This blog was born just over a year ago, in July of 2010, with a series of posts examining the work of Latin American civil society organizations like Artículo 19, the Center for the Investigation of Drugs and Human Rights, and Alternativas y Capacidades. The launch of the weblog coincided with the beginning of my consultancy with Open Society Foundations. I was hired by the foundation’s Information Program and the Latin America Program to help determine how each could most effectively collaborate with the other.

Consultants are routinely hired by foundations to “assess impact” and “scope out prospective interventions.” However, as Sameer Padania remarked at a conference on technology and philanthropy, the vast majority of intellectual capital produced by consultants remains left sitting tucked away on some hard drive, and out of sight from the larger public. Occasionally, the overworked staff of philanthropic foundations don’t have enough time to read the very reports that they themselves commissioned.

This weblog, then, was my effort to capture the state of the use of technology by civil society in Latin America, but to do so in an open, networked manner that invites wider participation beyond the same handful of experts that are regularly cited in reports and invited to conferences. I had also hoped to provide civil society with more information about how foundations make decisions by featuring a regular series of interviews with the program officers who ultimately decide which organizations receive grants and which do not. Finally, I had hoped to use this blog to promote the concept of “civic information;” that is, public information that is adopted and analyzed by tech-savvy civil society organizations to promote more citizen participation, government transparency, and, ultimately, accountability.

In its 16 months of existence I believe that this blog has been reasonably successful at drawing together a community of Latin American activists, analysts and technologists interested in the use of technology in civil society. They continue to develop innovative civic software such as Promesometro in Peru, Vota Inteligente in Argentina, Queremos Saber in Brazil, and Inspector de Intereses in Chile. Another sign of growing enthusiasm: the first weekend of December, dozens of civic hackers will meet in major cities across the region to dedicate 30 hours to developing applications that promote transparency.

I was less successful, however, at persuading philanthropic foundations to be more open and transparent in their strategizing and grant-making. Philanthropy remains a mostly exclusive, hierarchical practice, where the right social connections are more valuable than the right ideas.

Last month, my consultancy with Open Society Foundations came to an end. I am grateful to my former colleagues at the Information and Latin America programs who provided me with guidance, autonomy, and the opportunity to work with the most reputed civil society organizations throughout Latin America. I will continue to work on issues related to technology and transparency with Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm of Pierre and Pam Omidyar. With my new position, however, I will not have enough time to dedicate to this blog. If you are interested in taking over editorship of the blog, please leave a comment on this post or via the contact page. The use of new technologies to promote greater government transparency is still in its infancy, and it is my hope that analytical, journalistic endeavors like this one continue to accompany the movement.

For now, I recommend that readers interested in technology and civil society in Latin America subscribe to the following blogs to keep apace of new developments:

• TAI’s Bridging Transparency and Accountability [en]
• OpenDataMx [es]
• El Vaso [es]
• Technology for Transparency Network | Global Voices [en]
• Brasil Aberto [pt]
• Transparencia Hacker [pt]
• Open Government Partnership [en]
• The Next Web – Latin America [en]
• Res Publica [es]
• FreedomInfo [en]
• Observing Brazil [en]
• Mexico Informate [es]
• Garage Lab [es]

Editor’s Note: Much has been written in English about the use of so-called “crowdfunding platforms” in civil society, but there is relatively little information about the growing phenomenon in Latin America, despite several successful examples of crowdfunded projects. Last week in Mexico City, for example, a group of urban cycling activists that were fed up with their government’s lack of investment in bicycle lanes, raised $13,500 pesos to cover the costs of their own “guerrilla cycling lane.”

In this article Peruvian blogger and Información Cívica author Juan Arellano takes us on a tour of crowdfunding platforms designed for Spanish-speaking users, and shares some analysis from Latin America bloggers.

Crowdfunding

Anyone who has ever developed a project, or generally works in civil society, knows that fundraising can be time-consuming, stressful and discouraging. Organizations must frequently adapt their own vision to that of their funders.

With the recent global economic downturn, fundraising has become more difficult still, but a network-enabled alternative to traditional fundraising is spreading around the world, supporting the work of filmmakers, musicians, activists, and even beer brewers. Usually referred to as Crowfunding, I personally prefer the term “collective funding.”

is the collective cooperation carried out by persons who have created a network to get money or other resources, often using the Internet to finance the efforts and initiatives of other persons or organizations. Crowdfunding can be used for many purposes, from artists seeking support from his followers, political campaigning, funding the creation of companies or small businesses.

Two features make crowdfunding attractive for both parties. On the side of those seeking funding, they are able to publicize their project on the relevant platform in addition to traditional social networks. On the financing side, there is the satisfaction of joining a community of small scale supporters to enable a project that appeals to you. There is typically a deadline to reach a particular funding goal; if that goal is not met then the committed donations are returned to the funders.

There is a history of projects that have been developed based on this type of financing, from touring rock bands, to movies and pretty much anything you can think of (fashion or journalism, for example). To accomplish this many platforms have emerged on the Internet that help connect the entrepreneur in need of cash and philanthropists willing to fund ideas that are to his liking. The best known of these platforms are: Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, ChipIn, Venture Bonsai, Crowdcube, RocketHub and many other platforms. There also platforms that are oriented toward social entrepreneurship of which one can mention Globalgiving, Pifworld, the very well known Kiva and Donorschoose.

To choose just one example that demonstrates the social aspect of collective funding, “a Harlem grocery store opened after collecting just under $25,000. These individual investors were re-paid ” not in shares, but with signed kitchen books, tickets for the holiday fundraising party and the loyalty card to the market,” writes David de Ugarte of La Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas :

The key lies in the strong sense of identity embedded in the proposal (organic food, cooperative decision-making), its strong social dimension (the workers are young boys “at risk of exclusion” and the business will be located in Harlem) and especially in the very nature of “crowdfunding ‘ (by providing small amounts the donor feels that each contribution is more than monetary).

Crowdfunding

So far I have focused on platforms and examples from North America, but what about the Spanish-speaking world where civil society has traditional depended on large private donors from the United States and Europe? There are several collective funding platforms geared toward Spanish speakers, though most are currently based in Spain.

One of the best known is Lánzanos (“Launch Us”). In their FAQ they state: “We look for projects of all kinds: art, film, music, literary, design, dance, and all other projects or events that can be imagined.” An article from El Pais explains:

In Lanzanos.com the creator retains ownership of his work. In exchange for the money (from one euro up to 1750 euros) they offer unique experiences as a reward to the Internet users who make contributions, which they call support. “We aspire to be the platform for the Hispanic crowdfunding public regardless of where they live,” said Hervas, who has a degree from business chool. Instead of linking the contributions to a checking account, as Kickstarter does, monetary donations are made through PayPal.

Another crowdfunding platform in Spain is SeedQuick a product of the Loogic association. The site wwwhatsnew [ES] tell us a bit about how this platform works:

One of the most outstanding features of SeedQuick is that when an entrepreneur uploads his new project, it must go through a process that should receive user feedback for product improvement. Once the “test” has been passed, the project can start receiving support from people interested in becoming investors. All users that participate in this phase get reputation points. There will be regular rewards for those users with the best reputations.

A third option is Verkami. Like Lánzanos, the creator maintains the rights to his project, and offers investors “rewards in the form of exclusive creations and products, unique experiences, limited editions, merchandising, and access to downloads …”. In the aforementioned article in El País, they also interview the founders of Verkami:

“We are cultural consumers and we believe we can take forward certain projects that would otherwise never see the light.” Joan Hall, a biologist of 52 years, has driven spearheaded Verkami together with his sons Jonah and Adria. They only accept creative projects or social projects, and they establish a period of 40 days to get financing. Payment is by credit card through Caixa Catalunya, which charges between 1.30 and 1.45% for each transaction. They get a commission of 5% if the project goes forward.

A new option that will be launched soon is Goteo, which announces that it will fund “open” projects.

In Latin America, crowdfunding platforms are also emerging. Idea.me is a new Argentine initiative. According to its FAQ: “We focus on creative projects in Latin America. These projects must have a beginning and a definite end. Our platform is neither for ongoing charitable causes, nor business projects that aim to cover overhead costs.” FayerWayer quotes Sebastian Uchitel, the CEO of the initiative:

In Latin America there is an extraordinary source of creative and innovative talent that faces many restrictions in getting financing. Through our platform, we can help those ideas become reality, “says Sebastian. “It’s a paradigm shift in the consumption of entertainment, people have the opportunity to participate in a project, initiative or idea from the moment of conception, development, and then its execution.

Also in Argentina is Proyéctanos, is another recently launched initiative, aimed exclusively at domestic projects. The financing is issued in Argentine pesos and payments are realized through Mercadopago.com. Norte Económico explains how contributors are compensated:

Each project owner shall establish a system of rewards or compensation for people who contribute to their project. These rewards should not be monetary, but intrinsic to the project itself. For example, if my project is to publish a book of short stories, one of the rewards could be appear in the acknowledgments of the book, send an autographed copy of the book, and so on.

