Mission

At TIMBY, we build and design a suite of easy-to-use and accessible digital reporting tools that help streamline communication between frontline staff and communities, and stakeholders - however removed they may be. We believe that empowering individuals, communities and organizations around the world to effectively and safely document, corroborate and share what's happening on the ground with reporting agencies, certification schemes, policy makers, lawyers and journalists can help drive change and improve outcomes.

What We Do

TIMBY is a social enterprise that builds and maintains the TIMBY suite of digital reporting tools. The tools include a mobile application for collecting geo-referenced reports; a moderation dashboard to verify, search through, and collate reports; and a storytelling tool to generate reports, press releases, blogs and more. Each group works with the TIMBY team of designers and data specialists to build a custom site based on their needs.

The mobile app works on most Android phones and can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. It enables users to collect geo-referenced and time-stamped audio, video, photographs and works in both online and offline areas. The app is colour and icon-based to facilitate reporting by users with limited levels of literacy and digital literacy, and everything on the application is encrypted to ensure field reporters and data stay safe.

The moderation dashboard allows authorized users to verify, add context to and collate reports through time. Users can view and search through reports or plot them on a map where custom layers can be overaid to see how reports interact with geospatial data from global repositories or custom user-generated content. It also allows users to easily create anything from blog posts to long-form investigations that can be published directly to an organizations' website. Reports from the dashboard can be embedded inside these reports, allowing readers to view the primary source material upon which the 'stories' are based.

TIMBY was born out of grassroots work with communities and civil society organizations in Liberia, and continues to be used for grassroots as well as larger-scale monitoring of environmental, social and human rights issues and more. The most rapidly expanding arms of TIMBY have been with: (a) development agencies creating new mechanisms for reporting issues; (b) international legal and investigative journalism collaborations; (c) investors and corporate groups working on corporate social responsibility projects in the developing world; and (d) community-based organizations documenting issues in hard-to-reach areas.