Transparency

As noted in our description of the project, our goal is to be an unbiased tool for analyzing societies and governments. This is a uniquely difficult thing to do in a field as polarized as politics, so we think it's worth discussing in more detail.

While each individual at Project Seldon may have their own belief set, we as a team believe only in transparency. Governments that conceal information avoid informed criticism, and we believe that only through criticism and self reflection can societies grow and improve.

Does this mean that there's no scenario where information can't be held back temporarily for national security purposes? No, we're open to the idea that in rare cases information may need to be witheld to avoid panic and rash decisions.

We're speaking more broadly in terms of...

• Where does the vast majority of our tax money go?
• How is our country performing in key areas like the economy?
• What are the effects of our government programs?
• What might we learn from other transparent countries?

Honest answers to questions like these breed progress. You can't fix problems that you refuse to see and discuss openly.

Sourcing

While we strive to retrieve our data from unbiased sources, the truth is that no source of data is completely without bias. To combat this we plan to make transparent sourcing a key feature in our platform. This means that for every card, chart or page you see, the origins of the information presented will be featured prominently. And by this we mean in your face and not buried in some fine print...

Even when compiling data from multiple sources, we'll provide access to them all. We encourage our users to click through and dig into them to verify that we haven't missed something. If what we're displaying is outdated or otherwise incorrect, tell us and we'll fix it.

Flagging

We plan to allow users to flag inconsistencies and issues in our data as another first class feature throughout the site. We may allow users to do this anonymously down the road but anyone flagging an issue must be prepared to provide their alternate source(s).

Right now, this functionality is limited and requires a GitHub account to submit feedback. We plan to expand this later in the year to make it easier for our users to help us improve the quality of our datasets.

Contributing

We don't support first-class contributions through the application yet, but we plan to offer this soon. For our more technical users, we highly encourage you to collaborate with us in GitHub as we expand the data collected in our service. Even if you don't know how to code, your input and research could help us to drive projects forward.

Keep in mind that some of our sources (e.g. Wikipedia) already allow you to make corrections and add data. We highly encourage direct contributions to these external services and those updates should be picked up the next time we run our data collection tools.