Another Argentine crowdfunding initiative is Bananacash a pioneer in these conflicts, which is also active on Facebook. And further north, in Mexico, we find the Fondeadora, the platform of “a civil association with the mission of offering a liaison between artists and creators of creative projects and Mexican society through our Collective Funding platform to create value in our country.” In its fairly extensive FAQ, it comments on something that is often noted as a criticism to crowdfunding platforms, the potential theft of ideas:

we believe that the best way to protect an idea, is to realize it. By nature, this site is to share ideas and work together. If you are not willing to share information about your project because you fear that you steal the idea, it is likely that the Fondeadora is not suitable for your idea. If your project may be protected by copyright or a patent, go ahead. We are not against any step you make to protect your ideas.

Crowdfunding - the future

Successful use of crowd funding platforms is not as simple as merely submitting a project and sitting and waiting for money to arrive on its own. If you review the project portfolios of the aforementioned crowdfunding platforms, you will find that many here fail to meet even half the suggested amount. So how do you make a project attractive and successful? Jorge Toledo’s blog La Cajita gives us some tips about what is needed:

- The existence of a trained and competent individual or team that, beyond the proposal itself, is able to convey confidence in the success of the project.

• The relevance, desirability and quality of the proposal itself.
• The openness, transparency and intimacy in dealing with the communication to recipients via email, comments, social networks, the official website, etc. Maintain smooth, continuous information on the progress of the project, be open to suggestions and contributions, accept criticism and appreciate the participation.
• The existence of concrete objectives, tangible, deadlines, forms, applications …
• The possibility of a return on investment.

Collective funding represents a shift in how we understand the roles of both the investor and the entrepreneur. Cristina Riera of #Bcult explains:

This establishes a new system of responsibilities between creator / promoter – receptor /co-producer / co-author. A relationship in which transparency and accountability are key to the success of the model and proposals. Community is key, but so is transparency and accountability.

In some cases it transforms the concept of authorship as well as the expectations regarding economic performance. Some projects incorporate a concept of distributed ownership, opening up the process of creating a community intervention. In this case, crowdfunding goes beyond an economic microfinance mechanism to become a philosophy to recover the concept of shared culture.

The question arises whether it would be possible for government to employ similar mechanisms to allow citizens to participate more actively in the use of public spending. In fact it is a dynamic already in place in some cases, participatory budgeting, and it opens up a path to explore a possible model of administration that is more open, participatory and transparent.

El post original en castellano fue traducido al inglés por Negarra Akili Kudumu. Fue editado por David Sasaki.

The first image was obtained from the Small Business Trends site, the second image from the site L1452 and the third from the blog Crowfund news.

Overwhelmed by Interactions

As the famous saying goes, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Social network analysis backs up the truism. In March 2010 three researchers found that a CEO’s annual salary increases by over $17,000 for each additional connection to an executive from an outside firm.

The problem is that, these days, most of us “know” thousands of people. We meet them at conferences, on flights, at cocktail parties. We exchange business cards and we tell each other with straight faces that we will keep in touch. There is simply no way for us to maintain meaningful contact with every person we meet, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to decide how to invest our time in order to most efficiently reach our goals.

A 21st century addendum to the 20th century truism might be: “It’s how you know what you know about who you know.”

If this is a difficult problem for individuals, it has become even more difficult for NGOs. Few organizations have records of their interactions with journalists, donors, bloggers, politicians, other NGOs, conference attendees and petition supporters. Nor do most organizations know how to segment their constituents effectively.

Perhaps an advocacy initiative is only relevant to a particular voting district, but because the organization doesn’t know the voting districts of its supporters, it must send out the information to everyone. Or, perhaps some supporters are only engaged in issues around, say, water conservation, but don’t want to receive updates about urban mobility or access to health care. Equally important, some contacts prefer to receive information via email, others on social networks, and still others via text messages on their cell phones.

In my experience with NGOs around Latin America, I have found that over 80% of organizations use a simple Excel spreadsheet to manage their contacts. Usually these spreadsheets have nothing more than the individual’s name, email, phone number, and organization. Occasionally they attempt to capture other information such as the media coverage of particular journalists or the events they have attended, but most organizations seem to give up on such documentation once the spreadsheet becomes unwieldy in size.

Enter CRMs

A CRM — constituent relationship manager — is in its most basic sense, an address book for organizations. But unlike an address book, which merely captures information about individuals, a CRM also documents information about our interactions with them. Over time, this record of interactions shows an organization how particular relationships help it achieve its goals. (Though a bit dated, Techsoup has a helpful introduction to “creating a Relationship-Centric Organization” through the use of a CRM system.)

Introducing CRMs to Civil Society in Mexico and Argentina

The Open Society Foundations is supporting Wingu in Argentina and Telar Social in Mexico to explain the costs and benefits of implementing and maintaining a CRM solution for civil society organizations. After meeting with various NGOs to document their needs and capacities, they will cover, among other issues:

• What are the basic parts of any major CRM system?
• What are the pros and cons of the two most popular CRM solutions for civil society organizations, CiviCRM and Salesforce?
• What is a “CRM strategy“?
• How to integrate an organization’s social media strategy with its CRM strategy?
• How to integrate a CRM system with an organizations existing website?
• What is the cost — in time and money — of implementing and maintaining a CRM system?

Throughout the process both Wingu and Telar Social will document and share their findings with the larger community. At the end of the month we will summarize their findings and publish them here at Información Cívica.

Last week a Chilean commission of environment, health, economy, mining and agriculture ministers voted to approve a massive coal mining project on Riesco Island in the far south of the country. Supporters of the project, which will construct five mines and a shipping port, say it will create needed jobs and reduce Chile’s dependence on foreign oil. Opponents warn of a 360% increase in Chile’s carbon emissions and environmental harm to one of the world’s great nature reserves.

Greenpeace Chile activists protesting the proposed coal plant on Riesco Island

Yet for good government proponents there is another, major detail in the story: one of the largest shareholders behind the project is none other than President Sebastián Piñera. When the commission’s decision went public, the company’s stock price rose immediately, earning President Piñera US$ 5 million in a single day of trading.

The Riesco Island coal mining project is only the latest of the many conflicts of interest that define the Piñera presidency and the entire Chilean political class. The following presentation by Miguel Paz, associate director of El Mostrador, reveals the extreme consolidation of wealth and power in just a few Chilean families. In fact, the 15 wealthiest Chilean families account for nearly 20% of the entire country’s GDP, making Chile one of the most unequal countries in the world despite its skyscrapers and modern infrastructure.

Visit just about any Latin American country and you’ll soon hear about the five or ten families that have always been in charge. In Guatemala, journalist Juan Luis Font calls them “the ten families,” but admits that there are in fact many more. In Chile just four families control 47% of the assets on the Santiago Stock Exchange. Nicaraguan economist Francisco Mayorga claims that his country is virtually governed by just 12 families. In Mexico the 39 wealthiest families make up 13.5% of the country’s substantial GDP.

Transparency and good governance advocates in Latin America are less concerned by the consolidation of wealth as its frequently illicit influence on regulation and public policy. In response, a new generation of tech-savvy transparency activists are now building Internet platforms to reveal the often hidden connections between powerful individuals and the political institutions that should represent all citizens.

Forced Transparency: Corporate Image on Wikipedia

In hindsight, the first corporate transparency platform might have been none other than Wikipedia, which has proven a challenge to public relations firms that try to downplay exposed corruption by spending millions on marketing campaigns that paint corporations in the most flattering light possible.

Last year two researchers from Public Relations Society of America published the results of a four-year study which tracked the Wikipedia pages of 10 Fortune 500 companies (Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, General Motors, Ford, General Electric, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Citigroup, AIG, and IBM). The researchers found that over the four years the tone of the pages became more critical, and the content focused more aggressively on related corruption scandals. It is worth emphasizing that, for each of the ten major corporations, the associated Wikipedia page is always among the top three search results on Google.

The unstated advice of the Public Relations Society of America to Fortune 500 corporations was clear: keep an eye on your Wikipedia pages and employ contributors to ensure that the page reflects each corporation’s best interests.

Crowdsourcing Corporate Accountability

The initial excitement around Wikipedia and crowdsourcing inspired some corporate accountability organizations to experiment with wiki software and volunteer contributions. In 2007 the Center for Corporate Policy, the Corporate Research Project, and CorpWatch came together to launch Crocodyl.org. The aim of the website, in its own words, is to:

stimulate collaborative research among NGOs, journalists, activists, whistleblowers and academics from both the global South and North in order to develop publicly-available profiles of the world’s most powerful corporations. The result is an evolving compendium of critical research, posted to the public domain as an aid to anyone working to hold corporations increasingly accountable.

The website has dozens of detailed profiles on major corporations, categorized by issue and industry. There is also a research library of related investigative journalism. Searching through its voluminous content, we discover, for example, that the India-based Jindal Steel & Power Ltd won a bid to develop an iron ore reserve in Bolivia, but in its own country the mining corporation was accused of using so much water in its industrial operations that it left several small towns without drinking water.

Unfortunately, the website has only been updated a few dozen times in the past two years — and mostly by the same small handful of contributors. Several of the articles, such as the profile for Wells Fargo, are filled with spam links, which casts doubt on the vetting process and validity of the content.

