Public Integrity acquires tool to make data more accessible to journalists
The Accountability Project makes more than 1.8 billion public records easy to search and analyze.
by The Center for Public Integrity, March 2, 2023
(This story shows why we need to protect and expand access to and the aggregation of public records and other data sources across jurisdictions and data silos to make sure the public is kept well informed about their government, possible corruption or ethical issues, and how public policy may need to change. Non-journalist databases perform this function as well and also enable numerous transactions and processes we all rely on every day).
The Accountability Project (TAP) solves a problem for journalists: Searching across public data sets can be arduous, particularly on deadline. It also creates opportunity: Finding threads across campaign finance data, property records, business ownership and other sources can yield important stories about conflicts of interest, outsized influence and other issues that warrant deeper public scrutiny.
Seeing a need to streamline public data sets, the Investigative Reporting Workshop created TAP with the support of the Reva and David Logan Foundation to put much of that data in one place so journalists, researchers and others could search across otherwise siloed data.
TAP began with data related to money in politics and has added data on nonprofits, voters, business licensees and public employees.
In his original proposal for the project, Donald stressed the need for data among accountability professionals. “The key is the link among databases that provide the connections that allow us to hold the powerful accountable for their decisions and actions,” he wrote.”
