Shedding Light On Corruption

Screen shot   http://www.corruptiontracker.org/main

Corruption exists in all countries around the world: there isn't a country in the world where it does not impact on people, business and government.

Corruption perverts justice, undermines democracy  and costs people their businesses, houses and in extreme cases their lives.

A new website focused on shedding light on corruption around the world has been launched in the US.

Corruptiontracker.org aims to capitalise on the burgeoning social media and crowd sourcing phenomena to generate maps and reports of almost real time corruption reports.

According to the Corruptiontracker website: "Corruption Tracker empowers people to report, identify and fight corruption via crowd sourced information sharing and analysis. People will be able to submit reports directly through CorruptionTracker.org via SMS, mobile telephony, and our Internet site. In addition, we will be fully integrated with all the major social networks.  " 

It will be interesting to see how countries with poor human rights records like China and countries like Libya (146)* and Indonesia (110)*  where corruption is part of every day life treat access to this website.

Reports are cross referenced with more conventional and well known sites like Global Integrity.

Image via WikipediaAnalysis of reported corruption from existing open source data streams such as Transparency International and IPaidaBribe provides a method of ensuring that this website is not used as an easy way of spreading rumour and innuendo.

* 2011 Transparency International Rankings