The change in government after 61 years of the same ruling coalition showed that Malaysians truly wanted change. Now with Pakatan Harapan in power, the rakyat knows that this time, we really need to hold our government accountable for the promises they made to us during the GE14.
Don’t worry about keeping track though. There’s a website for that.
Source: Facebook
OpenPromises was borne out of frustration with the fanaticism of political supporters who made political discourses too polarised, ill-informed and emotional. That was when 25-year-old Nazreen Mohamad who is a self-taught programmer created an open-source platform called OpenPromises Malaysia, a simple website that allows you to track the “promises” made by every government leader at the federal or state level.
In an interview with Malay Mail, Nazreen stated how promises were the capital that gives politicians support. “It’s what they make when they want our votes.” So to simplify the process of keeping track of these promises, he made OpenPromises Malaysia!
OpenPromises Malaysia has already been running for 8 months and gives visitors the ability to track every single policy pledge made by government leaders. It does this by directing the user to information related to the promise, which are usually pooled from open sources like public statements and newsfeeds.
This is how it works: information is archived, curated and filtered according to relevance. So if you wanted to track the list of pledges made by a minister, say Lim Guan Eng who is the current Minister of Finance and former Penang Chief Minister, you click on the profile window and a list of all key policy promises will appear. This is complete with the date, category and status or progress of the promise. User-friendly right?
Source: OpenPromises
If you click on an individual pledge, the page will provide details about the policy like a key quote and the source of the information.
At the moment the program is only tracking 15 politicians.
Source: OpenPromises
Since OpenPromises is self-funded, all members work other full-time jobs and dedicate their spare time to the project. However, the project has now gained traction – pretty impressive considering the publicity drive is done organically.
OpenPromises is attracting a large following of young and enthusiastic volunteers who make simple but useful contributions like scouring the internet for information.
Source: Facebook
“They’d post links or information about a particular pledge on our Facebook page, for example, which helps us save time,” Nazreen said.
There are now close to 1,000 followers on the page, and among them is the popular Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq Abdul Rahman.
“We want to shift and facilitate a more informed debate, one that can focus on policies. We hope this project can be one of the solutions,” he told Malay Mail.
In fact we recently got in touch with Nazreen where he told us that they have now set up a Patreon page to help them fund the website. They also have plans to trial Thailand with the concept.
What a wonderful initiative by our Malaysian youth. Maybe you could volunteer too on their Facebook page.
Also read: The Government is Complete! Here’s The Full List of PH’s Federal and Deputy Ministers
