Crocodyl is a collaboration between nonprofit organizations such as Center for Corporate Policy, CorpWatch, Corporate Research Project, other contributing organizations and individual contributors from around the world. Using network tools such as the wiki, crocodyl enables disparate groups and individuals to pool our knowledge about specific corporations in order to reduce the high cost of corporate research and ensure maximum efficiency in holding corporations accountable. Now professional researchers in Mumbai, India can team up with a citizen journalist in the Netherlands to track international companies not easily held accountable in one country.
Our information is divided by Issue Areas and Industries and tracks the impact of corporations on public policies, health, sustainability, human rights, social justice, labor, and related issues of corporate responsibility. We use our contributors' knowledge and experience of these industries and issues to inform the global conversation happening in other online communities of knowledge, such as Wikipedia, SourceWatch and NewAssignment.
For small activist community groups campaigning against Bechtel in Nevada or Barrick Gold in Papua New Guinea, attempting to track and hold global multinationals accountable for environmental or human rights abuse in their communities is a formidable endeavor. Crocodyl can help them challenge the public relations machines of big business by providing an easy-to-access snapshot of information about these companies, including an inventory of their misdeeds. Crocodyl also increases traffic flow in the reverse direction, drawing attention to information gathered by small watchdog groups working on the front lines of corporate accountability. In addition, Crocodyl is intended to be useful to researchers, journalists, concerned investors, consumers and the public at large.
The proliferation of Open Source and Free Software as well as the vibrant global conversations happening on the blogosphere have illustrated the power of collaborative networked production to create a more popularly accessible information ecology. Our project allows technical and non-technical users alike to freely create and edit pages, with assurance that the highest standards will be upheld by the community of editors and experts also participating. Because anyone can add a page and have the new information available globally immediately, it allows ordinary citizens to report on a breaking news event, quicker than mainstream media can, because there are no initial barriers to reporting the news. Information that is breaking, controversial, or in question is encouraged, but must be clearly sourced so that readers may judge the information for themselves.
Of course no solution is perfect -- the very “open-source” nature of this kind of journalism means that companies themselves and malicious or misinformed individuals can publish material on the site, possibly distorting its accuracy. The solution to this is to use our community and our editors to vet and verify posted material, allowing the most thoroughly scrutinized material to be re-published in a section that is not open for general editing and is updated less frequently. In this way we can use the collective wisdom of industry watchdogs, nonprofits working on campaigns, company shareholders and other stakeholders to hold corporations to the highest standards of accountability.
