Poderopedia launches new chapters in Venezuela and Colombia with IPYS and Consejo de Redacción
Award-winning transparency platform maps connections between political and business leaders
Poderopedia.org will launch new chapters in Venezuela and Colombia, starting with Venezuela opening on World Press Freedom Day, May 3, 2014.
These chapters will enable citizens of the two countries to discover connections among powerful people in politics and business, exposing networks of influence and potential conflicts of interest.
The expansion of this accountability and transparency project from its home base in Chile comes through collaborations with the Venezuelan Institute for Press and Society (IPYS) and the Colombian Consejo de Redacción. The project is also supported by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as well as Startup Chile.
Information and power for everybody. This is Poderopedia.
Poderopedia is an award-winning, collaborative data journalism platform that maps who is who in business and politics. ICFJ Knight International Journalism Fellow Miguel Paz launched it in Chile in 2012 with a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant.
The launch of the new Venezuela chapter will be held on May 3, World Press Freedom Day, through Poderopedia.org. On that site, users can choose a country, then explore the networks of influence or register on the platform to provide information, documents and tips. The Colombia chapter launch will be announced soon.
Each of the new chapters will receive additional support from its own funders. The Venezuela chapter is backed by Transparency Venezuela through Coalición ProAcceso, while the Colombia chapter is under a program financed by Open Society Foundations.
The expansion is the first step in Poderopedia’s effort to promote cooperation across Latin America in strengthening democracy and promoting innovation, technology training for journalists and the development of online news applications.
Impact metrics
Since its inception, Poderopedia has attracted international attention. It was a finalist for the Global Editors Network (GEN) 2013 Data Journalism Awards and has won other prizes. It is currently nominated for the Bobs Awards, managed by Deutsche Welle, in the Best Innovation category. It was nominated for its visualizations of power networks, its use of citizen collaboration, and its innovative open software platform.
Also the Poderopedia team made of Mónica Ventura (Chief Researcher), Juan Eduardo Hernández (Lead Developer) and Miguel Paz (CEO) has produced over 10 impact cases about conflicts of interest; shed light on shady business deals and potential political misconduct; generated debate among citizens; and provided information for dozens of news stories.
The platform is now a wealth of information about the powerful in Chile. It contains info on 3,107 individuals, 1,398 companies, 812 institutions. Six Chilean newsrooms are republishing Poderopedia content. There have been nearly 300 news stories related to the project, and we have 3,590 registered users.
Press, media inquiries and those interested in creating a chapter of Poderopedia in other countries should write to team@poderopedia.com
More Resources
-Video “This is Poderopedia” http://vimeo.com/51796505 (english) / http://vimeo.com/50626558 (spanish)
-Keynote you can embed on your website http://www.slideshare.net/poderopedia/this-is-poderopedia-we-map-who-is-who-in-business-and-politics-in-latinamerica-with-you
-Follow us on Twitter http://twitter.com/poderopedia
-Join our Facebook community https://www.facebook.com/poderopedia
Poderopedia, the Chilean data journalism platform, plans to expand to Venezuela and Colombia
Paola Nalvarte, from the The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, help a phone interview with our CEO Miguel Paz last week. He announce several good news about our internationalization project during the one hour talk:
In late 2012 Chilean journalist Miguel Paz, an ICFJ Knight International Journalism fellow, launched with a group of colleagues a data journalism platform called Poderopedia, which helps reveal the network of relationships between business and government elites in Chile.
Now, the Poderopedia Foundation – of which Paz is president and aims to promote the use of new technologies to foment transparency – is making improvements to its platform in order to implement it in several countries in the region and allow users to feed and continually update the network. This year, the foundation will open its second Latin American chapter in Venezuela and its third one in Colombia.
Also available in:
Portuguese
Visit Source and find out more about our free platform
Source, the Knight Mozilla Open News website that promotes data journalism and code for information and news projects, posted and article about our open source platform written by our CEO Miguel Paz.
