An open-source research collective; factchecker, community tech-builder, problem-solver.
December 2022
Close of year sees us at a good place. We’ve tracked hundreds of protests; shared data with Reuters, the BBC World Service, NPR and so on; and built serious software. Elixir, which we built for the medicine shortage, is now elixir.redcross.lk. Lanka.Kitchen is out.
Our podcast was heard in 32 countries. We have beautifully researched longform exploring every aspect of electricity, the economy, farming and agriculture, major incidents regarding the 2022 collapse, and even the mass grave at Oddamavadi.
So much of a company’s internals cannot be talked about, but: we’ve weathered every possible type of chaos, we have a fantastic team, and we have what I consider to be the premier public data journalism operation in Sri Lanka. Watchdog’s suicide plan has remained unchanged since day one - if I can’t raise more funding, we open source everything and go farm vegetables.
It’s not been smooth sailing. 2023 has been one of the worst years of my life and for Sri Lanka in at least a decade. We have seen complete economic collapse, political upheavel - what I referred to as ‘the Boring Apocalpyse’ in my piece for Perspective Magazine. Being on the front lines of this and documenting the collapse at Watchdog has taken its toll.
April 2022
Here’s a mid-year writeup of what we managed to accomplish:
https://restofworld.org/2022/meet-the-fact-checkers-decoding-sri-lankas-meltdown/And here’s the team that made all this possible:
December 2021
Having raised $320,000 in funding from OCCRP, I quit LIRNEasia to try and turn Watchdog into a real company. In 2022, we began anew as Appendix, a holding company for Watchdog and other things we wanted to work on.
The roadmap is complex and I’m not going to post it in public, but the idea was that we would back up our factchecks with exceptional data journalism into things people need to understand: infrastructure. Environment. Laws and society. The systems that we live in, work with, and rely on to keep a civilization running.
April 21, 2019; bombs went off in Colombo, leaving hundreds dead and setting the stage for mobs, racial hatred, and the rise of the Rajapaksas (again). Bhanuka Harishchandra (who figures in this story) had just missed being blown to bits and Nisal Periyapperuma was in Sri Lanka poking around at things he was fascinated by. I spent the next week or so fact-checking the rumors that were flying around, on Whatsapp groups with these guys, all of getting increasingly frustrated and angry at what was happening.