Another endeavor into crowdsourced corporate accountability is SourceWatch, published by the Center for Media and Democracy. The wiki-based website — also inspired by Wikipedia — was created in January 2003 and has accumulated over 55,000 articles about “the people, companies, and entities attempting to shape public opinion.” Unlike the now defunct Crocodyl.org, a glance at SourceWatch’s “recent changes” page reveals the the site is still very much active today, though the majority of content still comes from a handful of contributors. Whereas Crocodyl.org aimed to reveal corporate malfeasance, SourceWatch is more focused on public relations, government lobbying, and the manipulation of public opinion.

A look at the SourceWatch page for Altria Group, formerly Philip Morris, offers a sample of the website’s tone and format. We learn that in 2010 Altria Group spent nearly $2 million on political contributions to federal candidates. The same year they spent $10.4 million on lobbying. A link to OpenSecrets reveals that Altria Group filed ten reports advocating against the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act and 17 reports against the health care reform bill. The article also suggests that in 2005 a Philip Morris employee deleted a statement on the Wikipedia page for Marlboro cigarettes (the deleted information was not detected and reinstated for two and a half years). Most of the information is focused on the United States, but we also learn how Philip Morris circumvented a total ban on cigarette advertising in Saudi Arabia.

From Crowdsourcing to Structured Data

As true in other sectors, the initial excitement around crowdsourcing among corporate accountability advocates soon subsided. A former contributor to Crocodyl.org wrote to me over email, “we didn’t have the thousands of independent contributors, Wikipedia-style, contributing their knowledge.” Instead they depended on a small team of part-time, paid researchers who did their best to come up with a standard format and keep up with the accelerating avalanche of information related to corporate accountability.

Soon the Silicon Valley buzz transitioned from crowdsourcing to open data. Corporate accountability organizations followed suit.

Crocodyle.org fell dormant, but CorpWatch soon partnered with the Sunlight Foundation to develop CrocTail, “an interface for browsing information about several hundred thousand U.S. publicly traded corporations and their foreign subsidiaries.” Rather than depending on volunteer contributors, CrocTail automatically takes information from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and re-structures it so that users can see a map of subsidies of all US publicly traded corporations. Again, if we use Altria Group as an example, we see that it has 44 subsidies — mostly in the United States, but also in Canada and Brazil.

Just as the United States Security and Exchange Commission makes some basic information about corporations available via its (very user unfriendly) EDGAR platform, in the United Kingdom corporate information is available to all citizens through a website called Companies House. Information about all UK-registered corporations is available to the public, but the website charges £1 per document, which is delivered in PDF format, a nightmare for researchers engaged in statistical analysis. At one point, writes James Ball for the Guardian’s Data Blog, the Companies House website even had operating hours, as if it were a brick and mortar office. That soon changed when Rob McKinnon, who single-handedly launched TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, scraped all of the data and made it available (24 hours a day) at “Companies Open House,” which later evolved into Open Corporates. Today Open Corporates, which dubs itself “the open database of the corporate world,” has information on more than 21 million companies in nearly 30 jurisdictions including India, Gibraltar, Malta, and Panama. A few months ago Open Corporate was joined by a new player in the field, Level Business, which has made 2.4m UK company accounts open to everyone, for free, according to the Guardian. Level Business is actively hiring and expanding. Their business model: “make the raw companies data available for free while selling services that make use of the information.”

“Corporations Are People, My Friend”

That now infamous remark by US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney holds some truth when put in the context of how we understand corporate influence on public policy and regulatory enforcement. The open data platforms we have observed so far — CrocTail, OpenCorporates, and Level Business — are all company-centric. They show profiles of corporations and their subsidies, but provide little information about the individuals behind the corporations and their relationships with politicians and political institutions.

Such databases of companies, individuals, and investors have long existed in the private sector — for example, CrunchBase and Blackboard — but it wasn’t until 2009 that the Public Accountability Initiative launched LittleSis, “a free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations.” In their own words:

We bring transparency to influential social networks by tracking the key relationships of politicians, business leaders, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated institutions. We help answer questions such as:

• Who do the wealthiest Americans donate their money to?
• Where did White House officials work before they were appointed?
• Which lobbyists are married to politicians, and who do they lobby for?

All of this information is public, but scattered. We bring it together in one place. Our data derives from government filings, news articles, and other reputable sources. Some data sets are updated automatically; the rest is filled in by our user community.

The site currently offers profiles of 61,308 people, 18,846 organizations, and 325,177 relationships between them. It takes a hybrid approach; scraping data from government websites, but also depending on crowdsourced contributions based on journalistic citations. According to the website, “making edits on LittleSis is more like adding friends on Facebook than modifying a Wikipedia page.” Users who make inaccurate or malicious edits can lose editing privileges. All edits are currently monitored by paid staff.

Another relationship-mapping platform is Influence Networks, a collaboration between OWNI, ObsWeb, Transparency International and Zeit Online. The open source platform allows journalists and volunteer contributors to add individuals and organizations to the database and then suggest relationships between them that are then vetted by a community of reviewers. The platform was recently featured on the popular Spanish-language blog ALT1040, which pointed to Spanish Culture Minister Ángeles González-Sinde as a clear example of conflict of interest between industry and government. A filmmaker who was formerly the president of the Spanish Academy of Arts and Cinematographic Sciences, González-Sinde has deep ties in the Spanish film industry, which she clearly represented in her proposal to restrict online file sharing. She is also an active member of the powerful and controversial Society for Authors and Editors, the country’s main collecting society.

However, when we examine González-Sinde’s relationships on Influence Networks, all that is revealed is that she is a member of the Society for Authors and Editors. Even her current role of Minister of Culture is omitted. Influence Networks claims to have mapped 1,158 relationships, but without a large influx of meaningful content and context, the site’s automated visualizations of networks leave us with little useful information.

Finally, it is worth noting Sunlight Foundation’s Influence Explorer, a collection of tools and data to help users better understand the relationships between people, organizations, politicians, and industries. For example, the Checking Influence tool gives you detailed information about the lobbying activities and campaign contributions of the companies listed on your bank statement. Two other notable platforms are Subsidy Tracker by Good Jobs First and Follow the Money by the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Technology and Corporate Accountability in Latin America

So far the use of technology in corporate accountability has been mostly limited to the United States and the European Union, where information about corporations has been made public by respective governments (albeit often in convoluted and poorly formatted ways).

Yet, as emphasized at the beginning of this post, Latin American countries suffer from much more egregious acts of illicit influence by corporations. Journalist Denise Dresser calls Mexico a classic example of Crony Capitalism, or what she dubs “capitalismo de cuates.” She lists countless examples, such as the country’s infamous lack of competition in television and telecommunications. Earlier this year it seemed that Mexican antitrust regulators were finally going to impose a record US$ 1 billion fine on Carlos Slim’s telecommunication monopoly, America Movil, but effective lobbying by Slim’s lawyers has called the judgement into question. As Mexican media shift their attention campaign season, it seems that Slim will likely once again out-maneuver government regulators.

Similarly, Yul Francisco Dorado Mazorra of Corporate Accountability International has described how the global tobacco industry has managed to influence legislation and treaty enforcement in Peru, Guatemala, and Ecuador.

The cases go on and on, but there are few organizations working to document them in any meaningful way. Two of them happen to be based in Chile where legislators are required to submit asset declarations before taking office. Chilean law requires that legislators refrain from voting on bills in which they (or close family members) have conflicts of interest or stand to make personal economic gains, but there is no clearly defined enforcement procedure.

As such, the Smart Citizen Foundation (Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente) is currently developing a web application called “Interests Tracker” that is designed to integrate with Vota Inteligente, their congressional monitoring platform. The Interests Tracker app will take information from the asset declarations of legislators; cross-reference it with information from the commerce registry, land property registry, and public tax returns; and build a database of relationships between politicians, companies, organizations, and industries. Whenever a related bill is discussed in Chile’s Congress the web app will notify Internet users and journalists of potential conflicts of interest that can then be further investigated.

Also based in Chile is Poderopedia, which was cited at the beginning of this piece. Earlier this year they received a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to build an open source platform similar to LittleSis, but focused on Chile and geared toward investigative collaborations with professional journalists. Co-founder Miguel Paz speaks of the project as an important piece of the context-based news movement. Too often, says Paz, investigative journalists duplicate the work of colleagues by repeatedly investigating the relationships between influential actors. Only a small amount of that research makes it into the final story, however, and rarely do journalists share information with others. Paz hopes that Poderopedia becomes a common, shared resource for journalists and others.

Finally, the Mexico-based Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research (PODER) is currently seeking a programmer to develop a “Who’s Who Wiki.” According to the project description, the “platform will consist of four components: a database containing information on corporate elites and their companies in Latin America, a network analysis and visualization tool illuminating the corporate social network, a wiki site to coalesce and empower diverse corporate stakeholders, including investors and civil society organizations, and a secure whistle blowing mechanism to inform on corporate malfeasance.”

Corporate Leaking: There’s no turning back

Micah Sifry has eloquently articulated why there is no turning back from the new normal of leaking confidential information. Most analysis and hyperbole around Wikileaks has focused on its role in making accessible leaked documents from governments. But, in fact, much – perhaps most – information in the Wikileaks archive relates to corporate malfeasance. Rumors of forthcoming Wikileaks exposés on major corporations have even inspired a number of columnists — such as Fast Company’s E.E. Boyd — to offer corporations free advice to avoid internal leaking.

