Watchdogging and transparency

Technologies that seek to provide greater visibility to the activities of governments, corporations, or individuals in power and allow others to monitor them.

Suggested reading:

• Technology is not a quick fix solution for corruption, by Melissa Tsungai Zisengwe. She writes from a South African perspective but the takeaways are broadly applicable to the whole genre of anti-corruption tech. (2020)
• In The Future of Promise Tracking Jordan Urban and Adam Feldman, co-founders of govtracker.co.uk, explain what promise trackers are and how to build a meaningful one. (2018)
• Which Promises Actually Matter? Election Pledge Centrality and Promissory Representation is a published research paper that finds that simply evaluating elected officials on the fulfillment of every miscellaneous promise made while campaigning isn’t helpful, because voters weigh certain promises as more central to the campaign than others. The authors suggest weighting promise centrality when evaluating the campaign’s fidelity. By Jonathan Mellon, Christopher Prosser, Jordan Urban, and Adam Feldman. (2018)
• Jameela Raymond of Transparency International discusses the Impacts of anti-corruption pledge trackers at The Impacts of Civic Tech Conference. (2018)