Monday 14 February 2011

OpenLeaks

26th January 2011, OpenLeaks goes public Flattr this

Today, on the 26th of January 2011, someone impatient posted a PDF to cryptome.org leaking the website content we were still preparing for release. Some parts that are not finished yet are missing. Enjoy the read and feel free to give us some feedback.

Our new initiative seeks to bring more whistleblowing platforms into existence than what we have today. It was created by enthusiasts from various countries and backgrounds, who believe in the power of transparency.

Community and Service Provider

OpenLeaks considers itself a non-profit community and service provider for whistleblowers and organizations, media, and individuals who engage in promoting transparency. It makes leaking at a local, grassroot level possible and allows for certain scalability.

OpenLeaks will not accept or publish documents on its own platform, but rather create many "digital dropboxes" for its community members, each adapted to the specific needs of our members so that they can provide a safe and trusted leaking option for whistleblowers.

We are concentrating on making the process of submitting leaks safe and easy, thus we do not focus on review or publishing (the other parts of the leaking process). That will be done by members of our community: NGOs, media, independent organizations, and more. These participants will be diverse in nature and in regionality, coming from all over the globe in later phases.

The split between submission and publication of leaked documents makes the whole process safer for all who participate in it, and at the same time makes scaling so much easier. Watch our video, which explains this concept visually.

Whistleblowing Knowledge Base

Besides developing and building the technical platform, we want to encourage leaking all over the world while minimizing risks for whistleblowers. With this goal in mind we are creating a Knowledge Base that covers as many countries as possible, giving answers to questions with regard to local legislation, source and whistleblower protection, precedence cases and more.

We will need the help of the global community to fill this database with high-quality content and to keep it up to date. If you believe you can aid us in this substantial task, please Contact us.

Finances and Transparency

We believe that we cannot, with integrity, promote transparency everywhere else if we are not so ourselves. For example, we will provide as much clarity as is feasible about our finances, including our needs and expenditures. We will update such information on our website at regular intervals.

Concerning finances, there have been rumors that we will commercialize whistleblowing and sell content. This is not true. We are not creating a profit-oriented organization, and our services will generally be free of charge, for both our partners as well as sources. Our Knowledge Base will also be free for all.

However, we do need to build and secure the infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, and other capacities) and therefore will need the means to take care of this and other necessary processes. Firstly, we are seeking to encourage those of our partners that can afford it to help us expand our infrastructure by adding resources to it; thus making free access for others possible. Secondly, we provide means for donations from the general public wishing to support our project (these can also be non-monetary, e.g., server space).

Our Roadmap

As of today, OpenLeaks is not yet operational with regard to actually having members that accept documents, since we are only in the alpha phase of the project. For now we are further developing our concept, processes and infrastructure, with the help of our development partners.

The alpha phase began in January 2011, when we started testing with a small group of media organizations and NGOs. Our partners for this phase have already been selected and we shall describe our progression with them in the coming months.

We plan to start the beta phase in the second half of 2011, when we shall open the door for more initiatives (ranging from media, to NGOs and unions; anyone who requires the service) chosen both by ourselves, and the public.

More Information and Contact

Please refer to our FAQ page for more answers to questions you may still have, and if there are some left open, see our Contact page to find out how to reach us.

Visit our Concept page for details on how OpenLeaks is structured and how we will work. Be sure to visit it again later though, as this section will see some updates.

Help us bring whistleblowing to a new level, and to make it successful! Spread the word, and visit our Support page.

via openleaks.org

Posted by at