We will be sharing some interesting stories around transparency, privacy, power mapping, investigative journalism and useful resources for influence mapping projects and transparency-mapping practitioners.
With this effort, we at the Influence Mapping project hope to bring together resources and tools to inspire projects around the world and hopefully build a stronger global network of influence mapping projects.
Share your thoughts, needs, achievements and failures in our Google Group, hear about Influence Mapping projects in our Blog and join our Science Fair!
#STORIES AND THOUGHTS
Profiled: From radio to porn, British spies track web users’ online identities (The Intercept) / More than two dozen documents about surveillance on ordinary people’s online activities from the Government Communications Headquarters were disclosed by The Intercept.
The world needs investigative journalism (Al Jazeera) / David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer winner and former president of the Investigative Reporters & Editors (IRE), talks about the how journalists around the world are “at risk of being punished for telling inconvenient truths, a danger not just to them but to every one of us who values liberty”.
How Putin tried to control the Internet (Motherboard) / “In this exclusive excerpt from the recently published The Red Web, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan describe how the Kremlin has been trying to rewrite the rules for the internet to make it “secure” as it is understood by Russia’s secret services.”
Buying power: The families funding the 2016 Presidential Election (NY Times) / “They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters”. An interactive radiography of the 158 families that have provided almost half of all the seed money to support the presidential candidates.
Transparency in the private sector is likely to evolve gradually through law, politics and experiment (Democratic Audit UK) / “Transparency discussions invariably focus on the public sector, leaving a significant gap when it comes to the private contractors and companies. In this article, Ben Worthy explores the laws, regulations and technological innovations which are gradually increasing transparency in the private sector.”
Journalism and the Latin American open data agenda (IJNET) / An overview to the open data scene in Latin American and how advocates, technology groups and civil society are generating publicly available data since 2011.
#RESOURCES
TPP Treaty: Intellectual Property Rights Chapter / WikiLeaks just released the final negotiated text for this chapter of the Trans Pacific Partnership, which is perhaps the most controversial chapter due to its wide-ranging effects on internet services, medicines, publishers, civil liberties and biological patents.
Tipsheets & Presentations from GIJC 2015 / “Investigative Research Links” (Margot Williams, The Intercept) and “100 best Databases” (Gary Price, GIJN and infoDOCKET) are not only as useful as they sound but are also some of the most favorited resources on Twitter.
Deep and interesting datasets for computational journalists: a quick list via Dan Nguyen, Stanford Computational Journalism Lab.
Programming tools for transparent data journalism, Visualization for Story Finding and Telling +. Papers from the Computation+Journalism Symposium 2015.
Last September, an awesome group of journalists who specialize in cross-national collaborations, and technologists working on tools to support them, met in our first conference on Technology for Investigative Journalism. This Wiki gathers some of the challenges, collaboration models, experiences, tools and user needs shared at the event.
#COMMUNITY
Kayak.com for Social Network Data We’ve submitted a project to the Knight News Challenge that seeks to make projects around social network mapping tools better connected, more trustworthy, more communicative to users, and easier to use for everybody.
Read more about it here and give some ♥!
Influence Mapping Community
[caption id=”attachment_361” align=”alignnone” width=”996”]
Transparency Report Network: The Wikimedia Foundation and the lobbies specialized in the information society.[/caption]
Linkurious: A web-based data visualization tool for investigative journalism. It’s been used by ICIJ to investigate the “Swiss Leaks” and AFP to work around drug-related crimes. Recently the Linkurious team has been exploring lobby relationships through the Transparency Register.
#TOOLS
agate 0.12.0 Chris Groskopf from NPR Visuals Team released agate, a Python data analysis library “optimized for making humans faster at working with normal-sized datasets”. It intends to be a clean and user-friendly API. Now, with instant text histograms.
Odo Basically, this tool migrates data from the source to the target through a network of conversions. Odo is part of the Open Source Blaze projects supported by Continuum Analytics
#MAP
Map of Power: Consultants Working for the 35 Biggest Companies in Spain
#NEXT EVENTS
Graph Connect // October 21 (San Francisco, USA)
UN|COMMONS // October 22-24 (Berlin, Germany)
Elevate Festival // October 22-26 (Graz, Austria)
Refugee Hackathon // October 24-25th (Berlin, Germany)
Open Goverment Partnership Global Summit // October 27-29th (Mexico City, México)
MozFest // November 6-8th (London, England)