[Open-companies] Crowdsourcing URLs to corporate registries

Wed Aug 3 08:19:48 UTC 2011

James

Really good points. A couple of other resources for finding company registries:

This website is pretty good on Europe and the bigger countries:

http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/registers.htm

And there's also the Investigative Dashboard list:

http://www.investigativedashboard.org/category/wwd/text-based-wwd/

Both have their strengths and weaknesses, overlap a fair bit, but also
with jurisdictions the others don't.

Chris

I should perhaps re-post this again later, but in an email correspondence

with Chris Taggart, we had the idea of putting together a spreadsheet like

mySociety did for its FixMyTransport to crowdsource URLs for corporate

registries. Here's mySociety's blog post and accompanying spreadsheet:

http://www.mysociety.org/2011/06/22/fixmytransport-is-close-to-launch-and-we-need-your-help-to-make-it-fantastic/

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0As0ZKOGBI8TTdGxsSjk2SnNYc2p0WlY5Z1V6V3ByeFE&hl=en&authkey=CLr67P8D#gid=4

I've started collecting metadata on corporate registries on this spreadsheet

as a way to track OpenCorporates' progress, which we can use to source a new

spreadsheet for crowdsourcing:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0As0ZKOGBI8TTdGxsSjk2SnNYc2p0WlY5Z1V6V3ByeFE&hl=en&authkey=CLr67P8D#gid=4

Aside from attribution to the person who did the research, we'd want a notes

field for what data is available/how it is made available. One tip I'd share

for hard-to-find registries in developing countries is to use the World

Bank's Doing Business project to find the country-specific names for

ministries/registries, for example:

http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/botswana/starting-a-business

Cheers!

James

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