openBest

A model-driven repository of best practices. It can be configured to store best practices for different domains; e.g. organisational sustainability improvement, refugee integration initiatives, information security, research.

This project is steered by University of Utrecht. We welcome collaboration with organisations and individuals.

openBest is being refactored and piloted within the SCENTISS project: Boosting Social and Community-driven Entrepreneurship for the Transition to an Inclusive and Sustainable Society (KICH1.MV01.20.018); funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO.

Prerequisites

The following is definitely required for running the project.

Install Node and npm on your machine so that you can use the required packages for the project

Install the Firebase command line tools

npm install firebase-tools -g

Troubleshooting

We haven't tested if the following installs are required when this project is pulled, but in any case there's no danger in updating these packages frequently. These packages are installed previously and may or may not be required to be installed again for every new project pull:

Install Firebase functions

npm install firebase-functions

Install Firebase admin

npm install firebase-admin

Running the tool

You can test the tool by spinning up a local web server using

firebase serve

Deploying

The tool can be deployed using

firebase deploy

after which the tool will be available at a public domain

Callable functions

Certain functions cannot be executed client-side. We use Cloud Functions connected to Firebase hosting for executing scripts server-side. These functions are deployed on Firebase and can be called from our web-app. We use Cloud Functions on Firebase Hosting to overcome any CORS-related problems. Functions can be added to index.js in the functions folder and then called from any JavaScript file.

It may be required to install and initialize Firebase functions when pulling this project. More info can be found in Google's documentation following the previous link or by looking at the Troubleshooting section above.

Contributors

The following people made valuable contributions, commiting code to the project, acquiring knowledge, performing validations or running pilots.

• May Taherzadeh contributed a framework for establishing and maintaining knowledge sharing communities for social enterprises.
• Stefan van der Pijl contributed a major refactoring (e.g. good practive rating mechanisms to and community-based feedback) and a framework for evaluating knowledge sharing behavior enabled by openBest.
• Alexander Jacobs enabled situational characterisation and retrieval of best practices from openBest.
• Milo Plomp developed and validated the backbone of openBest
• Zoë Coenen analysed good practice repositories for responsible enterprises.
• Mariëlle Adèr investigated how responsible enterprises define sustainability improvement plans, and the role openBest can play