Hello everybody!

Community Introductions
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Since there’s a category for introductions from the Aleph Team, I’m starting one for outsiders who are hanging around here, too!

I’m Friedrich, and I’m running a little data company called OpenSanctions which uses parts of the Aleph technology stack to build an integrated graph of people and companies subject to international sanctions, government watchlists, and people who hold political office. We run 270+ crawlers that collect data every day and publish it in FollowTheMoney format, ready to import into any Aleph instance with a single command.

The database is a free resource for journalists and activists, and a paid service for people who want to use the data for commercial purposes.

Before working on OpenSanctions, I started the development of Aleph in 2015, and helped build the platform up at OCCRP until 2021. Recently, I found a video of the first public demo of Aleph online :slight_smile:

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Thanks for taking the lead and introducing yourself and your org, @pudo ! Obviously we wouldn’t be here talking about Aleph if it wasn’t for you and we owe you quite a bit. The FollowTheMoney format making bridging Aleph not only to OpenSanctions data but to so many other tools (some of which don’t even exist yet) is really such a tremendous achievement!

And thanks for this bit of trivia. Spectactular demo, really great to see the first public version UI and with the “it’s a small hack I’m working on, let’s see” kind of comment I feel safe to say this was the Linus-Torvalds-modestly-announcing-Linux moment of Aleph :grimacing:

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Hi @pudo!
Nice to e-meet you! :handshake: Thanks for starting this new thread for Aleph Community members.

I enjoyed reading about how you use Aleph at Open Sanctions. Thanks for being one of the those who started the development of Aleph, @stchris rightly said we won’t be here talking about Aleph, if it wasn’t you.

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