The case of corporate malfeasance by Enron demonstrates the importance of leaking and whistleblowing by employees like Sherron Watkins who risk their jobs to reveal the truth. For example, former Wal-Mart executive James Lynn was fired when he revealed labor law violations in Costa Rica (Lynn later lost a lawsuit against Wal-Mart because, according to the court’s ruling, Wal-Mart’s actions did not violate Arkansas state law).

In another case of corporate corruption reported to Wikileaks, a former employee of EMC Corp was allegedly fired when she reported that EMC’s Mexico City office hired the spouse of a government official responsible for approving contracts at the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSS), and frequently invited both to dine.

Perhaps most notoriously, Wachovia employee Martin Woods was intimidated and harassed when he discovered — and later exposed — that his employer was helping launder billions of dollars for Mexican drug cartels.

It is worth emphasizing that in all three cases, corporate misconduct in Latin America was reported by employees based outside of the region. A culture of whistleblowing and internal corporate accountability still has yet to take hold in Latin America. There is a strong culture of corporate loyalty and yielding to authorities. Still, the increasing popularity of Wikileaks will likely attract a new generation of tech-savvy, idealistic leakers in the near future.

Small (Puzzle) Pieces Loosely Joined

A broad survey of the use of technology in corporate accountability reveals that most of the necessary pieces of the puzzle have been developed, or are in active development, but they do not effectively share data and link to each other’s contributions.

In 2002 David Weinberger wrote an (at the time) influential book called Small PIeces Loosely Joined, which offered a vision for the so-called Web 2.0 ecosystem. Web applications would offer small, highly focused services that share data with one another. Twitter, for example, didn’t need to offer its users photo or video uploads because dozens of other companies could do it better, and tap into Twitter’s user base which ultimately benefitted both companies.

Within the realm of corporate accountability, however, most online projects still try to be everything to everyone rather than focusing on particular niche analysis that adds specific value to the overall corporate transparency ecosystem. For example, why doesn’t LittleSis link to CrocTail’s subsidy information to automatically generate relationships between corporations and their subsidies? Why is PODER developing its own leaking platform when they can act as a local conduit and analysis for WikiLeaks, OpenLeaks, Cryptome, WSJ SafeHouse, and the many other leaking platforms already in operation? Why is Influence Networks trying to build its own database of people, institutions, and companies rather than offering its visualization tool to LittleSis, which has already documented 325,179 relationships (compared to Influence Networks’ humble 1,158 relationships)? Why don’t OpenCorporates profiles link to related information from LittleSis, SourceWatch, and Crocodyle.org? One can even imagine a collaboration with Sourcemap so that users can better understand the related corporate accountability issues behind individual products — such as an Ikea bed — and not just corporations. Increased sharing of information will increase the utility of all the websites surveyed above.

Beth Noveck, formerly the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer (2009-2011), has returned to New York Law School and the Do Tank, a “democracy design workshop.” One of the major projects of Do Tank is ORGPedia, which aims to provide unique identifiers for all legal entities in the United States in order to facilitate “the ‘mashing up’ of disparate data sets about the ownership, structure, performance and regulatory compliance of organizations.”

Noveck explains how it is nearly impossible to compare information for a single company across different government agencies: “Currently, one federal agency might refer to a company as ABC Inc. while another uses ABC Corp.” Her vision is to “help solve this problem by mandating open, universal identifiers here rather than exacerbate it by creating yet another IT system with yet another set of disparate naming conventions.”

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation — which funded the Encylopedia of Life, a collection of individual web pages for every known biological species — has provided Noveck with initial funding to attempt the same ambitious project for corporations and organizations, though they tend to evolve at a far faster pace than their biological counterparts. You can read more about future plans for ORGPedia at Noveck’s personal blog, and explore an experimental demo site that pulls in corporate data from various federal agencies

Even if Noveck and her colleagues do eventually achieve the world’s most complete encyclopedia of organizations and corporations, it won’t necessarily increase corporate transparency and accountability unless there is meaningful collaboration with investigative journalists and civil society organizations. In many cases, litigation is the only mechanism to resolve corporate malfeasance. ORGPedia could take a tactic from the collaboration between Congreso Visible, a parliamentary monitoring group, and the El Espectador newspaper in Colombia. Each time a congressional representative is mentioned in an article on the El Espectador website, a pop-up balloon shows related information from the Congreso Visible website.

In the end, Wikipedia will likely remain the world’s most read resource on corporate information, providing a challenge to both the corporations themselves and the activists that frequently aim to tar their reputations. Websites like LittleSis, ORGPedia, and OpenCorporates can form partnerships with Wikipedia to automate the cross-publication of relevant information — as well as its contextualization.

Now, more than ever before, corporations have lost their ability to control the narratives around their activities. In fact, so much information is currently available, the challenge now is to aggregate and make sense of it.

Though still in its early days, the data journalism movement is taking hold in Mexico with the rise of two distinct but overlapping communities, Hacks/Hackers and OpenData.mx.

The global Hacks/Hackers network began in late 2009 in the San Francisco Bay Area with the mission to “create a network of journalists (“hacks”) and technologists (“hackers”) who rethink the future of news and information.” There are now chapters around the world including Mexico City and Buenos Aires. The Mexico City chapter was founded by media consultant Gabriel Sama who agreed to answer some questions about its formation and objectives:

IC: What is the back-story of the formation of the Mexican chapter of Hacks/Hackers? Who was involved in its formation?

GS: I was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 2009-2010 and one of the first people I met outside of the fellowship at Stanford was Burt Herman, who had been an AP correspondent for years and now wanted to start his own company. He also was planning to launch a series of “meetups” between the developer and the journalism communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. I went to the first Hacks/Hackers meeting and have been to several since.

In December 2010, after I finished my fellowship year, I began setting up to launch the idea in Mexico. My goals were very simple: 1) My expectations were very low. I wanted it to grow organically and set up a low bar for each meeting. For example, my expectations for the first meetup were just for it to happen. I did not care how many people came. 2) It had to be cheap in order to not depend on financing or third-party money. 3) It had to become a grass roots movement, which meant I had to move out of the way because it was naïve to think I could keep doing this from the distance.

The first meetup was held in December 16, 2010. I sent out a tweet asking for help and Esteban Gutierrez, a developer and database expert, offered to find a venue. He got us hooked up with Telmex Hub in downtown Mexico City for free. Then I invited Esteban and seven other people to speak. I figured each of them would invite at least one more person and that the attendance would be at least 15 people.

I organized the second event at the Tec de Monterrey Mexico City campus with the help of Maria Elena Meneses, an academic. In that meeting I hooked up with Roman Tienda, Arturo Aguilar and Paola Ricaurte, who have helped in organizing the following meetups.

IC: The first Hacks/Hackers group is from the San Francisco Bay Area where you are based. But you’re a native of Mexico City and have been instrumental in the development of the Mexican Hacks/Hackers chapter. What are some of the differences between the two groups?

GS: First, the concept of meetups, which are extremely common in the Bay Area, seem to be too informal for Mexicans. They expect flyers, invites, RSVPs and, even, to pay for events like this. The idea that these are free and somewhat spontaneous hasn’t taken root in Mexico City. Secondly, the variety and level of HH meetups in Silicon Valley are extremely difficult to emulate in Mexico. For instance, Facebook introduced their Facebook+Media initiative in a bay Area Hacks/Hackers meetup. It is tough to compete with that.

Even when my expectations are low and I know it has to grow organically and locally, the growth and participation has been pretty slow, considering the level of some of the things we’ve introduced and the fact that all five meetups have been completely free.

IC: What is the importance of data literacy among Mexican journalists? What do you expect the Mexico Hack/Hackers group to achieve in the coming years?

GS: My main goal has always been to spark collaboration between these two very different communities [of journalists and programmers]. My hope is to see new information projects spinning off from connections made at HH Mexico.

As per data literacy, Mexican journalists are going through the same experience that American journalists went through a couple of years ago: realizing that their trade has changed, which means that their skills and knowledge has to change too. I am surprised that journalists are still shying away from learning about new programming languages or digital tools just because they feel they won’t ever use them. HH is not about teaching journalism to developers or coding to journalists: it is about getting the two communities together so they can understand each other a little better when it comes to launching digital information projects.

Google Developer Advocate Mano Marks offers a free workshop to Hacks/Hackers members on data journalism using Fusion Tables.

If Hacks/Hackers aims to bring programmers and journalists together in order to provide journalistic context to big data, then OpenData.mx is perhaps more focused on convening data enthusiasts from civil society, government, and the Internet at large. Its first two-day event was organized by Fundar, a transparency and human rights NGO (see our case study here), and Citivox, a for-profit startup that offers data collection and data analysis tools. Small groups took on particular datasets with the goal of making simple applications and visualizations that could lead to larger, more sustained projects. One group visualized spending data from the World Bank, which reveals that the majority of World Bank spending in Mexico is focused on public safety:

Another team used Tableau to analyze how individual hospitals spent money on HIV/AIDS medicine. Octavio Ruiz documented how he extracted information about the government licensing of software programs from PDF files that were obtained using freedom of information requests.

Programmers and social scientists working together at OpenDataMX.

