Apps | Reprex

Smart Policy Documents

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Stop uploading your work onto the web 2.0 in a pdf, epub, or word file. Build a self-refreshing resource that re-refreshes the statistics, legal texts, tables, visualizations, footnotes and bibliography instead. This way you’ll have a greater impact: you’ll connect to global knowledge graphs, and your work can be reused much better.

Our “smart document” is always live: it contains code that searches for data updates or changes in the law. It is a document that includes reproducible research code and makes sure that your document contains the latest information. It is a resource that, when uploaded to the web 3.0, cannot only be downloaded, but finds itself its audience, places itself into global libraries, data exchanges, automated websites.

📊 Downloads or updates reliable statistical data, utilizing the SDMX standard, for example, Eurostat datasets, which is placed into your text as a table, a data visualization, and its source as a footnote and bibliographic citation.

⚖️ Updates legal citations from Eur-LEX, i.e. contains the latest form of policy or legal documents, and flags for the researchers any important changes in the lifecycle of the citation (legal text goes out of force, amended, important court decisions get connected).

🎨 Exchange cultural Digital Objects with Europeana or other cultural heritage or knowledge organizations, such as out-of-print books, music works, or 3D design objects.

We admit that at this point we mainly serve policy wonks or scientists who are very tech savvy. But we are working hard to package it into a highly usable end-user product.

What is reproducible research?

Reproducible research is what it is: it can be reproduced. Easier said than done. We create open source software that accompanies the entire research workflow, from the fieldwork or big data collector, downloading documents via the analysis, visualizations, citations, web dissemination and publication. We do all those little steps that computers do better than humans: logging, documenting, testing, validating, archiving. This allows our users to do what humans do best: think.

Our data observatories are open scholarly platforms that support reproducible research. Our policy documents bring this functionality to your personal computer, and make it available for an NGO, a lawyer, a consultant, or an individual researcher.

Feature list

Each external resource, i.e. a policy document, a legal text, a cultural heritage object, a catalog entry, a dataset is clearly identified and downloaded, processed for the document into a footnote, citation, table or standard visualization.
New artifacts, such as visualizations, tables, receive a unique document object identifier (DOI) that clearly states their source, the person who oversaw the creation, the date, and the version.
These artifacts are added into the text in pre-defined places, such as the “Chart on GDP growth” placeholder containing the latest chart on GDP growth, while the citation in the bibliography contains the new version of the artifact (i.e. the chart with a DOI.)
The artifacts, such as datasets, tables, visualizations, codebooks, reference lists, are uploaded with a new version to an open science repository such as FigShare or Zenodo. This ensures that the creator’s intellectual rights are respected, and different, unauthorized versions of the table, chart, or other artifact in unknown news outlets, social media, are not connected to the creator or publisher.
Zenodo, via OpenAIRE, connects your work with global libraries, and if they meet the quality criteria, they are often immediately placed into the catalogues of global libraries. Our smart policy documents are not only uploaded onto the web, but connect to global knowledge graphs, or the web 3.0.
The author and publisher of the ‘smart policy document’ receives notifications of significant changes, i.e. non-trivial new data at Eurostat, or non-trivial connecting policy documents, court decisions, which should trigger a revision of the smart policy document’s textual contents. Needless to say, behind the scenes, we handle those trivial changes, too.
After human review of the new version, it is created as Word docx, EPUB, and PDF file, and with a new version and DOI, it is uploaded to open science repositories that synchronize this publication with global library systems.

Application Development

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 13:52:00 +0200

We are building and ecosystem of open data, open software and trustworthy algorithms around our data observatories. We collaborate with scientific software developers, and their communities, such as rOpenGov. Our software tools have many thousand users, but they require coding skills. We will soon start to deploy more user-friendly applications that can be used by sustainability reporting professionals, or lawyers preparing factual green disclosures.

Our Eviota project, which builds a multi-language reporting interface for preventing greenwashing. It will have a user-frontend for our environmental (and economic) impact assessment software tool, iotables. The iotables R package implements most of the functionality laid out in the economic and environmental input-output analysis features in the Eurostat and the respective UN statistical technical guidance on the topic.
Our smart document are always alive: they contain code that searches for data updates or changes in the law. It is a document that includes reproducible research code and makes sure that your document contains the latest information. It is a resource that, when uploaded to the web 3.0, cannot only be downloaded, but finds itself its audience, places itself into global libraries, data exchanges, automated websites.

Eviota

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 13:52:00 +0200

Reporting the impacts of the entire value chain.

Our minimum viable product will create sustainability reports (or report components) for greenhouse gases and sustainable water use with applying the Global GHG Accounting & Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry and EFRAG’s proposed concept on connecting European accounting standards and information with sustainability. We will help small music organizations in their sustainability reporting, where detail data and reporting standards are only available for greenhouse gas emissions. The Music Eviota project is supported by the MusicAIRE.

Open collaboration

Our project is based on open collaboration. Our proposal, if funded, will provide us with resources to supply further music businesses, music civil society organizations and researchers with high-quality data (during the duration of the project for free.) We are already looking for interested parties to put our data and research projects into use and validate their usability and quality in real-life policy or business development scenarios.

Why are we developing this service?

The European Green Deal, which includes the proposed Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, and the sustainable finance package, aims to set the European economy on a permanent decarbonization and sustainability increasing path with adjusting the rules how economic activities are financed by bank loans, insurance, investments, and direct subsidies. From 2023, it will be cheaper to get loans, insurance, and other types of funding for organizations that can prove that they follow the environmental, social and governance path set out in the Paris Agreement and other UN, OECD, and EU agreements.

Requirements for connecting financial and sustainability reporting.

Correct and reliable sustainability management will come with many financial advantages and increased responsibility. The European Financial Reporting Advisory Board is currently preparing the new combined financial and sustainability reporting standard that will be used in banks, insurance, investment, granting, and the large companies of Europe in their entire supply and purchaser chain. The European Commission estimates that compliance costs until the end of 2023 will amount to 4 billion euros, with reporting and auditing costs mounting 10,000 euros per organization. While music small and medium sized organizations (MSMEs) and limited liability civil society organizations (CSOs) will be exempted from mandatory sustainability management and audited reporting, they can still comply in a non-audited and voluntary way.

Our solution benefits the music MSMEs and CSOs in several ways:

It provides them with a size adequate sustainability management and reporting tool that helps first the management of greenhouse gas emissions, and later sustainable water use, pollutions, biodiversity, and recycling in their entire value chain (for example, it flags environmental risks in the supply base of a festival including equipment rentals, transport, security firms, catering facilities, etc.) by connecting standard accounting documents of the MSME with SNA and EEA science based benchmarks.
Our system will be extendible to management of social sustainability. Our previous research shows that particularly the live music industry that needs a large workforce, suffers from underuse of, and discrimination of female workers in various technical and even managerial roles. Our system will be able to flag risks of gender paygap and related issues in the entire value chain and of course, provide good benchmarks for internal activities.

Our review of the environmental, social and governance risk management (ESG sustainability management) suggests that complying with ESG standards is not only a pre-requisite to get cheaper loans (less important) and cheaper insurance (very important in live music), but also a requirement by corporate sponsors of events, and even a large part of the audience. While some music organizations already provide sustainability reporting, they are not standardized and are less factful as they are not connected to accounting information at every point. Our solution aims to give much credibility to both the sustainability reports and non-financial disclosures of the financial reports (which are not mandatory for MSMEs but increase their trustworthiness on an elective basis if they are included.)

Growing interest for ESG in select countries.