Media Party 2017

Imagine that tomorrow you receive a leak, big and juicy like the Panama Papers or the Lava Jato case. You sit down, and begin to search: the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Economy... Pretty soon it becomes clear that this is slow. But what if you had a list of everybody in your country that is newsworthy? We are mapping out persons of interest, such as politicians, their families, business people, and criminals. Information on such individuals and their companies is essential raw material for activists who are tracking and generaring alerts on state capture and in-country or cross-border corruption schemes, or journalists finding information of interest in a leak. This sort of information comes particularly handy these days in the region, with Presidential elections coming in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Chile and the upcoming Legislative elections in Argentina. The data can be manually curated, but also collected from public data sources like Politically Exposed Persons lists, asset declarations, sanctions lists, most wanted lists and procurement debarment lists. In this workshop, Paola Mosso (The Engine Room) and Friedrich Lindenberg (OCCRP) will talk about why and how you'd collect persons of interest information and encourage participants to find LatAm sources, scrape and systematise them. To close-out the workshop, we’ll reflect on the challenges regarding finding and organizing persons of interest data, potential regional and national use cases and fundamental datasets for cross-analysing persons of interest data.