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Meeting in Italy The amount of criminal money washing around the world each year is estimated at $2 trillion, and it affects everything from health and human rights to democracy and national security. Investigative stories have always led to cases involving corrupt activities and criminal conspiracies. But the nature of corrupt and criminal acts is changing quickly with technology and globalization. How can investigative journalists stay on top of techniques to follow and expose crime and corruption in the 21st Century?

WHAT WE DO We build software that allows organizations to make sense of massive amounts of disparate data. We solve the technical problems, so they can solve the human ones. Combating terrorism. Prosecuting crimes. Fighting fraud. Eliminating waste. From Silicon Valley to your doorstep, we deploy our data fusion platforms against the hardest problems we can find, wherever we are needed most.

The Investigative Dashboard (ID) is a work in progress, that is designed to showcase the potential for collaboration and data-sharing between investigative reporters across the world. The initiative is spearheaded by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism, the Forum for African Investigative Reporters and the International Center for Journalists, and will expand to include other institutional members of the Global Investigative Journalism Network. The project is coordinated by Paul Cristian Radu (of OCCRP and CRJI) and Justin Arenstein (of FAIR) and was developed while both were in residence at Stanford University as Knight fellows. The John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists made possible the ID by providing access to the know-how of co-fellow journalists and of experts at Stanford University and in Silicon Valley. This first iteration of the ID website shares detailed methodologies, resources, and links for journalists to track money, shareholders, and company ownership across international borders. It also shares video tutorials, and other tools, to help journalists navigate often rapidly evolving data-sources. Future versions of ID will offer more advanced collaborative workspaces, data-archives, and discounted (or, where possible, free) access to expensive or proprietary research services. But, perhaps most importantly, the ID will campaign for investigative centres across the world to collaborate with each other to improve the depth and impact of their reportage.

Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Even better, flare features a modular design that lets developers create customized visualization techniques without having to reinvent the wheel. View the demos and sample applications to see a few of the visualizations that flare makes it easy to build. To begin making your own visualizations, download flare and work through the tutorial. You should also get familiar with the API documentation. Need more help? Visit the help forum (you'll need a SourceForge login to post). Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license, meaning it can be freely deployed and modified (and even sold for $$). Flare's design was adapted from its predecessor prefuse, a visualization toolkit for Java.