Application development started with creating a tool to assist and manage investigations for myself, but then evolved to include other ideas and projects. As of right now, there are three projects: A News Platform, Skopos, and Notary Journal.
The news platform is a way for citizens to ask the questions they want answered, and not solely rely on what editors of major outlets choose to publish. Contrast with the current subscription method of giving a set fee per period, this platform allows consumers to directly sponsor those ventures to answer the questions they specifically ask.
This model is copied from the intelligence community. Decision makers (representatives, the president or cabnet members, or military commanders) have intelligence agencies dedicated to answering the decision makers' questions. This platform intends to establish a relationship between citizens and reporters similar to that of decision makers and their intelligence professionals.
This is how it works: Citizens either ask questions to which they want answers, or upvote those questions already asked. Reporters submit project proposals to answer popular questions. Citizens, via financial pledges, then sponsor which proposals they support. Once a proposal is funded, funds are transfered to a trust and a custodian is assigned to the project for accountability. The Reporter then executes their plan, and upon completion publishes the results. In other words: crowdfunded and decentralized journalism.
Skopos is the first of the three current projects. It's designed to manage the intelligence collection process. Most of my investigations were recorded through loose documents (notes, photographs, misc files, etc), and then much time was spent organizing and formatting it in a way that is logical and coherent. My research in finding a case management system for investigators discovered that most of the software suites were quite expensive and focused on the financial aspect of the business more than the investigation aspect. Therefore, I decided to make my own.
The app was created for small, sole proprietor firms, like myself. As a result it needed to solve a couple of issues:
After becoming a Notary Public in Colorado and learning journals can be maintained electronically, I decided to look what was available. The most popular app was a monthly subscription. The next two were notary services, to hire a notary. The third was someone based in India. All others were the typical, personal journals and notebooks. So, I decided to make one myself.
Notary Journal is a simple app. No connections to the cloud, no subscriptions, no proprietary data formats. For $3.00 the data and app are yours forever. You can keep moving the data from device to device. It writes the journal entries in JSON format, so even if you remove the app, the entries are still there and accessible. Even the signature image is Base64 encoded, so you can copy and paste it into an HTML "img" tag and view the origional.
Skopos is by far the most sensitive of the projects. The policy is to not track user's data. All information, except the IDs of the documents (accounts, cases, collectors, activities, persons, actions, locations, events, associations, exhibits, and notes) are encrypted on the client side. The keys are handled outside of the data persistence backend (Google's Firebase system), so there is no way for the admin to decrypt the data, unless the user provides the key to the admin. Data is not collected, stored, aggregated, shared, sold, or similar, outside the necessity of persisting the data for the user and collaborating with other selected users. Furthermore, as a result of the architecture, data cannot be retrieved if the user's account is corrupted or lost.
Users may request their accounts and data be deleted by emailing: dev@mooney.agency.
Notary Journal is in the final stages of development and should be released in the near future. All user data is kept on the user's device, and it is up to them how they manage the output files (journal entries for notarial acts). The app itself doesn't collect or store user specific or identifiable information other than which state they are commissioned in, and their commission's expiry date. Even then, that data is stored on the device in shared preferences, and doesn't go into the cloud.