Check our video announcing the winners here

Global Integrity is delighted to announce the five innovative ideas selected to receive funding from the TESTING 1 2 3: The Global Integrity Innovation Fund.

The chosen ideas will receive up to US$10,000 to test unique ways to approach the problems of corruption, poor transparency and low levels of accountability in governments around the globe. They can be tested within six months, and they have the potential to yield proof-of concepts that add to our current knowledge base.

All decisions were made based on our selection criteria, and with the help of external expert advice on a case-by-case basis. 

And the investees are:

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.

“We are really excited about these five ideas,” said Nathaniel Heller, Global Integrity’s Executive Director. “They all reflect why we set out to do this fund, which was to put some money and effort behind some cutting edge and experimental approaches. These are all high risk, but potentially high rewarding investments.”

For Global Integrity, running TESTING 1 2 3 was an experiment in itself. Receiving 311 idea submissions from around the world in a two and a half-month application period was encouraging – it gave us reason to believe that providing access to a limited amount of capital could still draw out innovative ideas.

Our next goal is to learn through the prototyping process by working with each innovation team to guide and document insights. Our journey to “test quickly, fail forward, and learn iteratively” begins with these five ideas.

Thank you to all who applied, and congratulations to those selected!

–-Global Integrity

–Video Credit: Julio Urdaneta, TESTING 1 2 3 Investees