I also work at OpenCorporates and work alongside NGOs and investigators on stories as the data we have can be essential in tracking chains of corporate control and expose links to corruption. We have a community of botwriters and researchers who specifically go after datasets that are hard to find/scrape but are valuable e.g. financial licenses, businesses licenses etc. We're on slack if you're interested to see what's happening in our community: http://slack.opencorporates.com/
Great point! This joins a host of other coding bootcamps springing up in places with small (but increasing) tech sector e.g Code school in Kabul, Code for Pakistan etc.
The data is under a share-alike license which means if you're not going to share the results of the whatever you're going to do with the data with the rest of the world. A lot of academics, open data projects, NGOs and journalists use our Open Data API without any problem but ofcourse, we use the profits from selling our data to businesses to support the organisation. We think it's really important an organisation such as OpenCorporates remains sustainable and that's why we have this model.
I suggest volunteering. I'm quite social but I run a charity and I've noticed a lot of volunteers that are generally shy or introverted become more relaxed and pick up social skills over time as most conversations and interactions with the group are centred around tasks. It's easier to talk and over time, you get more used to trying out new things. Might not work for you but I would definitely recommend that. Also, try that with a small charity rather than a large one.
On reflection, Perhps we should perhaps have gone with a higher figure, but chose the conservative figure'. So, we are thinking of increasing the "4 trillion" to "over 10 trillion" to reflect a mid-point between the variation in estimates. Thanks for pointing it out!
It really is the starting point. I work at OpenCorporates and have worked on this campaign! We don't know what the data will tell us unless we scrape all of it though one of my colleagues took a look at the financial licenses from US and found some interesting insights. For instance, if you think about which companies have debt collection operations in other jurisdictions? There are 178 financial services companies from India that operate in the US. Many are presumably outsourced - he have found some controlled by Ocwen and by Bank of America. This may be useful information for various reasons but we can't get there if we don't do the step 1 which is to have all the data scraped and published as open data so we can have many eyes examining it.