Both Hacks/Hackers Mexico and OpenDataMX are consolidating a sense of community among their members before moving on to more ambitious projects, such as a sustainable open data portal or data-based investigative collaborations along the lines of Pro-Publica and the New York Times.

Still, there are signs that data-driven journalism is beginning to take off. The July cover of Nexos magazine featured a statistical analysis by José Merino into the distribution of homicides and the presence of the Mexican military. This month’s Nexos features another statistician-journalist, Diego Valle Jones, who looks closely at homicide statistics to challenge the notion that Tijuana has become safer in the past year. Social media, such as Twitter, are bringing stats-savvy political scientists like Javier Aparicio out of the ivory tower and into ongoing public policy debates.

The challenges listed by Gabriel Sama remain, but as data becomes increasingly accessible — and the tools more intuitive — we can expect Mexico’s open data movement to keep on moving along.

Once a week I receive a mildly depressing email from Mint.com. Last week was fairly typical: I spent $60 on beer and alcohol when I only budgeted for $10, I paid $8 in banking fees that I never understand, and I paid more money for internet access at hotels than for the connection at my actual house. Even though I like to think of myself as more charitable than consumerist, so far this year I have spent $500 on clothing and only $100 on micro-investments at Kiva.org. But despite all this bad news delivered to my inbox every week, Mint.com has also helped me save. A lot. First it demands that I create a budget to organize how I’d like to spend my money. Then it sends me alerts when I start spending beyond what I had budgeted for. Those alerts often convince me to not spend money when I don’t need to. There is even an entire section with tips about how to save money more effectively. For example, if I had stuck to my budgeted $10 per week for beer and had invested the other $50 in my brokerage account, then this week I would be able to make two more loans to small scale entrepreneurs on Kiva.org and treat myself and my girlfriend to a nice dinner.

Mint.com forces me to come to terms with my personal political economy by putting the relevant information right in front of my eyes. I can no longer play dumb to the fact that my purchases reflect my priorities (and at times my laziness).

Governments are badly in need of platforms like Mint.com to better understand their budgets and spending. Citizens also deserve to know how their tax payer money is used. Fortunately, in the past few years civic hackers and transparency activists have developed a number of websites and open source platforms to help us visualize and understand public spending.

Open Knowledge Foundation developed Where Does My Money Go? in 2007 to promote transparency and citizen engagement through the visualization of public spending in the United Kingdom. More recently the Open Knowledge Foundation launched OpenSpending, a global dashboard that aims to collect budget and public spending data from around the world by partnering with local transparency groups. Any organization or individual can upload budget data in a particular format and then use the platform to visualize and analyze the data. For example, we see that the London borough of Barnet spent £11 million on “commercial services,” £7 million on libraries, and £2.8 million on “Chief Executive’s Service.” So far, however, data is only available from the UK, Israel, and Italy.

Mexico & Brazil – Visualizing Budgets

Here in Mexico, the transparency organization Fundar — with the technical help of Visualización y Conocimiento — implemented some of the same OpenSpending visualizations for the Mexican 2010 and 2011 budgets on a site called “¿A Dónde Van Mis Impuestos?“, or “Where Do My Taxes Go?”.

My weekly beer consumption is a testament to the importance of distinguishing between budgets (projected spending) and accounting (actual spending), but even budget analysis gives us a better idea of how the government prioritizes its functions. For example, the Fundar website reveals that the 2011 Mexican budget has allocated roughly the same amount of spending on the economic development of the tourism industry as the energy industry. (Around US$ 400 million.)

We can also see which government entities are responsible for spending various percentages of the federal budget:

As you can see in the upper-lefthand box in the above graphic, a large chunk of the federal budget is destined to municipalities with earmarks for particular types of spending, such as education, health, and infrastructure. Fundar has created a visualization to show how much each state will receive in 2011 to fund different types of municipal spending. All the data are also available for download as a spreadsheet.

Finally, we’re able to compare the total amount of federal public spending from 2000 – 2010, with a slight breakdown of different types of spending. While it gives us a general idea of how Mexican public spending has evolved over the years, it doesn’t offer the level of granularity to compare, for example, how spending has changed in public security, farm subsidies, and subsidized college loans.

These visualizations are supplemented by a series of analytical blog posts that attempt to explain the numbers. A post published earlier this month describes how nearly US$ 50 million that was budgeted for basic medical attention was not spent. This is good news if it means that the medical needs of Mexicans are met beyond expectation, but the many citizens stuck waiting through the country’s notorious long lines at medical clinics will tell you otherwise.

As Fundar continues to add budget and spending data in coming years we can expect to see a timeline view that helps us understand how public spending evolves in particular sectors over time. For example, how much does the federal government spend on bottled water compared to water treatment plants? How do various states spend on text books compared to school computers? (Before Fundar is able to visualize state budgetary information, state governments first need to make the information accessible, as the law requires. A report this month by the UNDP found that only 21 of 32 Mexican states meet their obligations to publish budget data, including disbursements to municipalities.)

A similar website in Brazil, Para Onde Foi O Meu Dinheiro (“Where Did My Money Go?), also uses the OpenSpending visualizations developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation to give users a visual breakdown of the raw data available at the official Federal Government Transparency Portal.

Argentina – Follow the Money

Nearly all municipal governments in Argentina use the same accounting software, which includes a handy feature to automatically export the latest government purchases to the municipal website. In theory, citizens could see in real time how their local government spends taxpayer money and which government service providers receive the largest contracts. In practice, any concerned citizen would need to perform a separate search on the website for each government payment, then copy and paste the information into a spreadsheet, and finally analyze it with filters and graphs. The obstacle to greater transparency wasn’t a lack of information, but rather the burden of time. Fortunately a young programmer from Bahía Blanca in southern Argentina used free, open source tools to automate this process and share real-time visualizations of the city’s spending patterns at an independent website called Gasto Público Bahiense, or “Bahia Blanca’s Public Spending.” Citizens were able to see the relationships between the various city agencies and the companies that benefited from service contracts. For the first time residents were able to compare — in real time — the percentage of public spending that went to education, infrastructure, public transportation, etc.

Earlier this month, unfortunately, the website stopped working. The city government re-designed their own website and implemented a “captcha” restriction to enter the transparency section. Humans can still access the same information as before, but computer scripts are now prevented from collecting and analyzing the data, a major step backward for budget transparency in Argentina.

[Update: As of July 28, Gasto Público Bahiense is now back online with a new design.]

Argentine “civic hackers” were already aware that the platform depended on the whims of government agencies. They had contemplated rolling out versions of Gasto Público Bahiense for each of Argentina’s municipal governments, but with foresight they decided that the platform was too dependent on factors they could not control. Instead their plan is to work with the city governments to convince them of the virtues and advantages of open government and budget transparency.

Noam Hoffstater and Alon Padon, two transparency activists in Tel Aviv, would likely support their strategy. In 2009 they recruited volunteers to spend months converting the Tel Aviv city budget from its public PDF format to Excel so that they could analyze and visualize it online. The sad irony is that the city government creates the budget using Excel, but then exports it to PDF so that citizens have more difficulty analyzing spending patterns. The following year Hoffstater and Padon decided that it was a waste of time to develop custom software. Instead they sued the city, demanding that it publish the budget in a more accessible format. A day before the Tel Aviv District Court was scheduled to hear the case, the city announced that it would publish the 2011 budget in an open format. A few months later and the Israeli federal government also decided to publish its annual budget in an open format online, which as you’ll recall, is now available on the OpenSpending portal.

Both cases reveal the importance of pressuring governments to release budget information in accessible formats. At times this can be done through incentives (for example, offering a prize to the municipality with the best budget data on its website), but other times we must resort to lawsuits and critical media attention.

USA – From Analysis to Interaction

Compared to other parts of the world, until recently there were few platforms in the United States to visualize how the federal government spent taxpayer money despite the fact that the necessary data have been available since 1997 on the website of the Government Printing Office.

In December 2007 the US government launched the first version of USAspending.gov, which offers a number of visualizations to better understand federal spending and the procurement process. For example, in the above graph we see the total dollar amount of Department of Defense contracts from 2000 – 2010. (The data shows that the Defense Department spent more than four times as much money on contracts in 2010 as it did in 2000.)

However, according to Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, not all the data on USAspending.gov are accurate. This finding inspired the transparency group to launch Clearspending.org in September 2010. They produced this brief video to explain discrepancies on federal spending reporting:

The very same month two computer engineers from Minneapolis, Louis Garcia and Andrew Johnson, launched What We Pay For. Their motivation, they explain, is to remove the psychological barrier between citizens and their government in order to increase civic participation and ensure a more efficient democracy. The website allows users to enter their annual salary and tax filing status in order to better understand what percentage of their tax payments go to which government agencies. For example, if a single, self-employed American citizen makes US$ 45,000 per year, then in 2010 she paid $171.53 to fund federal highways, $123.61 to fund the National Institutes of Health, and $202.77 to finance the Military Retirement Fund. Overall she spent $365.48 on education and social services, and $3,368.25 on national defense and veteran benefits.

Louis Garcia and Andrew Johnson were happy with what they built, but they felt that much more could be done with the data they collected. In February — with the support of Google and Eyebeam — they launched the DataVizChallenge. The $5,000 grand prize isn’t much of an incentive for computer programmers that often make over $80,000 per year, yet more than 40 entries were submitted.

