Watchdog Sri Lanka

Watchdog (www.watchdog.team) is a multidisciplinary team of journalists, researchers and software engineers, operating under the Appendix umbrella. We hunt misinformation, investigate matters of public welfare, and build software tools. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of having a hand in and also the source of the majority of the grey hairs on my head.

We began in April 2019, days after the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka, as a group of concerned citizens trying to counter misinformation. We did this amidst government crackdowns on freedom of expression and mass hysteria caused by fake news and rumors, building a mobile app that was used by over 200,000 people to verify information and counteract rumors in their own networks.

My friends and co-founders convinced me to lead the thing as CEO and editor in chief, and here we are. Watchdog is now (and I say this with pride) one of the finest data operations in Sri Lanka. As Sri Lanka collapsed (2021-2022), we went hard, building one of the finest longform operations in the country - all while being trilingual.

Here are some of the things we’ve done:

1) mapping agricultural policy changes, factchecking all the way back to the 11th century and down to modern markets

2) explaining a collapsing economy while geolocating 600+ protests

3) building open-source software to funnel millions in medical aid to help a collapsing healthcare system

4) using satellite imagery, boots-on-the-ground, and enormous waves of government RTIs to explore and explain the mass grave at Oddamavadi

5) building a 1:1 representation of the city of Colombo in a video game, to serve as a visualization tool for explaining transport policy proposals.

6) building tools for other journalists and factcheckers

See https://restofworld.org/2022/meet-the-fact-checkers-decoding-sri-lankas-meltdown/ (mirrored at https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/06/meet-the-fact-checkers-decoding-sri-lankas-meltdown/). It focuses too much on me and too little on the others on the team, but it is thoroughly fact-checked and verified by actual people who were following us around.

Watchdog has had three incarnations under my watch. The first was as a pure factchecker, scaling up and down depending on the election cycles and volunteer translators pitching it. The second was when we raised funding from OCCRP (the Organized Crime and Corruptiuon Reporting Project) to become a proper journalism operation, with all that it entailed, including a nonprofit funding model that went beyond just Nisal and myself footing the bills. The third is now, where we’re on the tail end of our roadmap, releasing projects that go well beyond journalism and into the realm of artefacts - things that we hope will act as assists for others doing the kind of work we do.

We’ve also been called everything from paid government/govt opposition/CIA/LTTE/NATO plants to regime change operators (usually by corrupt politicians and anonymous accounts), and had everything from state intelligence knocking on our doors to threats to burn down the office. At this point we can only request those who dislike our work to get their stories straight, and for someone (be it the CIA, FBI, MSNBC, or whatever) to make themselves useful and cover our milk powder expenses: we’re running out of milk tea at the office.