corporate malfeasance

Project URL:

http://www.crocodyl.org/

What will change in the world because this Project happens?:

UPDATE:Â See here for more details... Corporations often escape scrutiny of the most eggregious offenses because their actions are not easliy trackable by average citizens. Parent company/subsidiary relationships are often unknown, save to those with access to expensive and proprietary databases. By adapting visualization software such as Prefuse into a Drupal module, a large database of unwieldy government information can be made accessible and intuitive for activists and citizens to interact with.

The visualization would illustrate the relationships of who-owns-who in the global corporate landscape and shed light on the often dizzying maze of shell companies used to displace liability and avoid corporate accountability.

This is an important project to take on as a mashup, because it needs to pull live data as opposed to a static dataset or a well written report. The pace of buy-ins and sell-outs is so high that only a live feed of data could aggregate and track the voluminous sources from regulatory institutions and keep this information up to date.

Because we would devlop this module as part of the popular open source content management system, Drupal, it would be freely available and adaptable to not only CorpWatch, but anyone who wanted to use the software for their Drupal website.

We would also publish our data in a format that allows other organizations to build an API on top of it.

What information will people interact with to make this change?:

Information sources such as the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR database (see, even the names are inaccessible) are excellent sources of raw data, but because they are created by government departments they often do not do much to contextualize the data they collect.

Traditionally making sense of this information has been the territory of investigative journalists, academics, computer scientists and other "experts." Though the NetSquared Mashup Challenge, CorpWatch hopes to build an application that will provide context to the vast amount of information available and make it open and accessible to everyone.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?:

CorpWatch has a long history in the area of corporate accountability, from war contractors to sweatshops, CorpWatch has written hard-hitting exposes on the world's most powerful corporations.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here:

Project RSS Feed:

http://www.crocodyl.org/rss_feed.xml

Additional Project RSS Feed:

http://www.corpwatch.org/rssfeed.php

Organization Supporting your project, if any:

CorpWatch

Supporting Organization URL:

http://www.corpwatch.org

Does your Project have financial support?:

Yes

What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?:

Update: The folks at the Google Hackathon suggested that we focus specifically on the SEC Database. We are editing the proposal to narrow our scope. They also suggested that we create a more detailed technical specification of this project for developers. Please see our blog for more details:

http://www.netsquared.org/blog/ian-elwood/technical-specifications-corpwatch-mashup

List URLs that link to, or describe, your mashup data sources:

The EDGAR Database of the Securities and Exchange Commission