What is basic your idea of your initiative and what are you trying to accomplish with it? When was the first thought born about the project?
The basic idea is that when a politican appears on TV s/he should not think about it as an opportunity to say whatever s/he wants.
What we are trying to accomplish is an ideal state situation where politicians try to base their arguments on facts, which are right, and use them in the right context.
The inspiration came from a slovak press watch blog (spw.blog.sme.sk) where there were occasional posts about sunday debates and factually wrong numbers/ arguments peopple had used in them. Afterwards I came across such projects as politifact and factcheck in th US, where people analyse political claims and rate them tru/untru/misleading/ etc.
How much time did it take to launch the project before it went live? What were the first reaction of the people?
We had a three months period of testing of what we would be capable of in terms of how much time is needed to analyse one TV debate etc. We used wordpress platform for the site, so to set up the site was not very time consuming. First reactions were (and still are, when someone new comes to the site) that it is great to have someone who watches thos political mumblings every sunday. We launched the site couple of months before elections so the attention was kind of logical.
Did and how the idea change since Day1? What are your users saying and how are you adapting to their needs?
The idea is still the same, we use the same methodology, but we have upgrade the website and now we use a CMS made specifically for our needs (with statistics for every politician, etc).
Usually our user dont say much, or at least they dont say that to us. The basic feedback we get is when someone is not satisfied with our analysis or conclusion.
What are your plans for near and further future?
The plan is to cover detabes in the public radio as well, and to monitor politicians' claims continually during the week- eg major press conferences, events etc. another goal is to spread the concept to other countries.
What is/was your main obstacle while developing and running your project?
As with any similar project, the main obstacle is lack of time and money. In the beginning we run the whole thing as a voluntary project in our free time, since September we have been getting some funding and other volunteers from a Slovak ngo SGI. But we still have to find a way how to make the whole thing sustainable.
Do you do anything to attract more people to interact? Not only in a negative way?
The basic idea is, that we want people to dispute our conclusion (sort of "crowdsourcing" the factchecking)- we do not think we are absolutelly right in every case. However, people often react in an angry way, which rules out any rational discussion. given that our main field is to factcheck statements, we dont have any other special feature which would give people more space to get engaged.
Did politicians ever contacted you to "straighten something up"? Or do you contact them?
Sometimes we try to contact them- in cases when they are talking about some report or governmental analysis which is not (yet) online- but they usually do not react.
in a few cases, some of them have contacted us, useing comments under the articles or by mail, to add somthing to their claims, or to prove their opponent had been wrong. we analyse such additional informacion and if they make some sense, we add them to the original conclusion, with the byline, that they from such and such person.
How do you collect materials? Do you work as a media monitoring service or do you cooperate with one?
We have transcriptions of debates from Newton Media (a media analysis firm), any other material we look up on google. that is our main source and tool.
How do you promote your analysis? Do you paste links to some comments below articles on mainstream media?
We have several opportunities to publish our findings (in fact, too many at the time, and we dont have time to use them all) in national media or online- the thing is that we are the first one who does something like this here, so we were able to attract some media attention. we also do a kind of "realtime factcheck"- we analyse some of the claims during the debate on sunday using coveritlive platform. two slovak news server use the embed code of the coveritlive on their websites.