good.

To learn more about what organizations can already start doing to make their data more accessible, watch our recent webinar on integrated and open data.

Do you have a dataset you want to bring into the public domain? Get in touch with us via our contact form for more information.