This is a proof-of-concept Beneficial Ownership register to demonstrate how data could be collected. It was designed in less than a couple of days by OpenCorporates to help inform UK Civil Society's response to the UK government's consultation on what the Beneficial Ownership register (or register of Persons of Significant Control) will look like. Beneficial owners are the individuals who ultimately control companies, together with the means/route of control.
We will be iterating and improving it over time, and believe it can be developed into an open data global beneficial ownership database. Before then there's a lot to do, but first here's the site in a nutshell:
- Allows company owners to self-submit that they control companies, using OpenCorporates API to search for the companies
- Allow third-parties to add BO data for companies they add based on official filings
- Allows evidentiary filings to be uploaded (uses S3)
- List companies added, and allow to be searched by 'live-search'
- Show control graphs on controlling persons page
- Pulls in data on the company from the OpenCorporates
- Deployed to alpha.WhoControlsIt.com using dummy data
This software is open-source, and we welcome contributors to improve it, both on the back-end and on the UI too. The application is coded in Ruby On Rails, but there is plenty to help with, even if you aren't a Ruby coder (front end development, documentation, etc)
- Ruby 2.1.2
- Sqlite
####Installing on your local development machine: git clone https://github.com/openc/WhoControlsIt.git cd whocontrolsit bundle bundle exec rake db:migrate bundle exec rake db:seed # to add seed data rails s #to start a server, accessible at localhost:3000
This README would normally document whatever steps are necessary to get the application up and running.
####Things that need adding:
- Design
- Write test suite (rspec)
- Add relationships for other types of control
- Add more complex networks (bi-furcated etc)
- Make UI smoother, more ajaxy/sexy