About Factly Labs
About Factly
Factly traces its origin to 2014 when Rakesh Dubbudu realized that data may not be intimidating to people if it is demystified. In this philosophy, we found our motto — making public data meaningful. This means that we not only explain public data in a way that makes sense to all but also provide the tools that can help people figure out complex data for themselves.
In its aim to build data literacy among people, today, Factly undertakes three broad categories of work — content production; tool-building; and consulting & training projects to achieve this goal. In this context, Factly strives to leverage the balance between content creation i.e., journalism, and the power of technology, the best of both worlds to increase public awareness and empower them to make the right decisions.
The philosophy of Factly’s technology is to democratize tools around data and journalism. We aim to reduce the barrier of entry for news media organizations to pursue fact-checking & data journalism, and to equip small- and medium-scale businesses, and research organizations with data to make smarter decisions. For this, we intend to develop modern, reliable, high-performant, cost-effective, open-source solutions that are cloud-native and well documented.
About Factly Labs
In this mission to democratize journalism technology, we introduce to you Factly Labs, the technology wing at Factly that works on various solutions for Journalism Tech. Factly Labs was started to primarily address the technology needs at Factly, but we quickly realized that the solutions developed for Factly addressed similar problems across other media organizations. We have since developed various open-source projects and will continue to develop more solutions while building a vibrant open-source community around these projects.
We are currently working on the following open-source tools that are at various stages of development.
Dega is a lightweight, scalable and high-performant, open-source publishing platform for small- and medium-scale news media organizations. The platform has various features built-in for fact-checking organizations. Dega supports managing multiple organizations and sites from the same portal. It is developed for modern web features with all the best publishing practices built-in. The tool is written in Go & React.
MandE is an open-source application to develop data portals to publish datasets in various formats. It provides features to publish private datasets and has e-commerce features specific to datasets. Datasets will be available for access as APIs and can be integrated with visualization platforms. MandE is written in Go for the backend and React for the frontend.
Kavach is an open-source identity and access management solution. It is a lightweight solution with features to manage organizations, users, permissions and can be configured easily to support applications requiring multitenancy. Kavach is written in Go, React and is built on ORY stack of services.
Bindu is a modern open-source data visualization platform built on Vega, Vega-Lite. It provides the ability for analysts to create charts and dashboards from a rich set of chart templates. The access policies can be set at the chart level, providing the ability to share it with a set of users or publish it for the public. The backend for Bindu is written in Go and the frontend in React.
VidCheck is a web application that makes video fact-checking more standardized for fact-checkers, easy to read and understand for audiences, and scalable for platforms and fact-checkers. The application can be used in cases where claims being fact-checked are part of the video such as political speeches, news content, documentaries, any other type of commentary, manipulated content, etc. VidCheck is written in Go & React.
Parlens is a tool for searching data that is indexed from Indian parliament datasets.
Counting India (CI) is the first major application developed as an initiative of Factly Labs. CI makes data related to the States/Districts in India more accessible and understandable. The primary source of data for CI is the Census of India 2011 and other official sources. In CI, one can compare any two States/Districts side by side. One can also embed, access, or download the data.
In this pursuit, we have started a dedicated blog space on Medium to share our learnings, unlearning, and success stories on what went into building each of these information tools. In our mission to leverage technology to support data-based journalism, we hope that these information tools will increase access to public data and information by making it easy, interactive, and intuitive.
Watch out for some exciting technology updates happening in the information space.
