Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral. (Kranzberg)
The objective of the Aleph project is to provide powerful software to those who do investigative work in the public interest.
We develop this technology following the open source model, and will continue to release our code to the public. At the same time, we have chosen to limit the scope of the community to whom we will provide support and engagement.
The maintainers of this project limit support and responses both on GitHub and in the Slack channel to authorised groups and individuals. In order to receive authorisation, we require that you disclose the manner in which you use our technology. We will decide if that use falls within the intended uses of Aleph.
Examples of intended uses could include:
- Professional investigative journalists
- Activists, advocates and academics working in the public interest, and whose work is subject to an editorial policy
- International bodies that have an investigative function
Support includes installation support, requests for new features or issues specific to your local Aleph installation. Bug fixes and contributions to the Aleph source code that can contribute to reliability of the system will be considered.
Please submit a description of your use case along with your name, affiliation and email address using one of the following channels:
- The Slack #intros channel
- As part of the first GitHub issue that you file
- Via our contact form
Make sure you describe your goals, rather than the set of techniques that define your work (e.g. “investigations into human rights abuses in country X”, not “OSINT”). OCCRP is a non-profit organization. We do not offer commercial support or consulting services.
The Aleph team supports feature versions for 12 months after the first major iteration of that version was released. For example, we support Aleph 3.12.x for 12 months after Aleph 3.12.0 was released. The Aleph team supports upgrades, but only from supported feature versions of the product. Support means helping to ensure that you can get your Aleph instance up and running. As we're a small team we don't have the capacity to backport bugs to supported versions. In the case of critical secruity vulnrabilities we'll endeavour to ensure that all currently supported versions, but we recommend administrators upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.
For versions that are supported, if you are having problems, you can reach out to us in Slack or by raising an issue in Github.