Seeking the wisdom of crowds
1 February 2016
Webb-site is excited to announce the birth of what we believe is the World's first crowdsourced governance ratings system, Webb-site Governance Ratings. For 17 years, we've been freely expressing our views on the quality of corporate and economic governance in Hong Kong and elsewhere. Now, it's your turn. Any user who is logged in to his or her Webb-site account can now, with our one-click ratings system, anonymously contribute a rating on the governance quality of any organisation, including listed companies, on a scale of 0 to 5, where 0 is of course the lowest. We will publish the average rating for each organisation, but no individual contributions will be identified.
Let's get started!
To get started, just log in with your e-mail address and password, then enter the stock code of any HK-listed company in the "stock code" box at the top of any page, or search for the organisation using the "search organisations" box, also at the top of any page. You can also try the special lists of HKSAR Advisory Bodies and Statutory Bodies, or the list of Governmental bodies, including the HK Executive and Legislative Councils and the Hong Kong SAR and PRC Governments. Political parties can be found in our politics category here.
After you have made some rating contributions, stay logged in and visit the My Ratings page, where all your ratings are listed. You can change, update or withdraw your rating on any organisation at any time with a single click, it's that simple! To keep the system fresh, any ratings older than 1 year will be excluded from the average. You guessed it: once we have a decent volume of ratings, we will publish league tables, at least for listed companies, showing the best and worst governance ratings and everything in between. We also plan to track how they vary over time.
In the meantime, you can see the average rating on the page for each organisation. On your My Ratings page, you can also drill down to see the history of your ratings on an individual entity. User functions can be found in the "User" menu at the top of each page.
Webb-site Governance Ratings are intended to be absolute, not relative to a particular market or peer group, and have nothing to do with market valuations if the organisation is a listed company. Many political parties and non-profit organisations are set up as companies incorporated in HK, and Webb-site covers all 1.29 million companies registered in HK, so feel free to add your view. You don't have to be a shareholder or creditor - you might also be an employee, customer or supplier who has formed a view on the governance quality through your dealings, or just an interested bystander.
Trust Ratings
And why stop there? We're on a roll now. We are also launching Webb-site Trust Ratings for individuals. Do you highly or lowly trust a particular company director, politician, statutory body member or just the boss of your financial services firm, perhaps? How about your financial adviser? If you can find them in Webb-site Who's Who, then you can enter a trust rating for them.
Last week, we wrote to over 21,000 active subscribers to our free newsletter, introducing a new sign-up and log-in system that allows you to stay logged in for up to 1 month. If you have forgotten your password, just click here to receive a reset link, good for 12 hours.
If you haven't signed up, why wait? The ratings system will only be as useful as its users make it through their continuing contributions. Over to you.
© Webb-site.com, 2016
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