This Wiki gathers some of the knowledge shared in our first conference on Technology for Investigative Journalism Conference, which was held at City University, London, September 19-20, 2015.
The event brought together journalists who specialize in cross-national collaborations and technologists working on tools to support them.
Everyone doing networked investigative reporting faces similar challenges, including access to data, the usability of analysis tools, and the difficulty of determining who knows what among your collaborators. Solving these problems will require a new generation of software, but we will also need to find different ways of working together, and create models for sustained funding.
The event ended up with some consensus on goals, organization, and technical approaches.
Sessions, Workshops & Demo sessions
Saturday, September 19th
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Session: “What problems are we trying to solve” (Jonathan Stray) What problems are we trying to solve? Why are there so many failed tools and so much overlap?
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Demos: Solutions for Document Management 10 minute presentations of existing document platforms: DocumentCloud, Overview Docs, Investigative Dashboard, ICIJ and Tamedia.
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Demos: Solutions for Entity Mapping A quick overview of different influence mapping projects and tools developed and deployed amongst the participants. Demos: Oligrapher, NodeMapper and Paul Radu.
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Session: “Scale, Modeling, Contributions: Lessons from OpenCorporates” (Chris Taggart) OpenCorporates has grown to include 90mio companies, some collected via the Turbot crowd-sourcing mechanism. Chris will share some lessons.
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Session: “Poplus: Lessons learned” (Tony Bowden) The Poplus project has worked for the last two years to establish tool-sharing and data standards in the parliamentary monitoring domain. What can Investigative Journalism learn from this?
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Workshop: Personas / User needs in Investigative Journalism (Miguel Paz) _Let’s give names to our use cases, as a way to be able to refer to them more targetedly in future conversations. _
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Session: “Influence Mapping Toolbox Session” (Jun Matsushita) Jun will present iilab’s work on an Influence Mapping toolbox / set of best practices for newcomers. The session will collect participants feedback on the proposed resource.
Sunday, September 20th
- Session: “Where are we in 5 years?” (Smari McCarthy, Friedrich Lindenberg) Big picture, brainstorm: What are the major developments that we need to push for in IJ tech? Where are our current boundaries? What are the needs that require a systematic approach?
- Session: “Collaboration & Business Models” (Jonathan Stray)
- Session: “Data Standards + Who’s Got Dirt? API” (James McKinney) Looking at the possibilities for standard to increase data interoperability between our datasets and tools, including the idea of a common API for investigative entity mapping tools: “Who’s Got Dirt?”
- Unconference: Group discussions.
Participants
- Adam Hooper (Overview Project)
- Andy Lulham (Unlock Democracy / Spinwatch)
- Annabel Church (Influence Mapping Group)
- Blaine Cook (Poetica)
- Caelainn Barr (The Guardian)
- Chris Taggart (OpenCorporates, Influence Mapping Group)
- Dan O’Huiguinn (OpenOil)
- Didier Orel (Tamedia AG)
- Drew Sullivan (OCCRP)
- Eva Constantaras (Internews)
- Friedrich Lindenberg (Influence Mapping Group)
- Helena Bengtsson (The Guardian)
- James McKinney (Influence Mapping Group)
- Jonathan Stray (Overview Project)
- Jun Matsushita (iilab)
- Kat Austen (iilab)
- Kevin Connor (LittleSis, Influence Mapping Group)
- Mar Cabra (ICIJ)
- Matt Caruana Galizia (ICIJ)
- Max Harlow (TBIJ)
- Miguel Paz (Poderopedia, Influence Mapping Group)
- Mike Tigas (ProPublica)
- Paola Mosso (Influence Mapping Group)
- Paul Radu (OCCRP)
- Smari McCarthy (OCCRP)
- Stephen Grey (Thomson Reuters)
- Titus Platner (Le Matin di Manche)
- Tom Walker (theengineroom)
- Tony Bowden (EveryPolitician)
- Will Franklin (The Guardian)
Organisators
- Supercharging Transparency Mapping / Influence Mapping - Open Society Foundations Project
- Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP)