Group items tagged

Good piece on how to apply crowd-sourcing. March 22, 2012, 10:18 a.m. Television Broadcasters don't want to put campaign ad data online, so ProPublica pitches work-around With volunteers around the country, the news nonprofit is continuing its efforts to figure out what works and what doesn't when it comes to crowdsourced reporting.

The Dirty Energy Money tool provides an illustration of the network of funding relationships between Dirty Energy companies and politicians. You can use the interactive network map to explore our database campaign contribution relationships. Politicians and companies are positioned by their relationships, those that are close together tend to have similar patterns of giving and receiving.

Mr. People Years ago, while trying to clean up the names of donors in campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission, I hacked together a Perl module - loosely based on the Lingua-EN-NameParse module - to standardize names. One port to Ruby later, I've finally put together a Web front end for it. Try it out below - paste your own data in or try the sample data. To use the people Ruby gem in your own scripts, sudo gem install people, then read the documentation. Suggestions? Send them to mrpeople@ericson.net Allow couples:   Case:  Output:    Paste your names here:

Lessons on covering politics from the late David Foster Wallace COMMENTARY | July 09, 2012 Rule One in covering the presidential campaign, writes Henry Banta, has been to not allow information - even important information - to trump the entertainment factor, especially not in economics reporting. Time to do away with Rule One, Banta says, and stop fearing boredom. "missing variable

Open Data Cook BookMaking Open Data Accessible for EveryoneAbout the Cook BookThe open data cook book is collecting recipes for ways to find and use open data, particularly open data of social value - such as open government data, or open data for campaigners and charities. Working with data can seem scary. But it doesn't have to be. There are many different ways to make data useful - and lots of different gadgets to help you. Take a look at the growing list of cook book recipes to find simple step by step ideas for making use of open data. RecipesYou can find a list of the recipes so far here. Drafts, ideas and notesIn the cooks notebook you can find draft notes on using different datasets and sketches that might develop into recipes in future. Get InvolvedFind out how to get involved here or jump right in and create a recipe. Tweet with the #opendatacookbook tag, or bookmark content on del.icio.us 'opendatacookbook ' to share with the project. Join the mailing list to discuss developments. UpdateAfter a brief experiment with Drupal as a CMS for the cook book - we've switched to DokuWiki for a bit to make compiling a list of recipes a lot easier before we work out the best way to run the Cook Book.

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.