Watchdog Sri Lanka
Watchdog is a Sri Lankan research collective I co-founded in April 2019 - two days after the Easter Sunday bombings that killed over 260 people and sent the country into a spiral of mass hysteria and communal misinformation. Along with Bhanuka Harischandra, Nisal Periyapperuma, Ragulan Ketheeswaran, and Safra Anver, we built a fact-checking app within 36 hours. Within three months we had 25–30 active volunteers and over 200,000 users. My co-founders convinced me to lead the organisation as CEO and editor-in-chief.
What followed was several years of work I’m proud of - and also the primary source of grey hairs on my head.
Three incarnations
The first was Watchdog as a pure fact-checker, scaling up and down with election cycles, run largely on volunteer labour and Nisal and my own finances.
The second began in January 2022, when Sri Lanka’s economy collapsed and we relaunched as a full OSINT collective - what I described at the time as “a junkyard version of Bellingcat.” The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) provided $340,000 in funding, enabling us to hire a full-time team and operate as a proper trilingual journalism operation in English, Sinhala, and Tamil.
The third was the tail end of our roadmap: releasing projects that go beyond journalism into the realm of durable artefacts - tools and datasets we hope will assist others doing similar work long after we’re done.
What we investigated
A sample of the longform and investigative work:
- Agricultural policy - mapping policy changes and fact-checking claims all the way back to the 11th century, down to modern commodity markets
- The economic collapse - explaining a sovereign debt crisis in real time while geolocating 600+ protests across the country; Reuters used our protest data for nationwide mapping, and local newspapers used our findings to counter government claims about protest scale
- Project Elixir - open-source software that channelled millions of rupees in medical aid to a collapsing public healthcare system
- Oddamavadi - an investigation into a mass grave site using satellite imagery, on-the-ground reporting, and hundreds of RTI (Right to Information) requests filed with government bodies
- Salt Water Pilgrims - an interactive visual novel bringing to life the choices, circumstances, and journeys faced by Sri Lankan economic migrants (play it here)
- Colombo: Skylines - a 1:1 replica of Colombo built in Cities: Skylines as a visualisation tool for transport policy; reached the top of Hacker News
Rest of World wrote a thorough piece about our work during the crisis, also mirrored at Nieman Lab. It focuses rather too much on me and not enough on the rest of the team, but it is at least thoroughly fact-checked.
Tools
Beyond investigations, we built a suite of public-facing tools:
- Watchdog Protest Tracker - interactive heat map tracking the #GoHomeGota protest movement as it grew across the country
- Lanka Kitchen - a platform to help community kitchens, ration groups, and mutual aid organisations run operations during the crisis
- Watchdog Databank - a collaborative repository of key Sri Lankan datasets drawn from government sources, covering food, electricity, and healthcare
- Inflation Tracker - long-term food price data, built to make the cost-of-living crisis legible over time
- #AskWatchdog AI - an LLM-powered search engine over our own archive and sources