Sinar Project

Sinar Project (سينار — Malay for "ray of light" or "sunlight") is a Malaysian civic technology initiative based in Kuala Lumpur whose mission is "using open technology, open data and policy analysis to systematically make important information public and more accessible, in constrained environments". Founded by co-founder and coordinator Khairil Yusof out of Malaysia's open-data activist scene, Sinar Project operates across three interlocking registers — democratic transparency and parliamentary accountability, internet freedom monitoring, and AI governance — and has grown into one of Southeast Asia's most technically sophisticated civic-tech organizations. The name encapsulates the mission: making government, law, and the digital information environment legible to citizens who are otherwise navigating constrained, opaque systems.

Origins

Sinar Project emerged from a cohort of Malaysian "tech types" who felt, in Yusof's words, a compulsion to put their skills to civic use. The Bersih 2.0 rally of July 2011 — when tens of thousands of Malaysians took to the streets calling for free and fair elections and an end to systemic corruption — was the galvanizing moment that crystalized this civic-tech movement: among the crowd were developers who concluded that technology could systematically expose what Malaysia's political culture worked to obscure. The organization initially focused on tracking legislative bills, then expanded rapidly into parliamentary data, corruption documentation, and internet freedom measurement. Operating from a Kuala Lumpur studio apartment and relying on grants and donations, Sinar faces a structurally difficult information environment: Malaysia's Official Secrets Act, the Sedition Act, limited federal Freedom of Information protections, and weak whistleblower safeguards all constrain the supply of public data that the organization's tools depend on.

Open Parliament and democratic transparency

Sinar Project's foundational programme is Open Parliament — a suite of tools making Malaysia's legislature legible to citizens and journalists. Wakil Rakyat (Malay for "People's Representative") is the citizen-facing platform for discovering information about elected representatives — their activity, their statements, their constituency. Billwatcher allows users to follow, search, and browse bills tabled in Parliament — a basic transparency function that Malaysia's official parliamentary infrastructure did not provide in accessible form. A parliamentary written-replies archive makes searchable the Hansard responses to parliamentary questions, which Sinar Project has mined systematically for crime statistics and other data points that are absent from official government statistical releases — including datasets on sexual assault compiled from replies that disaggregated data in ways official crime statistics did not. Popit is Sinar Project's open-data infrastructure contribution: a reusable database and API service for recording politicians, politically exposed persons, and their organizational memberships, generating Popolo-standard open data to power parliamentary-monitoring projects across the region. A contract-database project exposed connections between government procurement awards and politicians' private business interests, leading to corruption charges against at least one official.

Internet freedom monitoring — iMAP and OONI

Sinar Project's internet-freedom monitoring work began in 2013, when the team independently verified during the 13th General Election that opposition-linked political websites were being blocked — using deep-packet inspection analysis to confirm what users had been reporting anecdotally. This led to a sustained partnership with the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) and the development of a Malaysia censorship measurement infrastructure. Sinar Project's OONI collaboration includes maintaining Malaysia's country test list, contributing to measurement campaigns, and documenting confirmed blocks: including Grindr, ArtStation, WeeChooKeong.com, and MalaysiaNow, as well as earlier documented blocks of Sarawak Report, Malaysian Insider, BBC articles, Steam, FanFiction.net, and sites covering the 1MDB scandal. The team discovered that Malaysian ISP DNS blocking persists even when users travel internationally while roaming on Malaysian carrier SIM cards — extending state-level filtering beyond Malaysian borders. Blocked or Not is the user-facing tool that allows anyone to check whether a given domain is accessible within Malaysia. The South/Southeast Asia Censorship Dashboard aggregates regional blocking patterns.

