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Aleph is developed mainly for use by investigative reporters in cross-border investigations.

About the project

The goal of the Aleph project is to provide powerful technology to investigative journalists who want to track (mainly) white collar crime. The development is fully open, and coordinated by the data team at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. We welcome contributors from other contexts, such as anti-corruption advocacy.

Why was Aleph created?

We decided to build Aleph to solve the following principal needs:

  • Easy data search for both structured and unstructured information (ie. documents and databases).
  • Cross-referencing between different datasets ("Who are all the politicians in my country that are mentioned in this leak?")
  • Access control and data compartmentalisation, but also flexible sharing within cross-border teams.
  • Visual exploration of investigative analysis through network diagrams, timelines and other investigative tools.
  • Continuous crawling of hundreds of public data sources as background material for research.

Our goal with all this has been to make an open, modular and extensible toolkit that can be operated at scale and in production.

Who is using Aleph?

Most of the organisations that have adopted Aleph do so for in-house use. Some public instances exist:

Organisations with in-house Alephs include Global Witness, Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ), Swedish Radio (SR), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) and others.

{% embed url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bg96HcR\_2Jc" caption="OpenOil, a startup that previously used Aleph, created this trailer video." %}

How can I contribute?

Aleph is an open source project, we're very excited for contributions from people or organisations who see benefit in helping to refine or extend our tools. Here are some of the ways you could help:

  • If you are a native speaker of a language that isn't supported by the Aleph user interface, join the Transifex project and help us provide the software in that language.
  • If you're a coder (Python, JavaScript/React.js), jump on our issue tracker to see open issues. Work that could be a good entry point for a new contributor is marked help-wanted.
  • If you're an open data enthusiast or data scraper, you can convert data from a public source to our FollowTheMoney data format and share the result with the community. Consider contributing a memorious scraper to the Aleph data commons!
  • Any graphic designers or visual artists could help us immensely, in particular by improving the set of icons available inside the application. Please get in touch!

Who has funded the development?

Aleph is the product of a collaborative effort, and many on the team been able to invest time and effort into developing the product. The following organisations have made this possible:

  • The Google Digital News Initiative has supported OCCRP with a large-scale grant to build Aleph. Google Ideas (now Jigsaw, an Alphabet unit) also provided funding for the Investigative Dashboard, some of which helped to kickstart this project.
  • Development of Aleph is also financed via OCCRP's core grants from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the US Department of State (DRL), Open Societies Foundations (OSF), and Luminate.
  • If you would like to support OCCRP's development of Aleph, please contact our Partnerships team via [email protected].

Besides grants to OCCRP, the following other organisations have contributed to the development of Aleph: