Crocodyl news

Greenpeace recently launched a website called Greenpeace Investigations that they will be using to archive their source materials from past research projects. The site includes scanned Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, fact sheets, reports and materials contributed by whistleblowers. They are currently scanning all of the Greenpeace magazines between 1980-1990 to add to the archive, which will be a great resource for people researching all types of corporations.

Each item has an HTML text version on its resource page, presumably for better searchability via search engines. They also offer the original PDF, which is great from a journalistic perspective, considering the need for source materials in any type of news writing. The website is ordered by "collections" so you can look at all of the relevant documents that relate to a specific investigation that Greenpeace has done.

I anticipate that this body of work will expose many more corporate crimes by bolstering existing corporate accountability research, allowing citizen journalists to mine these sources, creating follow up investigations and teasing out more details from the great work that Greenpeace has done, if it delivers on its promise:

"Greenpeace Investigations is a searchable library that contains investigative campaign research conducted by Greenpeace worldwide. It consists of thousands of documents that were obtained through our campaign efforts, FOIA requests, legal proceedings and whistleblowers. We believe that our investigative efforts and campaign documents should be made public as part of our ongoing effort to expose environmental crimes and their perpetrators."

The next company of the week is Dole Food. From the snapshot:

"Dole Food Company, Inc. is the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables such as bananas and pineapples, and also produces cut flowersand nuts. Dole has a history of operating plantations in the US across the globe, often creating poor working conditions and unsafeenvironmental conditions such as pesticide use, soil erosion anddeforestation."

A lot of great research has been done by many nonprofit and publicinterest groups on Dole, so I am sure lots of interesting things willturn up this week.

We have completely recovered the website from the database corruption that happened last week, so we are celebrating here in the offices that no data was lost. However, if you do come across a page that doesn't seem right for any reason, it would be a great help if you could notify us. Add the page to our list of pages that contain errors, which the team is subscribed to and monitors closely. We will take a look at the page when you add it to that list and correct any errors. Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who helped out, we are now back online and almost fully operational. As you may have heard from our announcements or the error page on Crocodyl.org, we had a database glitch during a routine security upgrade. Luckily we were able to figure out a way to get the site back to it's previous state, but it has involved reverting each page manually. So far we have about 900 out of 1000 done, so we are very close.

In the meantime, if you come across a page with an error, it would be a tremendous help if you could email it to the project manager at the following address: so that we can recover it. Some of the pages will have the wrong path, ie you click on a link and it goes to the wrong place. Other links will lead to a blank page. In either case, sending the URL to the project manager will help a lot in getting the site back to 100%.

Thanks so much!

We are proud to announce that Crocodyl has been selected as one of the winners of the 2008 NetSquared Mashup Challenge! Thanks to all of you who voted for us, your support for us was crucial to this great victory!

This is great news for us, as it will allow us to pursue a project we would not have been able to take on otherwise, the visual mapping of parent company/subsidiary relationships using the SEC database. We will be going to San Jose, California to Cisco Systems' Vineyard Conference Center and presenting the idea to the conference attendees, as well as working with NetSquared to develop the new web application.

If you want to collaborate with us on this project and have knowledge about databases, mashups, screen scraping or other related technologies, please get in touch with the Crocodyl project manager. If you have suggestions about the project proposal, feel free to collaborate with us by leaving comments on the proposal page.

Today, March 17 (Happy St. Patty’s Day!), voting opens for the NetSquared Mashup Challenge. The top 20 voted on projects will be featured at the NetSquared Conference on May 27 & 28 at Cisco Systems in Santa Clara, California. With your help CorpWatch and Crocodyl will be there!

We are asking that you take the time, if possible, to create a log-in account on NetSquared.org and submit a vote for our project, "CorpWatch – Government Data on Corporations." Our goal is to create social change through democratizing often hard to find and disparate information on corporations and the impacts of their operations, via our www.crocodyl.org site. Here is the address to create an account:

http://www.netsquared.org/user/register

Feel free to email Ian Elwood directly at ian@corpwatch.org anytime if you have questions. Here is the official voting guide:

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/vote

After you create an account , confirm your email address, and are approved you can login to netsquared.org and visit our project page to cast your vote. Just click "Add project to ballot" on the following page, while logged in:

http://tinyurl.com/2z5f4v

Registered users can vote for no less than 5 and no more than 10 projects. You can only vote for each project once. Click on the links below (or copy and paste them into your browser) to see the full contest entries. There are a lot of good ones, but here are a few that we think are excellent. Feel free to vote for whichever you like (but, if so inspired, please vote for CorpWatch!):

1) CorpWatch - Government Data on Corporations: http://tinyurl.com/2z5f4v

2) MAPLight http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/mapping-money-and-politics-maplight-org

3) OpenCongress.org :: Track Congress with Social Data http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/opencongress-org-track-congress-social-data

4) Metavid http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/metavid-community-video-archive-project

5)Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/ushahidi

6) EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/epa-superfund-mashup

7) City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/wholesale-demolition-new-orleans-neighborhoods

8) Hive: http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/hive

9) Connect Ingredients to Products and or Corporations: http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/connect-ingredients-products-and-or-corporations

10) Government by the People http://www.netsquared.org/2008/conference/projects/government-people

Thanks so much for supporting CorpWatch in this contest! The online, open source tool we will create as a result of winning will be a great asset in holding corporations accountable (and will facilitate an incredibly valuable in-kind programming donation to us, -- we don’t have the budget to do this ourselves).