Where Did My Tax Dollars Go? took the grand prize, though personally I am fond of Every Day is Tax Day, a clock-based interface which estimates how many hours of each work day are spent on the federal government.

Increasingly sophisticated visualizations of the US budget continue to blossom. A group of young programmers and designers from Austin, Texas raised $20,000 from individual donors on the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter to develop and launch VisualBudget.org. The New York Times has developed a number of interactive visualizations including “Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget,” which challenges readers to make cuts in federal spending. A follow-up article summarized how over 7,000 users chose to fix the deficit.

In the United States the debate over federal spending has reached a level of urgency that threatens global markets. Meanwhile, a recent headline from the New York Times declares that “Economies in Latin America Race Ahead.” But much of Latin America’s economic growth depends on extractive industries and the export of natural resources, which can cause social conflicts and environmental harm. Economists and social scientists warn that if Latin American governments don’t re-invest profits from natural resource exports in education, innovation, and development, the region’s impressive economic growth will be short-lived.

Whether in the United States or Latin America, it is clear that governments need to start spending and investing more wisely.

The Future of Budget Monitoring

Computer programmers and graphic designers have only become interested in budget transparency over the past few years, but the International Budget Partnership has been collaborating with local NGOs to promote open budgets since 1997. How can the traditional NGO-based budget transparency movement most effectively collaborate with the new crop of online tools and platforms? This is a question I put to the nascent Latin American Network for Budget Transparency, a collective of public officials and NGOs from around the region that support greater budget transparency. After showing them the latest platforms and tools for analyzing budget data at their second annual regional meeting, some enthusiastic participants exclaimed that this is exactly what they had been looking for. Many of these organizations collect mountains of budget-related data, but the only way they communicate such information with the public is by publishing 100-page PDF reports each year that very few have the time to read. As a result, budget monitoring has mostly been an elite activity of NGOs and academics. Even journalists rarely dig deeply into public spending data, though doing so would add important context to their reporting.

The tech-savvy programmers and designers who develop online budget platforms also have a lot to learn from civil society. It’s one thing, for example, to show that the Mexican federal government spent more on government advertising than it had budgeted for, but it’s quite another to carefully explain the implications and work with legislators to craft policy that clarifies how government agencies can use taxpayer money to advertise. If civic hackers want their platforms to engender more efficient democracies, then it is key to work with civil society to craft policy that is informed by good data.

By sharing code and tactics NGOs and programmers can quickly replicate the best approaches and learn from experimentation and failure. For example, the Mexican Institute for Competitivity has developed a very handy online calculator which shows how fluctuations in oil prices affect revenue allocated for social spending. The approach of the tool is brilliant, and it would clearly benefit transparency activists in other oil producing countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, and Ecuador. But the presentation of the data is confusing and overwhelming. It could benefit from some of the basic design principles that enable Where Did My Tax Dollars Go? to clearly communicate seemingly complex information.

Automated visualizations help us better understand government budgets and public spending. However, as humans, we rely on stories that we can relate to. The UK-based Open Knowledge Foundation, which first launched Where Does My Money Go? in 2007, has discovered the importance of the narrative. Last month they were awarded a $250,000 grant by the Knight Foundation to develop Spending Stories, a collection of data-backed, journalistic narratives to explain the context and implications of public spending to the British public.

It’s the middle of the week already and I have yet to spend any money on beer. Just this morning I made a $25 loan to Marco Miguel, a carpenter in Bolivia who wants to invest in a machine that molds wood. I find it a little easier to make better choices with better information. The same should be true for governments.

From 1997 to 2003 the United States Defense Department purchased and then left unused approximately 270,000 commercial airline tickets at a total cost of $100 million. The US Government Accountability Office didn’t catch the wasted taxpayer money until 2004. Just last month the Sunlight Foundation discovered that the majority of US senators don’t e-file their taxes, at a cost of $250,000 in taxpayer money each year. They put up a simple website that clearly explains to readers how to call their senators to demand that they file their taxes electronically. Politicians, too, can make better decisions with better information and a pinch of civic participation.

You can learn more about budget transparency by following the Open Budgets Blog.

Editor’s note: This comprehensive profile on the state of e-government in Latin America was originally published on the personal blog of Juan Arellano. It was translated into English by Siân Sinnott and been edited by David Sasaki.

Discussing E-government in Latin America — that is, beyond poorly articulated plans for vague initiatives — could seem utopian given the technological underdevelopment of governments in these countries. However, taking an interest in this matter is hardly new in this part of the world. In 2005 a blog, precisely named, E-government, commented that [sp]:

… while developed countries so clearly find themselves amidst a dizzying spiral of the acquisition and application of knowledge as well as transforming government functions, developing countries, especially in Latin America, face enormous obstacles. These include the purchasing and implementation of information technology, as well as weak democracies headed by leaders with little or no desire to push for the process of modernization centered around the use of information technology, which has proven necessary in public management. Furthermore, civil participation is minimal.

This was a depressing, yet accurate diagnosis. However, it is now 201. Have things changed? First, let’s look more closely at what exactly E-government is. Wikipedia offers a brief definition: “ E-Government’ (or Digital Government) is defined as ‘The utilization of the Internet and the World Wide Web to deliver government information“. Although the vast majority of Latin American countries have made progress in the use of technology for information management, sharing government data to increase transparency and accountability is still not exactly a characteristic of the region.

In previous posts we have tried to investigate two pillars of e-government in Latin America: open government and open data. The OAS, in its monthly information newsletter on new developments in this field, published an interview with José Manuel Alonso, a Spanish IT analyst and consultant, in which he emphasized and reflected on, the importance of open government and open data:

E-government is characterized by the delivery of services and processes, and on its ease of use compared to offline alternatives. In other words, it technologizes existing processes. However, e-government, in general, reflects the government’s vision regarding what society requires without integrating society’s own vision. This has changed recently in light of the movement, now known as “Open Government,” of which “Open Data” is an essential pillar. It also requires a change in government processes and culture, since part of the power that is usually held by government is transferred to society.

Transparency, participation and collaboration can be seen as steps toward the path of “Open Government”. If society doesn’t have access to enough information, how can there be transparency? How can you have an opinion on something that you don’t understand or are only half familiar with?

Unlike platforms built with open data, which usually come from citizens or civil society, and tend to have little government support , e-government comes from governmental institutions, and although citizens can lobby for it, it’s not worth much if the government itself isn’t interested in implementing it and making it “open”. Therefore, I think the OAS’s attempt to spread these ideas among technocrats of Latin America is important. And with this in mind we can call upon a new and interesting example from the Uruguayan government Agency for E-government and Information Society (AGESIC), which recently organized the 1st International E-Government Event: “Towards an Integrated State”.

The two-day event had the objective of “proposing an agenda which would take on the different dimensions of e-government (technonology, simplifying processes, digital citizenship; and regulatory frameworks) to make the integration with public administration a central focus, directed toward citizens”. This sounds great but Damián Profeta, who attended the event raises some important questions about the balance between the transparency of public information and the privacy of personal data:

And what happens to an individual’s sensitive information? Should this be accessible to third parties? What is and isn’t sensitive information? How do we reconcile access to public information with protecting of personal data?

Of course these are valid questions, especially in the context of increasing cybercrime, networks, the use of online networks by terrorists, and increasing threats to privacy. In one interview on e-government, Dr. Pablo Andres Palazzi, a specialist in data protection, argues that:

both transparency (access to public information) and privacy are fundamental pillars of a democratic society and are in short supply in totalitarian states. In the laws regarding access to public information there are always exceptions for personal data and this is where a balance is found between both interests.

If we truly want to gauge the current state of e-government in Latin American, we must look at each country’s proposed and implemented legislation. In the meantime, we can review some of the various government initiatives have been launched throughout the region and link to the relevant resources:

Mexico: The Latin American leader of e-government has a strategy for digital government on its national
digital government website. Furthermore, the site e-México provides access to government services and encourages civil participation. You can see an extensive analysis of e-government in Mexico from 2008 here and CNN México also recently published a related article. The magazine Política Digital (Digital Politics) is a good source of news on the topic, especially in its eGob México section. There is also the site Improve Your Government which brings together articles on e-government in Mexico as well as the University of Guadalajara’s E-government Observatory.

Guatemala: Although the government webpage doesn’t seem to focus on the digital efforts of the Guatemalan government, there is a list of such efforts here. Some more recent updates have been added in this post. A 2008 critique on the maintenance of e-government can be found here.

Honduras: In Honduras’ case there is an official government site but it appears to be offline at the time of writing this post. Alianza Regional published an analysis of the country’s various online platforms in 2007.

El Salvador: This seems to be the country where e-government is least developed, at least according to the 2007 Alianza Regional report. The presidential website isn’t particularly helpful for citizens interested in accessing government services. However, we can see here how the situation is beginning to improve in 2010 with several new efforts. In 2009 Salvadoran blogger Lito Ibarra published a helpful post with more context on e-government developments in his country.

Nicaragua: You can find the Nicaraguan e-government website here. It includes a link to the 2007 Alianza Regional report, which shows that the state of e-government in Nicaragua has apparently taken a step backward. Also of interest are these notes by Juan Ortega from a 2008 e-government workshop.

