ZAGREB, September 28, 2018 – Representatives of the GONG election monitoring NGO on Friday presented the Mosaic of Connections, an online tool for researching connections between politically prominent persons as well as their connections with other legal and physical persons via information from public authorities’ registers and data bases. As of today, the tool is available at www.mozaikveza.hr.
GONG executive director Jelena Berković said the Mosaic would significantly facilitate and expedite the work of everyone dealing with prevention of corruption and wanting to find relevant data from public sources in one place, including investigative journalists, activists, , scholars and the interested public.
“The Mosaic of Connections is primarily intended for journalists. As much as we want to make journalists’ job easier, there are much stronger powers hampering that job. We can’t make the steps forward that we want if journalists can’t do their job responsibly, which is the case today on Croatian Radio and Television,” Berković said, referring to the recent dismissal of Croatian Television journalist and editor Hrvoje Zovko, who is also president of the Croatian Journalists Association.
The Mosaic of Connections has data on more than 390,000 physical and about 280,000 legal persons with hundreds of thousands of established connections.
Index web portal journalist Ilko Ćimić said attempts to stop journalists from obtaining information happened almost on a daily basis and that it was perfectly “normal” to deny journalists information. “Any application which will help us to shorten that job is welcome. I hope citizens too will recognise the Mosaic of Connections as a tool which can help to research corruption,” he said, adding that corruption was perceived to be highest in the judiciary and politics.
The Mosaic of Connections was developed with 450,000 euro from Google’s Digital News Innovation Fund, the National Endowment for Democracy, the European Union’s Europe for Citizens Programme, and the National Foundation for Civil Society Development.
