Hi! I'm a civic technologist working on effective tools and methods for data-driven journalism and advocacy.

A little tour of aleph, a data search tool for reporters

29.06.2016 Over the past six months, I've been working for OCCRP to productise Aleph, a powerful search tool for investigative reporters. This is a little tour of it's key features, and a little view into the future development agenda.

A Poor Journalists's Text Mining Toolkit

08.06.2016 How can journalists search and analyze collections of documents on their own computers with simple tools? At last weekend's DataHarvest, we ran a workshop trying to answer that question. This write-up to covers using Apache Tika for content extraction and regular expressions in Sublime Text as an advanced search tool.

Against Decentralization

04.11.2015 In the free software/open web community, the notion that the web should be decentralized is more than a shared ideal, it is a piece of dogma. But are we really promoting a progressive vision of the web, or fighting a losing battle to avoid political engagement?

Keeping stock: investigative data warehouses

03.08.2015 Data warehouses are used in industry to manage the many datasets accrued inside a company that might be relevant to reporting and analysis. I want to propose a similar pattern for investigative journalism.

SpenDB, a data analysis tool for government finance, looking for testers!

30.06.2015 The first beta version of SpenDB features a small set of well-designed features for data import and analysis. Now the platform is ready to be adopted by anyone interested in exploring financial data, from budgets to procurement.

On Hacks/Hackers, Google and community building

04.06.2015 A few weeks ago, the US team of Hacks/Hackers announced their plans to turn the network of journalism innovators into a collaboration with Google News Labs, starting with an event in Berlin. I tweeted about this, and Phillip Smith wrote a thoughtful reaction. Given this invitation to debate, I wanted to outline my criticism in more detail.

SpenDB, a light-weight tool for government financial data

03.06.2015 Over the past few months, I have spent my weekends simplifying and modernizing the OpenSpending codebase to create SpenDB - a prototype-stage, light-weight data loading tool and analytical API for government financial data.

Who’s got dirt? - What if robots could do cross-border investigations?

30.05.2015 If we want to make open data relevant to investigative journalism, we have to simplify the way people access it. We must create a way for our data tools to talk to each other and trade information about the companies and people we are researching.
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