This domestic work became the spine of iMAP — the Internet Monitoring Action Project — a Sinar Project-led regional network monitoring network interference and freedom-of-expression restrictions across nine to ten countries in Asia (Cambodia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Vietnam). Launched in October 2021 and running through March 2025, iMAP published annual internet censorship state reports drawing on OONI data, with country-specific partner organizations in each national context — including the Advocacy and Policy Institute (Cambodia), Centre for Internet and Society (India), EngageMedia (Asia-Pacific), and Thai Netizen Network (Thailand). Sinar Project conducted dedicated election-period monitoring during Malaysia's 15th General Election and the 2023 state elections, documenting confirmed blocking of five domains during the state-election window, and has produced annual iMAP country reports covering more than 70 blocked websites across categories including political criticism, news and media, and human rights.

AI governance

Sinar Project's AI governance work represents a strategic expansion into the emerging Malaysian and regional regulatory debate about artificial intelligence. The Safeguarding Our Information Ecosystem programme — a 48-month project (2025–2029) co-implemented with ARTICLE 19 and the Centre for Independent Journalism, with European Union funding — includes building a database of AI implementations in the Malaysian public sector, documenting how government agencies are deploying AI systems, and developing public-interest AI governance frameworks aligned with Malaysia's national AI Action Plan 2030 and 13th Malaysia Plan. A concrete training component teaches civil society organizations how to deploy and use AI models locally — extending technical literacy from measurement tools into AI itself.

In November 2025, Sinar Project published "Leading Regional AI Governance: Traversing Public Interests, Rights and Innovation in Malaysia" — a research paper emerging from a closed-door multi-stakeholder consultation on public-interest AI governance in Southeast Asia, co-produced with Engage Media and co-authored by Jun-E Tan, C Hari, S Shankar, Siti Nurliza, and Tengku Nur Qistina. The paper frames AI governance as requiring a balance of public interests, rights protection, and innovation advancement, situating Malaysia's regulatory context within the broader Southeast Asian policy landscape. Separately, the Enabling Tech programme has produced an AI Abuse Case Database and Creator Protection Guidebook documenting how AI systems harm Malaysian content creators, with practical guidance for rights protection.

Enabling Tech and capacity building

The Enabling Tech programme — Luminate-funded — is Sinar Project's capacity-building infrastructure for Malaysian civil society and activists. Its three core objectives are: strengthening civil society's technical capacity, bridging the gap between tech professionals and civil society, and developing shared digital services for ecosystem-wide approaches. The programme's Community of Practice (et.sinarproject.org) hosts meetups, workshops, and a newsletter across Klang Valley, Northern Region, and East Malaysia, giving civic-tech practitioners in different geographic contexts a shared learning infrastructure. A Civic Tech Fellowship supports practitioners working on active digital-rights research; a Travel Fellowship supports attendance at international events. The Enabling Tech Curriculum provides training materials specifically designed to help civil society leaders secure free and open online spaces for democratic organizing. Implementation partners include ARTICLE 19, Centre for Independent Journalism, Initiate.my, and Alternatives.

Posture in the Southeast Asian ecosystem

Sinar Project occupies a distinctive position in the corpus's digital-rights and AI-governance landscape: it is the region's most technically multidisciplinary civic-tech organization working across the full stack from parliamentary monitoring and anti-corruption data infrastructure through real-time censorship measurement and into AI governance and civil-society capacity building. While the corpus's other Southeast Asian entries — Citizen Lab (Canada-anchored, global scope) — operate at a research-institute register, Sinar Project is a practitioner organization embedded in Malaysian civil society, building tools used by Malaysian journalists, parliamentarians, and activists as primary consumers. The organization is a member of the Code for All network — the global civic-tech community — and a recognized OONI research partner. Its funders over its history include Luminate, Hivos, Access Now, Open Technology Fund, APNIC Foundation, IDRC, and the EU; the breadth of that funding base reflects both the multi-register character of the work and its recognition across the international digital-rights, open-government, and internet-freedom communities. For the corpus, Sinar Project closes the Southeast Asia gap at the regional civic-tech anchor level, complementing the local-group entries for AI-safety-oriented communities in the region.