Costa Rica: The government of the Republic of Costa Rica hosts the Easy Government website where users can find a Digital Government section, which presents its proposals and outreach. You can also look through a draft of the Master Plan for Digital Government in Costa Rica (PDF), compiled in  conjunction with the South Korean Government. Recently the implementation of e-government in 30 of the country’s municipalities has been announced. Here (PDF) is an evaluation of e-government in Costa Rica from 2009.

Panamá: Another country whose e-government website is apparently unavailable. However, the country’s 311 platform online service platform and “Internet for All” websites seem to be fulfilling the country’s e-government functions. Official attempts at e-government have been made since 2002 at least, as evidenced by this report. In 2007 this report was posted to evaluate some of the government websites. You can see an interview here with one of the civil servants who was responsible for modernizing the Panamanian state with the use of technology.

Venezuela: The site Government On-Line has access to government resources and information. You can see the history of e-government in Venzuela dating up to 2006 here and a contextual summary from 2009. This e-book about Venezuelan e-government includes information which dates to 2010. Another interesting initiative is the E-Government Observatory which compiles data on this topic from Venezuela and Latin America.

Colombia: One of the few countries with a Ministry of Information Technology, Colombia is home to several initiatives and almost all are accessible from the State Portal. In 2008 a study found that Colombia was third in an e-goverment ranking of Latin American countries and in 2010 it ranked first. An article about this with some suggestions for improvement can be found here. At the municipal level, Medellín Digital is a very good example and Colombia Digital is a initiative that compiles various local technology projects.

Ecuador: There are two portals here: Electronic Government which is quite a technical site and Citizen Services. In this report we find a brief analysis of the current state of e-government in Ecuador.

Perú: The Peruvian State Site acts as a promotional tool for the government while the National Office for E-Government is more informative. This is a short but relevant analysis on the state of e-government in Peru. It should be emphasized that recently implemented rules require greater accessibility to government information.

Bolivia: The Bolivian Government website looks a little basic and is directed primarily at linking to other government websites rather than facilitating services for citizens but this, at least, is something. Also of interest is this book (PDF) published by FLACSO which details experiences of e-government in Pasto, Colombia; Quito, Ecuador, and La Paz, Bolivia.

Chile: In recent years Chile has been one of the countries that has made the most progress on this matter. Its government site directs us to, among other options, their Guide to State Services which has detailed information on each service. An interesting report on the evolution of e-government in Chile can be found here (PDF). Recently, the OECD and others published a ranking of the progress made in e-government in Chilean municipalities. At the moment Chile is second in rankings in terms of regional progress.

Argentina: Similar to Chile, the Argentine government site directs us to tabs and different options for services and advice. An analysis of e-government in one Argentinian municipality can be found here. There are several opinions from a recent forum here and there are reports on the status of Argentinian e-government in this document (PDF) as well as here. In previous years Argentina has been first in e-government at the Latin American level.

Paraguay: The Paraguayan Government Site leads us to its Paraguay Services, directed at citizens and businesses. Paraguay is another country which benefits from an agreement with South Korea on this matter. Here is an analysis of the situation of Paraguayan e-government which unfortunately does not indicate the date of the analysis.

Uruguay: The Uruguayan government’s page is rather minimalist and directs the user to the service they want to carry out. An exemplary initiative is that of the Administrative Division of Montevideo, that offers open data to citizens. The AGESIC or “Agency for the Development of Electronic Management and Society of Information and Knowledge”, is the body responsible for progress on the matter. Here is a report from 2009 when Uruguay begun to commit with vigor to the process of e-government. This document about the Uruguayan and Colombia cases from 2008 is also interesting.

While we can appreciate the different approaches and progress toward e-government in each country, there is generally greater interest in making more information and services available online. It can also be found in civil society and among the community of Latin American technocrats, leading governments down the road toward openness, simplification and the consolidation of services.

As I was finishing this post, I came across Ciudadanía/2.0 (Citizenship/2.0), a new initiative which is linked with many of the issues in this post. A blatant omission in this little compilation is that of Brazil and other non-Spanish speaking countries of Latin America. I hope you can excuse this. If you have anything to add or any corrections to make I would be grateful if you could post them in the comments section.

The first picture of this post was taken from the AESIC webpage and the second from Maraustralis.

Civil society organizations are becoming increasingly adept at using social media to communicate to a wider public. While they continue to send traditional press releases to newspaper reporters and broadcast media, they are also increasingly discovering that social media platforms like Twitter allow for greater possibilities of two-way communication, debate, and networking among partners.

Información Cívica is an initiative of the Latin America and Information programs of Open Society Foundations. Through the use of Storify, an online tool that creates embeddable curations of digital media from various sources, we will begin publishing weekly summaries of what Open Society Foundation partners in various countries around Latin America are sharing via their websites, blogs, and social media accounts. This week we begin in Mexico. Most of the content, of course, is in Spanish, but further below I will provide an overview in English.

Let’s start from the beginning. Por la Educación (For Education) is a coalition of concerned citizens and NGOs that advocates for a more inclusive and higher quality education system in Mexico. The above Twitter message links to an opinion piece by Arturo Alfaro Galán which argues that the Mexican teachers’ union has too much control in a national program that evaluates and recognizes teacher performance.

On the blog of Locallis, a Querétaro-based organization that focuses on municipal transparency and development, they present the findings of a two-day evaluation on the amount of information available on municipal websites in the state of Querétaro, just north of Mexico City. They found that none of the 18 municipalities are in 100% accordance with Querétaro’s access to information law, but of the 18 reviewed, Ezequiel Montes and Jalpan received the highest ranking at 55.4% accordance, while Pedro Escobedo — with a population of 10,000 and no municipal website — only achieved 1.8% accordance with the law. A table with the full list of the rankings is available, but unfortunately Locallis does not describe or link to their methodology.

Sonora Ciudadana, a transparency and civic participation organization in the northern state of Sonora, posted a photo to its Twitter account of an employee handing out brochures to recruit citizens to form a committee to hold the Mexican national health institute (IMSS) accountable. You can read more about Sonora Ciudadana’s access to healthcare initiative at the Open Society Foundations’ website.

CIMTRA, another organization focused on municipal-level transparency, linked to a piece appearing in El Universal which provides a useful overview of the current state of Mexico’s Federal Transparency and Access to Information Law ten years after the catalytic Grupo Oaxaca Declaration. According to the article, Juan Francisco Escobedo, one of the key members of the Grupo Oaxaca, challenged the Federal Institute for Access to Information (IFAI) to once again use access to information to bring about greater political accountability. Jacqueline Peschard, president of IFAI, accepted the challenge.

The Institute for Security and Democracy recently launched a new blog, meDios by Marco Lara, which examines the coverage and treatment of violence by Mexican media. In his most recent post he draws readers in with a headline that lists some of the journalistic and political celebrities he met at the 2011 Central American Journalism Forum that was held in San Salvador from May 16 – 21. Lara’s review of the annual journalism conference is glowing, beginning first with his admiration of the Salvadorean online investigative journalism outlet, El Faro. The first evening of the conference, Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui interviewed Salvadorean president, Mauricio Funes, in front of a live audience. Much of their discussion, apparently, focused of the investigative piece “The Texis Cartel,” which was published the same day by El Faro and describes the various interests involved in protecting a cocaine transit route that stretches across the north of the country from Honduras to Guatemala. Abbreviated English versions of the investigative piece are available at Insight Crime and Tim’s El Salvador Blog. Lara goes on to describe a teleconference call with Julian Assange who has given El Faro exclusive access to Wikileaks content about El Salvador and describes a few of the workshops and debates that made up the rest of the forum’s agenda. He concludes by pointing readers to two new journalistic initiatives in Mexico, Nuestra Transparencia and Reporte Media.

Another of INSYDE’s many initiatives is the Presumption of Innocence in Mexico Project, which gained a big boost after the theater release of Presumed Guilty, Mexico’s most-watched documentary. In 2009 the Open Society Justice Initiative published an 80-page book by Guillermo Zepeda titled “How much does prison without conviction cost?,” which found that 42% of Mexico’s prison population have never been convicted of a crime. Though the book is available online as a free-to-download PDF, it is doubtful that many readers will dedicate so much time to such a specialized topic. Fortunately, the project has learned to re-package the content of the book, posting excerpts online and linking to the sources for cited statistics. Those blog posts are then further re-packaged as easy-to-digest Tweets which are distributed by the project’s followers. For example, this tidbit: “The cost of preventive prison in Mexico could cover the school breakfast costs of 21,000 students.”

Fundar is Mexico’s most well known transparency organization. A couple of months ago they launched a new initiative, Publicidad Oficial, which questions the use of the Mexican government’s communication budget. Diego de la Mora, the lead researcher on the project, has begun blogging at Animal Politico with weekly updates. This past week he commented on a story appearing in Proceso Magazine by prolific journalist Jenaro Villamil about the Public Security Secretary’s (SSP) investment of nearly USD $13 million for Televisa to produce a new television series called Equipo, which shows the Federal Police in a positive light under the tag line “they know that good conquers evil.” De la Mora refers to the TV series as blatant war propaganda, meant to convince a nation to support an unpopular use of military force, and points readers to the theories of Jean Marie Domenach who is noted for his writings about political propaganda.

