I’m a member of Transparency4Iran, one of the few groups working on transparency in our country. We have had some good experiences during our last election and now facing with the big one; the most important political event in Iran.
Our presidential election will be held on April and we have chosen the topics below to promote transparency and accountability during this golden time:
Tracking Promises
Proposed Cabinet members
Assets and income disclosure
Presidential official Action Plans
Candidate viewpoints on different issues
Election Funding amounts and sources
Election Spending amounts and sources
Candidate Career
We are looking for any experience on such topics in differnt countries. We look forward to here from you about any resources, empirical experiences and skilled related people to the mentioned topics. If so, please let us know.
@Mor, @rufuspollock , In Iran we are taking our first steps in our approach to transparency, therefore, knowing best practices will help us choose the best steps according to our circumstances.
Elections are not typically our areas of expertise so I can’t share examples of actual accountability or any influence the work such as ours have had an influence on the elections. Having said that here are a few tools that we developed that do relate to politicians and elections which might be of interest:
@hmalekny Always great to hear that groups are working on transparency and accountability in election processes! I would suggest that you start by taking a look at some of the resources that are already being produced around these issues in Iran.
ASL19 has developed an online tool called the Rouhani Meter to track President Rouhani’s adherence to campaign promises and a tool called the Majlis Monitor to provide more information about the composition of parliament and the qualifications of the representatives.
In terms of more general resources, the Open Society Foundation has produced a handbook on how civil society can monitor election campaign finance, that may be worth checking out.
Then, as @Mor mentioned, NDI’s Open Election Data Initiative provides examples of the types of data that can be made available throughout all phases of the electoral cycle and a series of nine principles for open electoral data that reflect international best practices as articulated during a series of dialogues with electoral management bodies, international observers and citizen observers from around the world. These principles can be used to structure advocacy efforts for additional open data based on an assessment of the data that it would be most useful to have in your electoral context.
Actually we have knew NabzIran and ASL19 since we started Transparency4Iran.There are some cons and pros about them but we are the ONLY group working on transparency inside Iran.