In recent years there has been growing recognition that progress cannot simply be measured in terms of economic growth. This in turn has led to a focus on other measures of progress including well-being, sustainability, equality and inclusivity.

As part of the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic and Co-Operation and Development) mission to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world, it hosts and supports WikIProgress in order to “collect the knowledge of organisations and individuals around the world who are working to develop a new, more people-focused, vision of “progress” through data collection, research, action and policy”.

However, WikiProgress is entirely crowd-sourced and open - anyone can contribute to it. Organisations, initiatives and resources - such as data, reports or websites - can be uploaded freely. WikiProgress also has a crowdsourced directory of articles relevant to wellbeing and sustainability, which is more akin to the well-known Wikipedia project. All of these contributions can be searched freely, for example by organisation, category, format and tags.

Between January 2014 and December 2015 the OECD was part of the European Commission-funded project Web-COSI (Web COmmunities for Statistics for Social Innovation), which was designed to improve people’s engagement with statistics beyond GDP.

WikiProgress was an essential part of the Web-COSI project. Over the course of the two-year project, a “Wiki of progress statistics” was developed, allowing for uploading, accessing and visualising data on societal progress beyond GDP. It also developed an interactive crowd-sourced map of initiatives on well-being and societal progress, a “WikiProgress University” encouraging students to develop knowledge and data-sharing on open source platforms, and engaged citizens in dialogue about societal progress through online discussions, a Youth Portal and a data visualisation contest.

Case study date: October 2016