About

Liquid Investigations is enabling journalists working across the world to collaborate securely, effectively and at low cost as well as independent of centralised infrastructures and platforms.

Liquid Investigations is a free, open-source software that’s self-hosted and bundles together index, OCR & search, wikis, chat and file-sync systems and annotations in a secure self-hosted environment. It’s scalable from cheap hardware up to enterprise grade environments.

With Liquid Investigations we are lowering the barriers for journalistic collaborations, empowering journalists towards:

• censorship resistance by way of networking;
• digital security during the research process (for protecting info-exchange, whistleblowers and source docs);
• anonymity towards infrastructure admins and owners by way of not retaining search logs;
• focusing on holding power transparent and accountable.

With the full bundle in production we allow for distributed, non-hierarchical data analysis, as well as sharing, information exchange and annotation for journalists in networks.

Team

(all, code and rest?)

Project History & Funding

The core code started to be developed for the Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism (RCIJ) at the end of 2015 by Alex Morega as an index & search tool (Hoover) for a small network of Romanian journalists to be able to search documents (RCIJ is one of the oldest investigative journalism non-profits in Europe, established in 2001).

It got adopted and further developed for the European Investigative Collaborations network (EIC) during 2016, adding Gabi Vijiala in the dev team, while EIC was starting to process a growing collection of leaked material (Football Leaks).

During 2017 RCIJ won a Google DNI grant (https://newsinitiative.withgoogle.com/dnifund/insights/liquid-investigations-helping-journalists-collaborate-safely-scale/) to develop the current bundle around Hoover.

After the grant was over, since 2018, the bundle was further developed with financial support from EIC.network, which is a non-profit network by agreement where each media organisation who's a member is putting human and financial resources together to research stories and maintain or develop tools for investigative journalists (published under free and open source).