Venezuela has been going through an unprecedented political transformation(?) since the extraction of Nicolás Maduro. All political stakeholders will try to pitch the possible outcome according to their respective interest: the Trump administration will say that it’s going fantastic; the Rodriguez regime will try to appear independent and in control; Team Machado will push for the full restoration of political rights; smaller actors like Enrique Marquez will try to conquer their own space; and the people will need to have proper tool, amid a sea of misinformation, to try to navigate between confusion and uncertainty.
Media outlets like Caracas Chronicles are doing our best to reduce such uncertainty, but there are new initiatives sprouting everywhere, such as the one that friend of the blog Pablo Hernández Borges is leading with a team of researchers and technologists. Umbral (umbral.watch), defined as “a free, open-source analytical platform for monitoring and documenting Venezuela’s regime transformation in real time,” allows anyone with an internet connection to contribute, as follows:
- Scenario Analysis with Citizen Participation. Five evidence-based trajectories for Venezuela’s political future, from full autocratization to complete democratic consolidation. Any person can rate the probability of each scenario on a 1 (least likely) to 5 (most likely) Likert scale. Results are disaggregated by profile and aggregated in real time, visible to all on the platform’s landing page.
- Citizen News Evaluation. Every article in the news feed can be voted on by users, who link it to whichever of the five scenarios they believe it signals.
- Historical Trajectory. A V-Dem-style democracy index spanning 1900–2024, mapping four major regime transformation episodes in Venezuela’s history (like Pablo did in this piece).
- Political Prisoners Tracker. Arbitrary detention statistics with demographic breakdowns, sourced from leading Venezuelan human rights organizations.
- Internet Connectivity Monitor. Real-time IODA (Georgia Tech) data on BGP, Active Probing, and Network Telescope signals, both nationally and across all 25 Venezuelan states, visualized through a choropleth map and horizon heatmap.
- GDELT Media Signals. Daily-archived instability index, media tone, and article volume from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, annotated with key political events.
- Fact-Checking Feed. Curated posts from three Venezuelan fact-checking accounts: @cazamosfakenews, @cotejoinfo, and @Factchequeado.
- Interactive Timeline. Democratic Episodes Event Dataset (DEED) with bilingual (Spanish/English) events.
- Reading Room. A curated archive of books, academic articles, investigative journalism, and reports on Venezuela.
- Prediction Markets. A Polymarket contract dashboard tracking Venezuela-related markets.
It’s Rotten Tomatoes for political junkies hooked on the Venezuela stuff.
To develop Umbral, Pablo, who is a data scientist with a PhD in Political Science from Texas Tech University, got the support of NGOs Ciudadanía Sin Límites and Code for Venezuela. The platform is fully bilingual (Spanish and English) and its source code is publicly available on GitHub, ensuring complete methodological transparency. Its analytical architecture is grounded in the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) methodology by the V-Dem Institute, which frames the inherent uncertainty of authoritarian transitions through concrete, evidence-based scenarios.
Umbral is not just an observatory—it is a space for active civic participation. The goal is for community-generated data to complement—and ultimately calibrate—the academic models underpinning the platform.
Check it out: https://umbral.watch