The Investigative Dashboard was created by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) to allow anyone to get started on follow-the-money investigative techniques.
The Investigative Dashboard / OCCRP ID provides a Worldwide Company Database - an ever-expanding list of databases containing information on companies from all over the world, from official sources such as state corporate registries and land records to commercial databases of companies.
OCCRP ID was developed by OCCRP co-founder Paul Radu (protagonist of our very first documentary "Our Currency is Information and Justin Arenstein from the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) while they were both John S. Knight Fellows in residence at Stanford University in 2010.
OCCRP ID also runs a free-of-charge Research Desk, where journalists and activists from the OCCRP network can submit requests to professional researchers to obtain data about people or companies. The research desk was created by Paul Radu to address what he considered were the biggest obstacles to investigators, especially in developing countries: funds and languages. Some databases require registration fees to be accessed, and the company you are researching on may be registered in a country whose language you do not speak. The Research Desk researchers can help by taking care of fees and translations.
Read more about the Investigative Dashboard and how it started in a 2012 article Paul Radu wrote in Boing Boing.
And, this historical video gives you a glimpse of how the Investigative Dashboard looked and worked back in 2011, when it first launched.
Hero image from: id.occrp.org.