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A Plug & Play Anti-Corruption Tool for All
The Chilean anti-corruption project Poderopedia launched a free, open source version of their web platform last Friday. Plug & Play 1.0 can be used to create searchable databases as well as visualizations of politicians and their associates and associations. It can also follow the flow of money from foundation to project, or public donor to candidate, among others. The Poderopedia blog suggests users can “map links between NSA, Prism and Silicon Valley” or “create a NPApedia, Baseballpedia or Soccerpedia.”
When techPresident covered Poderopedia earlier this year, they explained that the platform was similar to LinkedIn “but the creation and management of profiles is being crowdsourced out to journalists, activists and concerned citizens.”
In Chile the platform is used as a resource in fighting graft, but as an open source tool, there are many possibilities for its use.
According to the blog post announcing the tool, the Africa News Challenge Winner NewsStack will use it as part of a journalist toolkit to probe the continent's extractive industries. Ten media organizations will contribute to the yearlong, pan-African investigation.
The founder of Poderopedia, Miguel Paz, is also currently working on a project called OpenData Latinoamérica, profiled by Caroline O'Donovan at Nieman Lab.
Paz told Nieman Lab:
“The question for us, is, What are we gonna do with the data? Data for what? Bridging that space between opening the data and how it translates into improving the quality of people's lives around the world . . .is really where the World Bank Institute and our programmatic work is focused.”
That is ultimately what the Plug & Play Poderopedia hopes to accomplish too: facilitating the use of data to effective positive social change.
Read Jessica McKenzie's full article of June 24, 2013 on the TechPresident