The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is partnering with Neo4j on a renewed “Connected Data Fellowship.” As part of Neo4j’s Graphs4Good initiative, this program will allow a dedicated developer to join ICIJ for eight months to make sense of complex data and enhance ICIJ’s toolbelt with graph database technologies.
This new fellow will work full time either remotely or from our office in Paris (France). Our tech team being primarily located in Europe, this position will be open to a work schedule that falls within 6 hours of our Paris office hours.
One of ICIJ’s secret weapons is Datashare: a self-hosted and open source tool that lets journalists mine and analyze documents collaboratively. This fellow will be responsible for building a Datashare extension to export documents metadata to Neo4j. In coordination with the Datashare team, the fellow will also explore ways to present this data and find efficient ways to connect the dots. Finally, the fellow will also work closely with our data and research team to design and create Neo4j databases and perform analysis for our latest investigations.
ICIJ’s tech team is a pluridisciplinary team of developers, UX designers, devops, data analysts and support specialists. We are dedicated to creating efficient and reusable technological solutions for the most ambitious investigations in the world. To do so, we work closely with ICIJ’s data and research team to analyze, clean and verify the data that fuel our stories.
For many years, ICIJ excelled in publishing the most impactful stories worldwide, building a growing community of investigative journalists taking full advantage of the biggest leaks in history. Our latest investigation on the offshore world, the Pandora Papers, gathered more than 600 journalists from 150 media outlets to mine more than 11.9 million documents. The Pandora Papers, as well as every ICIJ investigation, is backed up by a strong and consistent ecosystem of technologies.
Among the tools used by our reporters, Neo4j helped us connect the dots between people and offshore entities in jurisdictions where transparency doesn’t exist. Since 2013, ICIJ has maintained the Offshore Leaks database, a repository of corporate information for offshore jurisdictions which was fed by data leaks acquired by ICIJ during years. This database now has details about more than 800,000 offshore companies, foundations and trusts, connected to people and companies in more than 200 countries and territories.
Inspired by the way graph databases strengthened reporting and helped journalists understand large data sets during ICIJ’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Panama Papers investigation, Neo4j supports ICIJ with a complimentary Enterprise Edition license. In 2017, the Neo4j team also sponsored a six-month Neo4j Connected Data Fellowship.
We are very excited to announce this new fellowship in partnership with Neo4j. For more details, the job posting is available here.