These guys work tirelessly to keep this site going, it has almost literally taken over their lives. Their service is an invaluable tool for many from private citizens, to authors and journalists. Please help keep the site up and running. Thanks!
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/fundraiser.jspDear Friends of Cooperative Research,
It is once again time to ask for your financial support. We have finally completed the contribution system and are ready to proceed with the next phase. But we are deep in the red and have put this project on hold until we raise the needed funds.
Last September we attempted to raise $45,000, but ended the fundraiser slightly short of that goal, receiving approximately $39,000 in pledges. Of that amount, only $36,500 was actually collected. We chose to move ahead anyways despite this 19 percent funding shortfall.
Our primary goal was to complete the contribution system. We had hoped to do this by January, but unfortunately we did not meet this deadline. When January came around, we still had tons of data entry to do, and the programmers were still in the thick of it. At that point we were also completely out of money. We decided however that we would work in the red and delay our next fundraiser until everything was done. And so we slogged on. We are now done. The contribution system (version 1.0 at least) is finished and the huge data reorganization task of converting 18,000 citations into a consolidated list of 8,500 fully described sources has also been completed (see below for details). During this phase we also managed to publish more than 1,300 new and revised timeline entries (about 550 pages of material). All this is the result of 4,590 hours of work (2 people working more than full-time + 2 programmers working part-time), supplemented by approximately 300 volunteer hours. But having worked the last two and a half months, 7 days a week, without any income, we have reached the breaking point. Our credit card balances are sky high, and next month's rent threatens to go unpaid.
Due to the 19 percent shortfall combined with a 13 percent cost overrun, Cooperative Research is in the red almost $15,000.Having completed the contribution system and the massive amounts of data entry, our next step is to create and train a network of volunteer contributors and editors. During this next phase, we will also being using the submission system to provide DAILY updates to the timelines (see below for a more detailed discussion of what this next step will include). Then hopefully by mid-summer we can put this thing on autopilot, so the website can become a truly collaborative effort. When that happens, our expense-to-content-produced ratio will drop considerably and this will become one of the Internet's most useful tools for conducting collaborative grassroots investigations. But we cannot begin this next step without your support. Please help us out by making your tax-deductible donation now.
You can also help by distributing this call far and wide and encouraging other people to contribute to this very important project. Are you as broke as we are? Well if you can spare only $16, then donate that! Certainly our work is worth at least that much too you, right? If every one of our regular visitors donates something, we will easily reach our goal in just a few days. Also, if you are an experienced Java programmer who has worked with JDO, consider giving us a hand fixing bugs and adding new features.
The projectIf you are visiting this site for the first time you may be wondering just what is so special about this project. Imagine an online database that people can use to get every single detail about every single important event relating to issues like the weaponization of space, depleted uranium, Venezuela, Bolivia, 911, the US and Iraq, peak oil, US development of non-lethal weapons for crowd control, genetically engineered crops, neoliberalism, the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, the ports scandal, the Bush administration's assault on the environment, suppression of renewable energy technologies, the IMF, the World Bank, the credit bubble, US covert activity in Central Asia, the derivative bubble, war profiteering in Iraq and elsewhere, and so-on. Now imagine, that this same database contains detailed information on thousands of powerful individuals, corporations, and organizations. Now stretch your imagination even further and envision that this database has information about all the relationships that exist between these entities and events. Finally, imagine that all of the data can be rendered as highly readable chronologies capable of being filtered according to topic, person, organization, corporation, keyword, and other types of criteria—and—that the website has the capability to generate customizable, scalable "context" timelines on any event with the click of a link. How significant would it be to have such a tool? Think about it for a second. It would essentially be an intelligence database maintained by members of civil society to monitor the activities of powerful interests—corporations, government officials, and the like.
With this capability, people such as ourselves—dedicated to the cause of providing accurate information about the affairs of the world—will become a force to reckon with. Having this resource will dramatically improve the productivity of independent journalists, researchers, and alternative media organizations. It will be politically and economically significant because it will enable grassroots efforts to compete on a near equal footing with private industry while contributing to and enriching the intellectual commons.
For more about the project, read our “about this site” page.
Proven importanceThis project is of crucial importance. The Cooperative Research database project has so far provided a tremendous service to the public as it has facilitated the research of numerous public interest groups, journalists, authors, bloggers, and private citizens.
The largest and most popular project on this website, the Complete 911 Timeline, has been cited and praised by dozens of authors and journalists. This carefully crafted chronology covers hundreds of events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, contains a minute-by-minute narrative of the day itself, and provides a critical account of the government's post-9/11 actions and policies. It is considered by many to be the most definitive source on the subject.
The importance of this site also became very apparent after the leaking of the Downing Street Memo, when thousands of people flocked to Cooperative Research to learn more about the events that had led up to the invasion of Iraq. The Inquiry into the decision to invade Iraq timeline project, consisting of between six and seven hundred entries at the time, proved to be a valuable resource for those trying to put the Downing Street Memo into perspective. The project contains numerous entries summarizing obscure underreported prewar intelligence events that had been largely forgotten.
In addition to these two investigative projects, we have 12 others that focus on a wide variety of issues, ranging from the Bush administration's environmental record to the US government's failure to adequately prepare for and respond to Hurricane Katrina.
Our database currently consists of more than 5,300 events; 4,200 entities; and references to more than 8,500 sources. Seventy percent of these entries were written by just two people. Imagine how comprehensive this database will be when there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of contributors and editors working together to document the historical record and investigate the activities of the world's most powerful governments and corporations.
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