Collaborate

With ProPublica I developed Collaborate - An open source tool to ease the process of gathering tips from the public and sharing them between newsrooms.

Tue 27 August 2019 ~ Brandon Roberts
Collaborate - Records View

A screenshot of the main records view in Collaborate.

As part of a joint project between ProPublica and the Google News Initiative, I developed Collaborate, an open source tool that helps newsrooms share crowd sourced tips among a distributed group of reporters. It was heavily influenced by the code supporting Electionland - ProPublica's collaborative election reporting project.

Using Collaborate, one can gather information from a variety of sources without needing to write any code: CSV files, Google Forms, Google Sheets and Screendoor. We wanted to target the broadest audience of journalists we could as users and emphasized ease-of-deployment. With our one-click installs, you can get a web server running with collaborate already set up on Google Cloud or Heroku.

You can find Collaborate on GitHub