Sharing is caring, literally.
Sharing creates an impact far beyond what you’d imagine.
This week, Walk Free and WikiRate launched a report — Beyond Compliance in the Garment Industry — that shines a light on the sector’s modern slavery reporting. It shows companies need to do better when it comes to reporting their actions to end modern slavery. It’s a valuable report, and we encourage you to read it.
However, we want to reflect here on the power of sharing data because without organizations caring to share data they have, this report and other valuable resources wouldn’t exist.
Open Data are pieces of an endless puzzle.
The “power” of open data is stated often, but we can only realize its power when there is enough of it. Like solving a puzzle, you can’t see the whole picture until each piece is in the right place.
Unlike a typical puzzle, however, when working with open data, you know that you’ll probably never have all of the pieces. But, with cooperation and determination, you can start to build a picture that impacts people’s thoughts, attitudes, and behavior.
Rearranging open data creates multiple impacts.
When organizations share different puzzle pieces, they can be rearranged to tell different stories with impact. That’s the great thing about open data, the power of the data is opened-up and possibilities expand.
The latest Beyond Compliance study includes puzzle pieces we had no idea would be used in this way when organizations shared them on WikiRate. For example, with aggregated data from Clean Clothes Campaign’s garment workers’ interviews, it was possible to verify whether companies’ policies and due diligence effectively reduce the chances of worker exploitation in their supply chains.
On the whole, the Beyond Compliance report combines three pieces of open data from several sources:
- Clean Clothes Campaign’s interviews with garments workers
- Walk Free’s modern slavery statement assessment
- WikiRate’s supply chain mapping, including data from the Open Apparel Registry
And this is not the only collaborative data puzzle so far!
In the Summer of 2021, WikiRate helped Clean Clothes Campaign and Fashion Revolution to combine their data sets on brand wage commitments and supply chain transparency.
This gave Clean Clothes the possibility to add an extra 180 brands to their FashionChecker tool: a valuable resource for those working to close the living wage gap for garment workers.
By combining Fashion Revolution’s data with a few of the data sets above, another is created:
- Fashion Revolution’s Fashion Transparency Index brand survey
- Clean Clothes Campaign’s brand survey
- Clean Clothes Campaign’s worker interviews
- WikiRate’s supply chain mapping, including data from the Open Apparel Registry
Neither the Beyond Compliance report nor the expansion of FashionChecker would have been possible without sharing data, both of which tell essential stories and impact the world for the better.
That’s why we say: sharing is caring.
Do you care to share a piece of the puzzle?
You might have a crucial piece of a puzzle that others are trying to solve. Or another organization might have data you need. Either way, bringing data onto WikiRate opens it up and makes deeper analysis possible, infinitely scaling your potential impact. We’d love to hear from you about the puzzle you are working on and whether we can help.
