by Kadir Yağız Çetin

The Season of Half-Burnt Cigars

Kadir Yağız Çetin — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 07:02:11 GMT

Lately everything I touch feels like it’s in some slow process of turning into something else. Projects become products, ideas turn into decks, plans dissolve into long nights of debugging and rewriting. After the Radical Innovation Summit in Mexico with Umut, even inspiration started to feel like work, motion everywhere, but not always direction. Yet, somehow, my humidor has become a perfect metaphor for how fragile that order really is. The humidity sensor started acting like a moody bureaucrat; showing 85 one day, 55 the next and before I knew it, my cigars began curling like old papers. A few even looked ready to be rolled into dolma.

There are those drives at 5 a.m. from Beylikdüzü to Etiler with Elif, the city still quiet & dark, headlights carving space for love and silence to coexist, and the quiet realization that we need to visit more restaurants before we rust. Some nights stretch into projects with Onur, Yusuf & Pınar, endless whiteboards, grant applications, and half-finished frameworks. Others dissolve into dawns with Umut, watching lines of code flicker like constellations thanks to Cursor.

I don’t even smoke most nights anymore; I just open the humidor, look, adjust, wait. Not everything broken is wasted. Sometimes the leaf just needs air, Emir please buy me a Raching.

CDR Youth 2025 events are finally over, the dinner with the Consul still feels strange in memory, and the soundtrack to these weeks is “Lacrimosa” by Zbigniew Preisner, a piece that makes even silence sound like confession.

Transparent but Not Accountable

Kadir Yağız Çetin — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 07:04:50 GMT

Governments, especially those with something to hide, often emphasize their transparency by publishing reports and data online. However, much of this information remains locked in inaccessible formats such as PDFs and scans, which neither people nor machines can easily process. This results in a performance of openness rather than genuine transparency, as information that cannot be meaningfully accessed, analyzed, or reused essentially remains hidden. True accountability requires structured, machine-readable data that enables public understanding and meaningful oversight, not just symbolic acts of disclosure. According to the OECD’s 2025 “Government at a Glance“ report, while regulatory frameworks in many countries promote transparency, the actual practice often falls short due to limitations in how accessible and usable the information is for the public. This gap challenges the effectiveness of transparency initiatives and highlights the need for improved data accessibility and usability to achieve real accountability (OECD, Government at a Glance 2025).

In reality, information that cannot be analyzed, compared, or searched cannot truly serve the public. A document uploaded to a ministry website might tick the "transparency” box, but if citizens, journalists, businesses, or researchers can’t extract meaning from it, it’s no different from being hidden. Accountability requires structure, and structure begins with data that can be read, interpreted, and reused.

At CDR, we’ve learned that being open isn’t enough. Real accountability starts when information becomes usable and machine-readable, when policy documents can be connected across institutions, and when citizens can understand the decisions made on their behalf. That’s why we’ve built tools like Referandom (we call it the Tinder for the Turkish Parliament) and its Instagram account to reach citizens while informing them about legislative processes in a sexier way, along with monitoring reports and datasets we share that help CSOs and researchers transform messy public records into structured data. These technologies, reports, and datasets allow them to ask better questions and challenge power with evidence rather than assumptions.

Policyful, our spin-out technology start-up, takes this work further by using AI to monitor parliaments, ministries, and regulatory bodies in real time. It brings together natural language processing, machine learning, and policy engineering to turn chaos into clarity by helping companies manage compliance more effectively, CSOs make data-driven advocacy easier, researchers analyze public policy trends and data over time. Because democracy isn’t just about access to information; it’s about understanding it, contextualizing it, and acting on it.

Some Songs

Kadir Yağız Çetin — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 10:32:25 GMT

Sometimes it can’t always be about politics, tech, or “world-changing” projects.
Nowadays I’ve been trying to pause for a bit, to listen more, think less, and just exist in the background noise of good music and small moments in my “canım annem’s” house, especially these days, as it’s been more than a hundred days since Fatih Altaylı was imprisoned. I used to start every morning with his videos. These are some songs that have been looping in that space, enjoy!

Lately (big lie, it’s been almost two years), I’ve been looping “Euphoria” by Kadebostany, Barış Demirel, and Serepocaiontas, especially the Turkish version by Barış Demirel (“Kakülünde Ak Oldum”). I still remember the day I heard it with Elif at Beymen Club; we were looking at coats, and I just froze for a second like, “Aaaaa, isn’t this the ‘Kakülünde Ak Oldum’?!”

Of course, I couldn’t skip “Hashish” by Ibrahim Maalouf from his Diasporas album, the one with the album photo hanging in my room. My lovely “İbrahim Ağabey” and his trumpet feel like a long sigh at 2 a.m.

And “Lili Marlen” by Ahmet Kaya, a song I still can’t fully memorize (like every song I know). Sorry, Ahmet Ağabey…

Who is Kadir?

Kadir Yağız Çetin — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 19:41:48 GMT

I’ve spent the past few years somewhere between civic-tech, social entrepreneurship, and public policy data trying to make sense of how technology can serve democracy instead of dominating it.

I lead two organizations: CDR, an independent non-profit technology and research focused think-tank that builds projects to make governance more transparent, participatory, and data-driven; and Policyful, CDR’s spin-out technology start-up that is developing an AI-powered compliance and regulatory intelligence platform.

Outside work, I’m obsessed with culinary experiences, cigars, jazz, and watches. Most of the time, together with my girlfriend Elif 🍯🦭, I’m on a mission to complete the Michelin Guide (and yes, to the one starred restaurant in Istanbul that’s still missing: your review is coming soon 👀).

You can check the About page for more details 😘.