We’ll leave it there for now, but readers are encouraged to click on more of the above links to learn more about the “No Means No” campaign; the forced internal migration of thousands of residents of Tierra Caliente, Michoacan as they flee violence; why Article 19 criticizes the G8′s Declaration on Internet; and why Mexicans are mostly ignoring the brutal crimes against Central American migrants.

For the past four months Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente — in collaboration with Información Cívica and Silvana Fumega, a consultant for the World Bank Institute — has been organizing a series of video-conferences with transparency NGOs and “civic hackers” from Mexico, Peru, Colombia, Chile and Argentina. On May 5 and 6 a selection of those participants traveled to Santiago, Chile to participate in a two-day workshop focused on sharing information about new technologies, innovative transparency initiatives, and concrete ideas for future projects and collaborations. Among the organizations represented at the meeting:

Mexico:

• Fundar
• Impacto Legislativo
• Citivox

Perú:

• Reflexión Democrática
• Asociación Civil de Transparencia
• Proetica
• Suma Ciudadana
• Todos Somo Dateros
• Escuelab

Colombia:

• Congreso Visible
• Monoku

Argentina:

• Asociación por los Derechos Civiles
• Centro de Implementación de Políticas Públicas para la Equidad y el Crecimiento
• Asociacion Civil para la Igualdad y la Justicia
• Directio Legislativo
• Poder Ciudadano
• Garage Lab

Chile:

• Chile Transparente
• Biblioteca del Congreso
• Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente

Beyond Legislative Monitoring

The majority of the participating organizations are involved in legislative monitoring in some form or another. Many are members of the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency. But the goal of the meeting was not to limit ourselves solely to discussions of the use of technology in legislative monitoring (which we have discussed here previously), but to zoom out and look more generally at the application of technology in various types of transparency projects; including budget monitoring, education, lobbying, freedom of information requests, and more.

The first day we began with a small activity to generate some debate about attitudes toward technology in the transparency field. Participants chose their position along a line of tape stretching across the room depending on how much they agreed or disagreed with the following three statements:

• Providing access to government data is the most important step to strengthen democracy in Latin America.
• Any organization that works with open data, or that monitors legislative activity, should not take any political positions about proposed legislation, representatives, or political parties.
• It is necessary to work with mainstream, traditional media in order to increase civic participation in political processes.

Responses to the three statements represented a wide range of differing opinions and priorities among the participants, but we arrived at some general points of agreement. For example, it is better for an organization to be transparent about their political bias than to try to hide it with the aim of appearing objective. Also, taking advantage of new media often attracts the attention of broadcast journalists; while collaborating with traditional media can bring a wider audience to an organization’s website where they can engage in dialog that is not restricted to the one-to-many broadcast model.

Scrape, Clean, Crowdsource, and Communicate

A group of programmers, web developers, and designers then presented a generalizable workflow of four important steps in the process of using government information for transparency, accountability, and advocacy.

Scrapy allows users to take data from government websites in a format that can be analyzed and re-purposed.

Scrape

First, Gonzalo Iglesias of Garage Lab provided an introduction to scraping tools such as ScraperWiki and Scrapy that allow organizations to take data from government websites so that they can be properly structured and analyzed. For example, in Argentina, Gasto Público Bahiense uses Scrapy to automatically pull in data from the Bahía Blanca municipal website and then uses Google Chart Tools to present that same data in ways that give it new meaning for citizens who want to know how their government spends their tax money and which service providers benefit most from government contracts.

Clean

Pedro Daire, chief of technology at Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, then spoke about the importance of well organized databases in order to communicate information effectively and sustainably as more data is added over time. He presented Google Refine as a free, powerful tool to help clean up messy datasets and provided a few examples of how well organized data leads to better visualizations and websites that scale over time with fewer issues.

Crowdsource

In addition to analyzing and visualizing government information, Jorge Soto of Citivox emphasized the importance of listening to citizens through the use of crowdsourcing. For example, an NGO in Mexico could use a freedom of information request to seek information about the number of metro users who enter and exit each station around the city at various times of the day. With that data they could build a timeline-based map that shows the flow of metro users throughout the city. But the organization could also use tools like Twitter and Crowdmap to solicit the opinions of residents about where there is a lack of public transit options. Both sources of information are valuable when planning an advocacy campaign to improve public transit.

Communicate

Finally, information designers Rodrigo Ramírez and Montserrat Lobos presented a number of examples of how to best visually communicate large amounts of information. They stressed that while extensive graphs filled with hundreds of data points might look impressive, they rarely communicate the meaning or significance behind the information. Infographics – such as those regularly produced by the New York Times and Good Magazine – can help readers draw greater context from the types of statistics that are often rattled of in news reports and press releases, but some information is best communicated with text.

Tools and Projects

Participants then rotated to attend a selection of smaller workshops and presentations about specific tools — and then concrete projects. The tools workshops included:

• How to take advantage of social networks
• Mapping and georeferencing information
• ManyEyes and statistical analysis/visualization
• How to incorporate social networks into the design of websites
• Participation with mobile phones
• Introduction to Google Analytics
• Mailing lists

The projects that were presented:

• Dinero y Política – the analysis of political donations in Argentina using ManyEyes
• Acceso Inteligente – a portal to request and view freedom of information requests in Chile
• Curul 501 – a forthcoming legislative monitoring platform by Citivox and Fundar
• Justicia y Transparencia – a database of judicial sentences related to freedom of information requests in Peru

Acceso Inteligente is Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente’s newest project. It aims to make FOI requests more accessible and user friendly.

Innovating and Collaborating on New Projects

After the review of tactics, tools, and projects related to transparency and accountability, it was time for the executive directors of the NGOs and the civic hackers to break up into small groups and discuss projects that they would ideally like to carry out together with sufficient time and resources. They worked in teams for roughly an hour and then presented their ideas in front of the entire group. A small selection:

• Proetica and Citivox presented a platform to compare the promises that candidates make during campaign season with their actual accomplishments as elected officials.
• ACIJ and Reflexión Democrática explored ideas to make more transparent the public education sector in Argentina and Peru. Websites that served as inspirations include Compara Tu Escuela in Mexico, Check My School from the Philippines, and Elige Colegio in Chile.
• In Mexico, Impacto Legislativo, Fundar, and Citivox are planning a collaboration to build a directory of current legislators and legislative candidates for this year’s federal election. The platform will include filters and graphics to provide more information about party affiliation, legislative topics, voting records, gender, age, birthplace, etc.
• Kiko Mayorga from Escuelab in Perú and María Luisa Sotomayor of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente put together a visually stunning presentation in a short amount of time to propose a strong collaboration between the two groups in order to foment the culture of “technology and transparency” in Peru. Already Escuelab has organized a meeting of transparency groups to discuss ideas for collaboration and there is much enthusiasm about implementing a version of Acceso Inteligente for Peru, a country which has a freedom of information law, but very little in terms of mechanisms for oversight and enforcement.

Open Data, Linked Data, and the Semantic Web

At this point everyone was drained after two intensive days of learning and participation. But we had one last special guest, Carlos de la Fuente of CTIC, a leader in the open data movement in Spain and Latin America. Carlos gave an excellent presentation about the current trends in open data, linked data, and the wider semantic web. According to CTIC’s directory of public dataset catalogs, so far Chile and Uruguay are the only countries in Latin America with official public datasets of government information, but as the global open government movement expands we can expect to see much more government data portals in coming years.

Participants left both exhausted and full of new ideas. The purpose of the event wasn’t necessarily to develop specific projects to begin working on immediately, but rather to present the executive directors of some of the region’s most influential transparency groups with a greater understanding and perspective of some of the current technological possibilities so that when the right opportunity presents itself, they have a more versatile toolbox to develop the most impactful projects possible.

In our last post, “A Critique of Legislative Monitoring Websites,” we looked at the #InternetNecesario campaign in Mexico as a model to increase civic participation in legislative debates. A review of the campaign reveals the importance of using social networks like Twitter and YouTube to attract broad participation from all sectors of society, but it also reveals the importance of key “bridge figures” who can build consensus and represent the campaign’s arguments directly with legislators.

I then received an email from María Baron of Fundación Directorio Legislativo in Argentina in response to the post. She expressed some skepticism about the role of technology and social networks in building significant consensus around proposed legislation, especially in particular sectors such as agriculture. In fact, for the past couple years Fundación Directorio Legislativo and Fundación Cambio Democrático have been collaborating on a project that aims to increase the participation of civil society in legislation related to agriculture and agro-industry. The initiative came about in response to the 2008 protest by the country’s agricultural sector, which left supermarkets without meat and dairy products. It was clear that building consensus around such a contentious issue would require years of constructive conversation among farmers, civil society organizations, citizens, and legislators. Three years later and Fundación Directorio Legislativo and Fundación Cambio Democrático continue in their attempt to build consensus and facilitate better communication among all groups.

Above is a 10-minute, edited version of our hour-long conversation. We arrived to the conclusion that technology can play a far greater role than it does today to bring more voices – more participation – to Congress. But a closer look at the Agroindustrial Consensus project reveals that internet technologies will always have their limits. Sometimes we all need to sit in the same room.