MEET PODEROPEDIA PLUG & PLAY
Making it easy to map the powerful or influential in any community
Poderopedia Plug & Play featured in TechPresident
“A Plug & Play Anti-Corruption Tool for All”. Wow. Awesome headline, eh?
Check the blog post in TechPresident
In Journalism.co.uk: Poderopedia among “Eight trends newsrooms should be aware of”
In a recent post in Journalism.co.uk about the digital trends that newsrooms should be aware of, Justin Arenstein, ICFJ Knight Fellow and digital strategist mentions Poderopedia as part of the major trends the media ecosystem needs to pay attention to.
When asked about what needs to change in newsrooms, Arenstein outlined 4 essential components that must become part of everyday journalism and digital news to evolve.
Quote:
1. Geotagging. By geotagging stories, people and places mentioned in articles, news outlets can be ready for new geolocation tools and services, including Google Glass. Unlike the next point, geotagging happens at the newsgathering stage.2. Build in entity extraction and network analysis. In comparison to geotagging, this must happen at the news production stage, Arenstein said. By creating “deep linked data”, news outlets can semantically link articles and both journalists and readers can start to see relationships by the linked information. Arenstein gave the example of Thomson Reuters project OpenCalais, and Poderopedia, which automates linkages.
3. Turning narrative news into structured data. (As explained further in the next point).
4. Treating news as an API. The New York Times and the Guardian are two news outlets which have done this, opening up their structured data.
This is exciting news for our team: at Poderopedia we are already doing the 4 things Arenstein mentions above and we want to share the platform we built for it, with you. Yes, our software is open source and you can use it! Go to our github repository and take it for a ride. We would love to hear what you think about it and learn how you are using it.
Poderopedia Team
Poderopedia: “A great example for others interested in fighting conflict of interest through increased transparency”
In a very detailed post, entitled “Chilean project exposes connections between business and politics”, the European Research Center Againts Corruption highlights Poderopedia as a platform that sets “a great example for others interested in fighting conflict of interest through increased transparency”.
The article explains how “conflict of interest in the public administration is a central issue in the anti-corruption agenda”. It also states that Poderopedia has an interesting new feature: “an effort to disseminate its platform for replication in other countries”.
Yes, indeed. This year will be all about Internationalization. So if you are interested, write to us.
This sunday on NPR learn about Poderopedia in The Best of our Knowledge
The Best of our Knowledge, a Peabody Award Winning radio program, interviewed our founder Miguel Paz for their weekly US nationally-syndicated show in NPR.
The 30 minute conversation with host Jim Flemming is an in depth talk about Poderopedia, how we work and what we have planned for this year.
In times of fast media it`s always great to sit down to chat with no rush. Seth Godin calls this slow media. Good soulfood. A pleasure for us.
Listen to part of the interview here.
Find a NPR station near you to listen to the show this sunday
Poderopedia among the 10 new digital tools for journalists
Eric Newton asked Michael Maness and the Journalism and Media Innovation team from Knight Foundation what tools journalists should be learning. Manes`s list includes 10 top tech tools that journos should learn in 2013. Among them: Poderopedia and Poderopedia`s Plug &Play software for newsrooms.
IN Lan Magazine features Poderopedia in “The City of the Future” article
The january issue of IN, the award winning magazine distributed in every LAN Airlines flight, includes an article entitled The City of the Future, about new technology and innovative apps, showcasing Poderopedia:
“Governments Under the Microscope
In Chile, Poderopedia aims to become the definitive database on the country’s business and political elite, displaying their intricate networks of connections to prevent conflicts of interest, thereby pushing transparency to a whole new level. That’s how the project is described by its creator, Miguel Paz, winner of Knight Foundation innovation venture funding in 2011 and a 2012 participant in StartUp Chile.”
In the same article by JI Stark, IN highlights SignalNoi.se, a startup created by Mohamed Nanabhay to provide insights for media, that our team really likes and roots for (disclosure: Poderopedia and SignalNoi.se are both projects that received funds from the Knight Foundation).
Quién es quién en los negocios y la política en Latinoamérica