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The Public Eye Awards (formerly Public Eye on Davos) are a critical counterpoint to the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. Organized since 2000 by the Berne Declaration (BD) and Pro Natura (the latter replaced by Greenpeace in 2009), Public Eye reminds the players of the global economy who impact people and the environment with destructive business practices that actions have consequences - in this case for the image of the company. We present shame-on-you-awards to the nastiest corporate players of the year. Two of these (in the categories ‘Global’ and ‘Swiss’) will be awarded by an in-house jury of experts while winner of the people’s award will be chosen on this website by… the people. Starting this year (2010) we also present a ‘Greenwash Award’ to account for the rapidly growing number of institutions that fabricate social-environmental fig leaves in an attempt to make inveterate corporate players look greener than they are.

On its web site the award features a “Hall of Shame” and an open voting system that allows visitors to vote for a specific firm that they believe has recently behaved in a particularly shameful way. This year, the choice is made up of the firms Arcelor Mittal, Farner PR, GDF Suez, IOC, Roche, and the Royal Bank of Canada.

I think the award is a great idea worth contributing to. It allows civil society to be better informed about the (mal)practice of multinational businesses and thus build an awareness for global streams of value generation and the manifold issues related to them. The PEA, however, apparently also serves as a gatekeeper in their field of action as the interested individual would not be able to either procure the hard data required to assess a firms behaviour, nor reliably judge that behaviour of any global actor based on such data alone. The “People’s Awards” is a strictly “democratic” approach with no bias towards professional expertise. Apparently, individual organisations are nominating also the firms on the shortlist for these types of award, not the people directly.

The issues obvious: based on which knowledge should I, as a citizen, make my decision. The question would be if social media could replace such a nomination procedure in a way that adds amy value. Could they inject “substance” into the decision making process or would they lead to a further dilution of the process by involving “swarm logics” and further removing the individual from making the decision? Do professional organisations with the funding and expertise serve a purpose in filtering and assessing data that leads to a nomination, or would crowdsourcing open up new possibilities for citizen interaction? Or, should we look at an entirely different model such as organisational nomination overseen closely by citizens (if not already the case)?