The “GlobalCorpWiki” project connects the capacity of the WEB and the power of the “Wiki” model with a network of activist organizations to give communities and activist organizations access to the strategic information that they need to make global corporations accountable locally and strengthen transnational networks. Its presence on the WEB takes the form of two paired sites: “Corp Key,” which will eventually contain systematic reliable information about hundreds of global corporations, and “Global Corp Forum” which is a space for transnational dialog, debate and sharing experiences that will allow campaigns to get feedback and support from a broad transnational network. The paired sites will be concretely connected, via a series of workshops, to a network of activist organizations, a network that will eventually be as global as the corporations that they are trying to make accountable.
The informational part of the project named “Corp Key” is housed on the Global Corporations portal of SourceWatch at http://www.corpkey.org. It will soon contain systematic information on close to 200 corporations, selected because of their relevance to on-going campaigns. In order to ensure the information is systematic and comparable, each profile is organized according to a common “template.” Like all information on SourceWatch, the information on “Corp Key” is taken from verifiable external sources so that users can trust its reliability.
“Global Corp Forum” is paired with Corp Key. It is a space for dialog, debate and sharing experiences, built on “drupal” software platform to make interactive participation and “blogging” easier. Activists and community groups can engage in debate and dialogue with each other by posting their experiences and their reactions to the experience of others. The posts on the forum will complement the information on Corp Key by adding narratives of on-going actions and their ideas for future strategies.
The general aim of the project is to promote the democratization of global economic governance by building a systematic, publicly accessible, map of key information about globally powerful economic actors, one that corresponds to the strategic needs of community and activist groups. To succeed, local campaigns for accountability need strategic information about the global actors they are facing. They need a map of the “highways of power” that command production and finance in the global economy. No local group has the time or the resources to do the necessary strategic research. Publicly accessible WEB-based information, harnessing the power of a multitude of “citizen editors” through a “Wiki” format, is an obvious answer.
Three organizations are currently playing key roles in the Global Corp Wiki Project.
- Dejusticia (The Center for the Study of Law, Justice and Society) has overall administrative responsibility and is also playing an important role in generating corporate profiles. Dejusticia is an NGO with experience in fostering researcher-practitioner collaboration in pursuit of socio-economic and human rights based in Bogota, Colombia. A planning grant from the Global Governance and Civil Society programs of the Ford Foundation enabled Dejusticia to take a leading role in the project.
- SourceWatch editors are hosting and managing the websites. Sourcewatch is a project of the Center for Media and Democracy. It is an Internet-based "open content" encyclopedia designed to compile and increase access to information on people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda. SourceWatch contains more than 30,000 articles and averages 2 million visits per month. SourceWatch’s editors have invaluable expertise in moderating Wikis and making sure that the quality information on the site is maintained.
- The Asia Monitor Resource Center (AMRC) is undertaking principal responsibility for the organization of an initial workshop, to be held in January in Hong Kong that will give activist organizations from Asia “hands-on” training in using the sites and engage in a collective debate on how they should be developed. The AMRC has 30 years of experience in gathering information useful to activists and communities in Asia and is a central member of a variety of activist networks.
