When we came up with the idea for an RPG-tracker for Malaysian politicians, we wanted to test the waters first, and thus myself and Seah decided that the path of least resistance would be teaming up with MCCHR. For those who don’t know, starting up a company can be quite a pain, and quite expensive, so it was very fortunate that MCCHR bought into the idea, and managed to secure funding of RM45,000 for us to start the project as independent contractors.
Thus far, that money has been coming into my personal enterprise (called Starship Enterprise, which registers all my freelance work), and i’ve been using that company to pay the programmers (Makerzone), the intern (Surekha), our 8-bit artist (Ivan) and the various freelancers we’ve used over the course of one year. Myself and Seah kept RM6000 for ourselves (which over one year comes up to about RM500 a month). In the spirit of transparency, here’s a breakdown of the costs so far. We’re actually down a hundred ringgit or so, but that’s okay 🙂
BUT now, MyMP has grown up a bit, so it’s time to move out
Since our launch in August, we’ve had more than 23,000 Malaysians visit the site, thanks to media outlets like Mashable, SoyaCincau, Coconuts, RakyatPost and CILISOS, AND not forgetting the wonderful folks from Reddit n Twitter too!
Since then, the public has helped us alot as well. To everyone that …
- Visited our site
- Shared our linkes
- Donated to our page (RM2k+ and counting)
- Flagged inaccuracies
- Volunteered to help (yes, we’re still clearing the backlog of volunteers. SORRY!)
…Thank you so much for helping us realise the first big step in making Malaysia’s politicians more accountable!
Which brings us to today’s announcement. MCCHR has indicated that the project should have its own entity now (even when you move out, your folks are still your folks), and so we’ve used some of the donations to set up a company.
Introducing GomenGames, or GG for short 🙂
We threw alot of names around. PermainanPolitik was rejected, and our next option was RakyatSasa. But then one Whatsapp message kinda sealed it.
With that, we did up the paperwork, and got I-Van (the artist behind all the 8-bit characters) to throw together a logo, and so here it is… incorporated with RM1000 paid-up capital (cos RM2 companies just sounds bad la). Our shareholders are Chak, Seah, Surekha, Ivan and Mak (no political parties, no agenda Yahudi).
The start of big things… hopefully
So now that we have our own company, our first order of business is getting the funds to operate for this year. Those funds will contribute to…
- Upkeep of the site (and update of info from flags)
- Development of
- Advanced Data Visualisation options for the public (HANSARDS, Comparing MPs etc). Think like MOH’s COVIDNOW site, but for MPs.
- Badge tagging
- More data points for MPs
- Volunteer efforts (allowances, gatherings)
- More data gathering (Parlimen Seatings, election changes)
- Staff salaries (a small staff count of 3-5 to handle volunteers, publicity, and admin)
- Tracking ADUNs – this is a big one, as there are 600 ADUNs, so consider this our ‘reach goal‘
We have a few versions of these goals, depending on the funding we can secure for 2022, through grants, donations and one other big thing we’re planning to announce soon (which was an idea suggested to us by commenters in several threads).
If you have any suggestions about our transparency, or funding opportunities, please please please let us know in the comments 🙂