Selflessness

In modern western societies, people like to emphasize their volunteering activities. However, this entirely defeats the purpose of charity and volunteering. By definition volunteering is supposed to be a selfless act where one doesn't declare it as an achievement, take credit for it, or boast about it. By doing so, not only does it invalidate the intention, action, and effort but the whole essence of selflessness. It is about putting someone else first. In some religions it is expected that a person gives or does something of this nature anonymously without any form of recognition or reward. University applications look for volunteer activities. Resumes contain volunteer activities. What are people trying to gain from declaring such activities that they did in a selfless act? 

OpenCorporates

Exposing company data in an open data initiative means that such public data as on company house can be semantically applied to various analytical processing applications. They even now have openspending and opencharities data to visualize how governments and charities are spending. It seems due diligence on company profiles can be further applied with opencorporates initiative for gathering and building insights about an orgranization or an individual in a rich and cohesive manner that both provides for further forecasts on such things as performance, credit, spending ability, future management, as well as transactions. This information can then be further used for compliance and KYC checks. Having publicly accessible data on a company in this manner makes one informed about liabilities and assets as well as helps other individuals and companies get insights on whether they can conduct business with that entity especially for legal and tax in the audit process. OpenCorporates even provides options for a Restful API as well as a reconciliation service with Google Refine. The open data initiative allows for the dissemination of knowledge exchange through open accessible curated data for various usable contexts in the process providing an opportunity for new innovation for development in the area that spans cross cutting concerns. Also, a very big initiative is on data.gov.uk  and data.gov which provide linked data on a whole range of government related categories.