Monitoring Together - From data to story, from story to public affairs

In recent years, local democracy in Hungary has been significantly weakened by centralisation, polarisation, divisions and a succession of crises. In addition to the weakness of local media, national (media) attention to local public affairs is selective and fleeting. National media neither follow through nor dig deeper into issues of local importance, so media attention rarely has, and even then, mostly a blocking, polarising influence on local policy-making. In local public affairs, there is a lack of long-term attention and monitoring: holding promises to account, monitoring strategies, tracking the impact of public policy decisions through data and fact-finding methods.

The initiative aims at strengthening local democracy, promoting publicity and discourse on local policy issues, developing the fact- and data-based advocacy skills of participants, and strengthening partnerships and awareness around the press representation of local public affairs. It also aims at further developing K-Monitor's IT tools, methods and services for civil society in line with local needs.

The initiative will be of interest primarily to locally embedded CSOs and socially oriented media initiatives in rural towns and cities, as well as national independent media seeking to cover local issues. During implementation, participants will develop the competences of K-Monitor and local partners through professional collaborations and workshops, improving the efficiency of technology-based activities, policy advocacy and access to national publicity. This will also strengthen K-Monitor's rural embeddedness, the usability of its technical material and the partners' capacity to carry out their local advocacy work more effectively. In addition to the strategic approach striving to achieve sustainability, lasting changes in the openness and transparency of decision-making will be achieved in the local issues addressed.