KUALA LUMPUR, July 15 — Imagine if you can keep tabs of every government leader’s policy pledge.

Yes, imagine you are able — at the tip of your fingers — to recall (and hold elected representatives accountable) every promise made, so much so that their failure to deliver may no longer be an option.

That’s exactly what a self-taught programmer, 25-year-old Nazreen Mohamad, had in mind when he 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.

“Promises are capital for support, it’s what they make when they want our votes,” Nazreen, from Sarawak, told Malay Mail recently.

“But nobody seems to be tracking them or if they want to, it’s not that easy… what we do is we simplify the process for you,” he added enthusiastically.

Up and running for eight months already, OpenPromises Malaysia is an application that gives visitors the ability to track every single policy pledge made by key individual government leaders by directing the user to any information related to the promise, mostly drawn from open sources like public statements and newsfeeds.

Essentially it is archived and curated information, filtered according to relevance. So if say, a user wants to track the list of pledges made by current Minister of Finance and former Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng, you click on the profile window and a list of all key policy promises will appear complete with metric details like date, category and status or progress.

The user can then click on each individual pledge, and the page will provide details about the policy like a key quote and the source of the information.

The website, designed mostly by self-trained programmers, is basically a white page with an explanation of the project followed directly by profiles of politicians; at the bottom of the page is a tiny interactive window box for volunteers to submit what they feel is a policy pledge, which would be subject to review by the team.

It’s a simple idea, a far cry from the cutting edge ones users may have come to expect of startups. But in an age of hyper-information, simplified and streamlined information is novel and can be highly useful and efficient for both amateur and professional researchers.

OpenPromises is only able to track 15 politicians at the moment, with the majority of them being top Cabinet members of the federal Pakatan Harapan administration.

Only two of them are from parties outside the PH coalition: Sarawak Chief Minister and Parti Pesaka Bumiputera Bersatu chief Datuk Seri Abang Johari Tun Openg and Deputy Chief Minister, Datuk Amar Douglas Uggah Embas.

Nazreen says he and his team of five core members plan to add more profiles in the future, which would include all state-level government leaders from both sides of the political divide.  

They’re also ambitious about making the platform an efficient one-stop centre for tracking these pledges, which entails linking or networking with other civic tech groups out there.

This is to widen their database to include official statements from their respective communications team or documents from both the Dewan Negeri and Dewan Negara.

But it’s tough work, Nazreen admitted, more so considering their limited funding.

“Right now, I use my own money mostly… I think I’ve spent around RM3,000 on the project so far,” said Nazreen who works as a freelance programmer and uses money earned from projects here and there to finance OpenPromises.

Each core member has a role to play, one of which involves the tedious job of combing news websites, social media feeds and other sources to identify pledges and gather them for the platform’s database.

That responsibility, initially undertaken by Nazreen, now falls to 24-year-old Lim Jing Yi, who started as a volunteer who only wanted to help as a means to teach herself “news literacy” but now heads a tracking team made up of three volunteer “trackers.”

“I was interested in gaining more news literacy because I feel in Malaysia that’s quite an issue,” Lim, who hails from Rawang, explained when explaining why she volunteered.

“You know the whole voter-registration issue? I was affected personally so I thought it was best to be more invested,” she added, referring to the complaints about the difficulties faced by first-time voters to register, which poll-reform group Bersih 2.0 claimed was a form of sabotage meant to deter a majority of youths perceived to be anti-Barisan Nasional from voting.

Since OpenPromises is self-funded, all members work other full-time jobs and dedicate their spare time to the project. But the project has gained traction, impressive considering the publicity drive is done organically.

OpenPromises is attracting a growing legion of young and enthusiastic volunteers who make simple but useful contributions like trawling the internet for information.

“They’d post links or information about a particular pledge on our Facebook page, for example, which helps us save time,” Nazreen said, noting that the project’s Facebook page now has close to 1,000 followers, among them the popular Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq Abdul Rahman.

But as the project grows, Nazreen understands that over-reliance on a primarily volunteer-based workforce may not be sustainable and that the lack of funding will eventually become a hurdle.

Yet not having a financial backer may not be all bad. Not being beholden to any political or corporate funder, which in today’s world often comes with vested interests, gives OpenMalaysia total freedom to hold those in power accountable.

“It’s something we value, this freedom,” Nazreen said, although later admitting that youthful enthusiasm rather than pragmatism is the over-riding sentiment now.

“Not having a funder gives us this freedom to do what we want without having to serve any political party or corporation and I think it’s a good thing.”

In fact, Nazreen said OpenPromises was borne out of this frustration with the political fanaticism displayed by rabid supporters from all sides of the spectrum. Political discourses, he added, are often too polarised, ill-informed and emotional.

“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 said.

And there is also the hope that a more focused discourse on policies can help youths navigate the saturation and hyper-flow of information — distorted or not — on the internet, which is seen as the primary cause behind youth political apathy.

Nazreen explained that he was apolitical himself at one point and understanding what made him change his mind helped spawn the idea for OpenPromises.

“I didn’t even know where to start because there was just too much information passing through… but I realised that it’s easier for us to learn about an issue with a more focused debate and I started paying attention to what some Sarawak politicians promised.”