We need a little help. If you’re a specialist in this area and would like to help the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) as a volunteer, we’d be very glad to hear from you:
We need someone who knows how to work with Facebook data. Specifically, to build a bot that analyzes Facebook groups in terms of their members (gender, age, location, etc.).
We’re also looking for aspiring journalists who want to intern with us and help us set up a type of work that’s new for us. Put simply, the job is to collect comments (in Russian practice, that often means prying them out of people). For example, Zhora found an undeclared house in Zhukovka belonging to Sablin, an “Anti-Maidan” activist. We’d all like to know what the other founders of “Anti-Maidan” think about it, what Sablin’s colleagues in United Russia have to say, what Putin’s All-Russia People’s Front (ONF) says, and so on. We gather whatever we can and distribute it in the form of quotes and audio clips (as here).
In other words, it’s the kind of work that the media would do without us under normal circumstances, but in our situation no one will do, because there are almost no independent media outlets left, and those that remain simply don’t have the capacity for it.
Write to us about yourself by email, but please make sure to include links to your social media profiles or to people who can recommend you — it’s not that we’re completely paranoid about spies, but just a little.