243 People Disappeared. Young People. Women. Children. And No One Cares.

Ghost Boat is project on Medium that aims to make sense of how a boat of 243 refugees, who had set sail from Libya in hope of a better life, disappeared without a trace on the 28th June, 2014.

In the most recent post, the team behind the project have put a call for action for people to help with the investigation:

We have satellite photographs covering the parts of the Libyan coast where we believe the Ghost Boat is most likely to have departed from. It’s a large zone of interest, several thousand square kilometers, stretching eight miles or so into the Mediterranean.

To make it searchable, we’re slicing up the images into easy-to-digest chunks and allowing anyone to go and look at those slices to look for visual evidence. What are we looking for? Anything that could indicate a boat’s presence — an actual vessel, or maybe an oil slick left behind by a ship in distress.

The project is wonderful example of the democratisation of publishing and participatory journalism. I plan to join in the most recent call for action, let me know if you do too. 🙂