International civic data infrastructure
Political actor databases for countries that don't have them.
- 2024–
- Lead
- live
- 471
Knowing who holds power is a prerequisite for holding them accountable, and in much of the world that list simply isn’t available in structured form. Researchers rebuild it by hand, per project, and it goes stale immediately.
NCoC has built political actor databases to close that gap — a Portuguese political actor database, and a Nigerian elected officials database covering 471 national seats plus governors, with a structured scaffold and a scraper pipeline that keeps it current.
The unglamorous version of civic technology is building the reference tables everyone else assumes already exist.