UPDATE: See the Indaba project website at http://getindaba.org

After 13 months of development, the third generation of Global Integrity’s online fieldwork platform, Indaba, went live yesterday. Hooray!

Indaba was deployed in the field for the first time ever yesterday as lead researchers for the Global Integrity Report: 2010 began to gather data and information in more than 35 countries to score their country’s Integrity Indicators. Lead reporters will come online in the next 24 hours, followed later this month by the in-country peer reviewers. Within several weeks, more than 150 Global Integrity staff and field contributors will be using the system daily to gather, review, edit, debate, and publish cutting-edge assessments of the existence, effectiveness, and citizen access to key national-level anti-corruption safeguards.

Indaba is not only a powerful tool for Global Integrity’s fieldwork, but it represents a first step towards the organization embracing a broader role within the anti-corruption and transparency community. Beginning this fall, Global Integrity will begin supporting a number of third-party organizations interested in using Indaba to make their own fieldwork projects more efficient, faster, and effective. We’re excited to help them and look forward to growing into this new role in the coming months and years.

There will be lots more to talk about with respect to Indaba, but this introductory video should provide a useful first look at some of the system’s key features. Bookmark http://getindaba.org and follow the platform on Twitter (@getindaba) for all of the latest updates.

Indaba Fieldwork Platform (1 of 4) from Global Integrity on Vimeo.

Indaba Fieldwork Platform – Project Management (2 of 4) from Global Integrity on Vimeo.

Lastly, a big shout out to our colleague Jonathan Eyler-Werve, whose vision and dedication for what Indaba could be (and is!) got us from the start to the finish line with terrific success. And we wouldn’t have gotten here without the terrific coding and development work from our friends at Open Concept Systems and Croix Connect.

— Nathaniel Heller