Dear World,

At Archer, we start from a fundamental belief: people are inherently interested in issues of systemic and geopolitical urgency but they often lack the way to contribute their time. We believe if we empower people through building and providing technology, they will increase access to critical information for themselves, their communities, and the world at large. This guiding principle in our work stems from our own story.

The summer of 2016 was one that rocked the UC Berkeley community with the passing of Tarishi Jain and Nick Leslie to acts of terrorism in Dhaka and Nice respectively. For many of us at Archer, both events changed our perspective on which global issues demanded our attention as we were either present or had friends present at both attacks. We chose to use our technological skill set to show how the product-scaling model can be leveraged for good.

In our first year, Archer partnered with organizations to build creative solutions to help scale existing processes used to hold illicit actors accountable. The tools that emerged ranged from SanctionsExplorer, a sanctions compliance tool, to Dashbit, a cryptocurrency dashboard for tracking illicit financing, to Meta, an analysis tool for photos. We received coverage from the LA Times, Berkeley News, KQED and more. Most recently we demoed our work at RightsCon in Toronto.

Now, in its second year, Archer is leveraging the experience gained from previous partnerships to create a single platform for accessing and analyzing public data where anyone can contribute.

The Archer ecosystem is built to generate actionable insight from disparate and often inaccessible data whether it be press releases, bank statements, photos or government data sets. Our view of the future is one where we, as citizens, have the analytic capacity to demand transparency and promote accountability.

We are a community of designers, engineers, activists, researchers, journalists, and investigators working side by side to invent — and reinvent — how we experience governance.

Join our global community in building tech, conducting analysis, and publishing insights for the public good.

Sincerely,
the Archer Team