Testing 123 Innovation Fund Announces Investees

Last September, we put out a global call for brand new ideas that target the challenges of transparency and accountability in government.  Of the 311 submissions received, we selected five for investment. Watch a video of them here. 

And the five investees are (in no particular order):

Simply Visualizing Politics – Macedonia
Simply Visualizing Politics is a dynamic visualization of changes in the views of Macedonian politicians over time.
In using text-based mining techniques to sift through the records of debates in the Macedonian parliament, the application aims to collect and display trends to inform voters about the interests of their political leaders and the issues they support.
What we’re interested in testing: whether algorithmically driven data mining techniques can be used to pick up otherwise imperceptible but meaningful patterns in political behavior.

Hidden Agenda – Spain
Hidden Agenda is a photo-based storytelling platform that seeks to make public top government officials’ daily schedules in Spain.
In a “Pinterest meets They Rule” fashion, images will be crowd sourced and used to tell visually compelling stories exposing lobbying efforts that lay under the radar but remain in the public interest.
What we’re interested in testing: whether engaging citizens in visual data collection and tying it to reporting efforts can raise awareness for creating legislative reform.

Veritza.org – USA/Serbia
Vertiza.org is a real-time corruption alert system that leverages automated “mashups” of disparate datasets to potentially reveal corruption-prone patterns.
What we’re interested in testing: whether a passive, “autopilot” approach of letting algorithms scrub disparate government datasets can usefully predict potential instances of corruption or abuse of power.

Planizacija.rs: Accessing Urban Development Regulations – Serbia
Accessing Urban Development Regulations is an online platform that will house a collection of pertinent regulatory documents for urban development in Serbia. It will bring together technical policy materials and shape them into publically understandable and accessible tools for citizen engagement in urban planning.
What we’re interested in testing: whether centralizing and distilling regulations that dictate community planning encourages citizens to push for development in favor of the public interest.

Police-Citizens Protocol – Mexico
Police-Citizens Protocol is an approach designed to mitigate corruption in law enforcement in Mexico by distilling existing sets of complex law enforcement rules, which police officers in Mexico City are expected to follow, into simpler versions that citizens can invoke when approached unlawfully by law enforcement officers.
What we’re interested in testing: whether government buy-in to enhanced citizen participation in accessing their legal rights can effectively mitigate law enforcement abuses.

Testing 123 investees are diving right into prototyping their ideas over the next six months. We’ll be happily documenting and sharing what we see and learn along the way.

First round of Africa Integrity Indicators complete!

Another major collaborative effort of ours, a five-year partnership with the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to generate original data on governance issues in all 54 African countries, reached a major milestone in March with the delivery of a first round of original data from 51 of 54 African countries. A huge amount of effort went into this herculean effort by colleagues in both our Cape Town and Washington offices, and we’re already gearing up for round 2. Following the delivery of the second round of data to the foundation in early-2014, these datasets will begin feeding directly into future iterations of the Ibrahim Index on African Governance. Stay tuned for more details as we roll out and disseminate the first round of research…