About Collaborate

Collaborate is an open-source tool that newsrooms can use to enable multiple reporters to share a dataset. It's modeled after the tools ProPublica built for its Electionland and Documenting Hate projects, in which hundreds of reporters shared the same sets of data.

It's designed to help multiple people sift through a large dataset and to add information to each data point. It is not meant to be used for statistical data analysis.

Although it can work with most datasets, Collaborate is built especially well for crowdsourced projects in which the data is pulled from a forms tool like Google Forms or Screendoor.

It will allow you to assign tips to reporters (or claim them for yourself), add a contact log for getting in touch with tipsters, save information learned about each tip and update each one’s status. It will also allow you to add tags to make it easier to sort through the data.

To learn more about how to carry out collaborative data projects, read our guide.

Collaborate is still in beta, which means we're still fixing bugs. It also means you should be careful to back up your data. If you encounter problems or errors, you can report them here.

The code for Collaborate is available on Github and can be forked and altered to suit your organization’s needs.

Collaborate is being provided as a hopefully useful tool, but it is being provided as is and all users should take necessary precautions, including backing up their data, before using it. ProPublica disclaims any responsibility for its use, makes no warranties about it and makes no promises to keep it updated in any way.