An open-source reporting tool for newsroom collaborations

ProPublica’s Collaborate software makes crowdsourcing data a seamless process when used for group projects

Spotted: ProPublica, a US-based, nonprofit investigative news organisation recently launched Collaborate, an open-source reporting tool that allows for those from various newsrooms to collaborate on data journalism projects.  

Collaborate’s aim is to make crowdsourcing data a seamless process when used for group projects. It supports live connections to multiple file and spreadsheet formats, including Google Sheets and Forms. Updates made these external data sources can be viewed and accessed by all who are using Collaborate. 

The in-house software was designed to be used by newsrooms both large and small and can be set up and customised without expert development resources, ProPublica says. Users can access the code they need from the open-source software development platform Github.

ProPublica specialises in collaborations with different news organisations. The new software was based on an existing program that ProPublica used for two recent data collaborations. One was Electionland, which monitored voting problems in real-time during the 2016 and 2018 US elections and merged the efforts of more than 1,000 journalists and students.