GE14 Candidate and Elected Representatives Website
This project builds upon several years of work on building open data infrastructure for government and parliamentary transparency work for Malaysia.
The open data standards (Popolo) spec databases allows us to quickly spin up and organize information on candidates despite incomplete information.
GE14 candidate site will be built on top our existing public database of over 4,200 politically exposed persons of candidates from past 3 general elections and currently elected representatives. The website will include campaign materials and media crowd sourced from our community content contributors.
Nominated candidates past and campaign period actions will also be judged against our objective public blacklist based on international definitions and best practices for accountability, integrity and transparency. Candidates without a CV, involved in corruption issues and hateful racist , sexist and undemocratic conduct will have their actions documented and the candidates shown clearly as blacklisted candidates to voters.
Once the elections are over, winning candidates will then be migrated into an elected representative website, where Malaysian public can continue to monitor them on their work in respective legislatures, integrated with our other transparency tools, that track beneficial ownership of companies, contracts, influence networks and corruption cases. Clean elected representatives could still be blacklisted as a poor representative if they fail the criteria with actions after being elected.
This project now currently ongoing as Wakil Rakyat, where we import existing data and information of candidates into elected representative website.
GE14 Candidate Blacklist Criteria
Status: Final GE14 Criteria Published
GE14 Candidate Blacklist Criteria is an effort to define an objective criteria to guide political parties and the public to select better quality candidates as our elected representatives. Nominated candidates that fail any of the following criteria will be added to a list of blacklisted candidates and prominently highlighted as such on Sinar Project’s upcoming GE14 Candidate.
Final Blacklist Criteria for GE14
Older drafts:
- View and comment on First Draft blacklist criteria (Google Docs)
Popit Politically Exposed Persons API/Database
Status: Stable/Online
Popit is an open data standards compliant API/DB for politically exposed persons and legislative data. It was developed over a few years to provide open data to build websites, apps, services as well as research data on politicians, their associates and legislative assemblies. The data is publicly available via an API at api.popit.sinarproject.org for other projects to freely use to build their own websites, apps or research.
The API is already providing data for Myanmar's Open Hluttaw elected representatives website and mobile app. We hope to have a similar comprehensive elected representative website after the elections.
Source code: https://github.com/Sinar/popit_ng
Status of subtasks:
- Popit Data Editor (used by our community content contributors to update info on candidates and politicians): In progress
Source code: https://github.com/Sinar/popit_editor_js - Import scripts for all state (except Sarawak) and parliamentary seats: Complete. Templates for scripts with data in progress.
Source code: https://github.com/Sinar/popit_Gsheet_sync
GE14 Candidates and Elected Representative Website
Status: Live / Alpha ge14.sinarproject.org
This is a content management website that links to Popit API/DB for Malaysia. Malaysian voters will be able to see basic information on all candidates such as name, age, sex, contact details, social media accounts, party, brief bio, past and current posts, as well as CV, campaign materials and supporting evidence for blacklist criteria (if any).
Also to be displayed if applicable are beneficial ownership in companies and awarded construction contracts through our integration with our project on beneficial ownership and contracts, Telus.
Source code: https://github.com/Sinar/wakilrakyat.buildout
Source code: https://github.com/Sinar/sinar.representatives
Content Contributor Workshops
At the end of March and first week of April, we will run two workshops for community content contributors on using websites and editors to update content following our blacklist and content guideline criteria. We aim to ensure integrity and accuracy of content contributed by our content community.
We will have volunteer content editors for each region of Malaysia (North, East Coast, Klang Valley, South, Sarawak and Sabah)
Internet Network Interference and Censorship Monitoring
We are running daily tests on 1152 global and local websites as well as instant messaging services such as WhatsApp. These test lists includes coverage of local and foreign media, political parties and civil society.
We will also be running a campaign to increase number of volunteer testers and coverage through installation of OONI mobile app to help run tests on specific events during campaign and polling days.
Data collected will be published on Open Observatory for Network Interference website. The data will provide evidence on whether there are any forms of network interference or censorship.
Open Data on Candidates
Basic data in Popolo spec fields in English and Bahasa being updated by our content contributors are available here as open data:
License: Creative Commons by Attribution 4.0 (International). You are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. Just attribute Sinar Project if you do use it.
How to help contribute
Funding and In-Kind Donations
Keeping Sinar Project the civic tech organization, hosted services and development and research requires funding. Donating funds to Sinar helps keeps the services online, funds full time work of existing Sinar team members,but also expands capacity by allowing us to hire and train young talent to work on modern transparency initiatives for the public good either full time or as interns.
Funding targets / status
GE 14 Target: RM6455/25,000 (Any additional funds will contribute towards set up and monitoring for representative site, as well as keep Sinar Project work going).
Total budget and funds raised for Sinar Project costs for 2018:
- Hosting costs for one year: 0 / USD1,200/RM4700
- Office costs for one year (rent/utility/Internet): RM6,000/RM12000
- 2 interns at RM1,000/month: 0 / RM2000
- 3 full time senior engineers and programme officers: RM9000/month: RM40,000/RM320,000 (Note: we try cover shortfall with project or consulting funding if possible to be able to keep working on Sinar full time)
- 1 admin/funding officer RM5,000/month: 0 / RM60,000
Online Donations
Making monetary contributions to Sinar Project is easy. You can make a bank transfer or deposit to the following account:
| BANK | Malayan Banking Berhad (Maybank) |
| SWIFT-BIC | MBBEMYKL |
| BENEFICIARY | Sinar Project PLT |
| ACCOUNT | 512307614259 |
Recurring Annual or Monthly Donations
In kind donations
The following in-kind donations of hardware will be much appreciated
- Spare 13in work laptop. 8GB, 128GB SSD and working battery (in case developer laptops fail or get confiscated)
- 24in Dell Ultrasharp monitors for office (with HDMI input)
- 2 x UPS for our servers
- 1 x CPU 500W power supply for our office server (main unit is failing)
Developers, Linux Sysadmins and Content Contributors
Have time and skills?
Join our Slack community where we constantly have ongoing discussions on planning and tasks while working on this project.