From Media Giraffe

[edit] Paul Radu

I'm Paul Radu an investigative journalist Romania traveling the world and coordinating teams of international journalists in investigating transnational organized crime for the past ten years. I'm currently the exec director of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project www.reportingproject.net and I'm also running a project called the Investigative Dashboard www.investigativedashboard.org

The Investigative Dashboard is a web-based clearinghouse for research requests from journalists and investigative not for profits. Reference librarians could join the clearing house, and could voluntarily undertake to assist in research. The clearing house would coordinate efforts (virtually) so that efforts would not be inadvertently duplicated. The result would be the first-ever effort to tie together the knowledge-gathering capabilities of the world's references librarians with the truth-seeking efforts of the world's journalists. The effort of librarians would be non-political and non-partisan, seeking only to find answers to research questions, without regard to, or concern for, the "point of view" of those making the queries.

A few of my ideas on this initiative:

• The system is already in place here: http://tracker.datatracker.org/ and we already proved it is functioning as we responded to requests from many geographical areas

• I'm basing my assumption that librarians would be happy to join these efforts because they own a big part of the cognitive surplus

• Reference librarians have access to multitudes of databases and they would probably be glad to donate some of their spare time assisting a journalist from somewhere in Africa to track down the wealth of a dictator.