What is Open Source Journalism?

Two weeks ago I spoke at to a crowd at blogcamp about a project I have been working on about a one eyed baby born in Chennai in July. Local authorities stopped providing me information once I told them I was investigating the possibility of an unethical clinical trial and since then I have been able to make little progress in the story. My last resort has been to throw open the doors to the blogging commmunity (and any other community for that matter) and share the information I have collected so far hopefully put a few more pieces of the puzzle together.

Since I gave the speech I have been accused by people of not understanding what blogging is all about, and by local media professionals who allege that only trained journalists have the ability to obtain unbiased information from sources. Many people have said that without proper credentials no one would listen to them when they ask a question of an authority figure. I disagree with all of these points at fundamental level. How can we ensure transparency in government and corporate behavior if we don't ask questions? While I do not know if there was a clinical trial of cyclopamine here in Chennai, there is enough evidence here to merit an investigation. Since the authorities do not seem interested it is up to regular citizens to move this foward. And I hope to do this in an open source way.

Anyone is welcome to use the information in this investigation to publish in any medium they see fit. If you can do so for profit, all the better, but if you benefitted from this investigation I hope you will post your findings here. I welcome journalists, citizens, and bloggers to collect as much information relating to the story as possible and share their findings with the rest of the community. Many people are already helping out in the investigation and we have some leads on where to find a birth certificate.

I will give all the information I have save a few phone numbers since publishing them here could result in an unintentional DOS attack that is not the purpose of this investigation. At the moment I am still trying to acquire the mother's address as well as any information we can uncover about illegal clinical trials. There is no central registry of clinical trials, though there is some movement in higher levels of government to create one. I hope that some people who have seen the recent story on Wired News may know people who have been injured by clinical trials, or know someone on the inside who would be willing to talk either confidentially or publicly.

I do not know what we will uncover. I hope that this was just a freak birth defect and that there was nothing illegal or immoral going on, but the sad truth in India is that there have been numerous instances of medical research gone awry here and in the past people have died because of them.

And the only way to know what really happened is to ask questions.

Tags: chennaioneeyedbaby, cyclopamine