Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente
Established December 2009
Location Santiago, Chile
Address 895 Holanda
Providencia, Santiago, Chile
Website ciudadanointeligente.org

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente (Smart Citizen Foundation)is a non-profit organization based in Santiago, Chile.The organization creates web technologies as a key tool for gathering, organizing, illustrating and sharing information through the web, working to promote informed citizen actions and government accountability. Under the umbrella of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, there are several ongoing projects. The web platform, Vota Inteligente (Vote Smartly), hosts different applications and tools that give access to information for the general public, ultimately serving to promote government transparency and citizen participation in Chile. The organization is non-partisan and does not take sides on political issues, apart from those dealing with furthering government transparency, accountability, and promoting citizen participation.

In addition to the main project, Vota Inteligente , the following projects are ongoing within Ciudadano Inteligente: Acceso Inteligente (Smart Access) is an online freedom of information management system for Chilean citizens, Promesas 21 de Mayo (Government Promises of May 21) is a graphic analysis and follow-up of presidential electoral promises, Señal Alo (Hi Sign) an online visualization of telecommunication antennas with a strategic design. Donar (Donate) is a tool modeled after Global Giving, that promotes donations to civil society organizations in Chile, making the donation process transparent and easily accessible for both Chileans and the NGOs on the site. The site, ¿Hay Acuerdo? (Is there Agreement?) breaks down the current ongoing debate between Chilean students and the Piñera administration. Globo Ciudadano (Citizen’s Balloon) is a project that live streams protests in Chile on its website, using balloon mapping. (See explanation below).

History

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente was registered as a non-governmental organization in Chile on December 22, 2009. Vota Inteligente was publicly launched on October 22 of that same year in preparation for the Chilean Presidential elections. The first drafts of the organization’s mission focused on the promotion of transparency and social accountability. Web technology later also became an essential element to the organization, mainly due to the influence of other organizations that had already successfully been using the internet to pursue transparency and accountability. The final draft of the project was completed during the first months of 2009.

Months after launching this platform, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente began receiving national and international recognition for its achievements, including invitations to present at the Austin Forum for Journalism in the Americas(see below for link), The Global Voices Online Annual Summit, and Personal Democracy Forum workshops.

Mission

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente works to close the information gap between citizens and their government through the use of various web technologies and development of web applications. The use of the internet and web applications allows for quick and immediate access to information about the actions of the government, and encourages informed and engaged citizen participation. The organization’s purpose is to fortify collective action among citizens, aiming to protect public interests, which are often overshadowed by a small minority of voices. The organization creates web technologies as a key tool for gathering, organizing, illustrating and sharing information through the social web, striving to promote informed citizen actions and accountability.

Funding and Finance

The Open Society Institute finances 90% of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente’s annual operations. The other 10% of finances come from grants such as those from the World Bank Institute, the Prix Ars Electronica Award, and recently, the Omidyar Network.

Founding Directors and Staff

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente was started on December 28, 2009, by its Founding Directors; Felipe Heusser, Erich Schnake, Rodrigo Saffirio, Rodrigo Mobarec, Sebastian Echeverria, Alfonso Tapia, Juan Covarrubias, Pablo Carvacho, Boris De Los Rios, Valentina Insulza, and Milenko Bertrand- Galindo.

Executive Team 2011

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente’s team consists of experts in political science, communications, web design, computer technology, law, and sociology.

Projects

Vota Inteligente

Vota Inteligente is the first initiative of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente. Through Vota Inteligente, Chilean citizens are able to access all up to date information on Congressional actions and activities in one place. This project is dedicated to monitoring the legislative actions of Parliamentarians and principal actors in the political arena and in the National Congress of Chile(www.congreso.cl). Vota Inteligente contains information on how Congress works, including how a bill is passed, information on its structure and the current party composition of Parliamentarians. This section makes it easy to see the parliamentarians’ demographics by age, political party, region, and re-elected versus new officials. Users are also able to compare this information between the 2006-2010 Congress with the 2010-2014 Congress.

Vota Inteligente’s main work is to track bills being debated within Congress – more specifically in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate – providing updated information not only regarding the content of the bill itself but also presenting the bill’s development and status, dimensions of debate, support and opposition of Parliamentary members, potential conflicts of interest and investments on issues, in both plenary and committee levels of Congress. .

In the Profiles, section of the site, users can find information of each individual Congress member, as well as the President. This information includes their résumé, Twitter and Facebook accounts, RSS feeds, committee membership, and voting history. It is designed to allow citizens to follow all actions of the Congress in order to make informed decisions and hold their representatives responsible for their actions.

Vota Inteligente also serves as a blogging space where citizens can publish information, opinions, or columns related to the issues of political accountability and transparency.

Acceso Inteligente

Acceso Inteligente (Smart Access), is the first web platform that centralizes the system of information requests to the Chilean government. It was launched in April 2011, at the International Seminar called "Transparency as the Modernization of the State," organized in commemoration of the second anniversary of the passage of the Law of Transparency in Chile. Acceso Inteligente facilitates and streamlines the process of petitioning the government for information, serves as a database of previous responses and requests, while promoting efficiency in this process, and allowing for immediate and permanent access to public government information.

This platform promotes the demand of requests of public information from Chilean citizens, and also makes the requested petitions visible to all persons with internet access. The Law of Transparency in Chile (CITE) establishes the parameters of information access from the government of Chile. It establishes requirements for the government to provide citizens with public information as well as the limitations to the types of information that citizens are allowed to access, establishing that certain information, such as some topics of national security, are deemed reserved only for government officials under certain circumstances.

In Chile, although much information is technically public, it is not always available on a website for immediate access. In order to request information a person has to visit the specific web page of the specific ministry that he or she wants information from. The form to solicit information is not in a standardized place for every governmental ministry and not necessarily accessible in one click. Once the user locates the place to solicit information and the request is made, the government is required to respond to that person in no later than 20 days. When that person receives a reply from the government, that response is sent to that particular individual, which means that if other citizens want that information, they also have to ask the government for it themselves. This means that the same information requests to the government may be made multiple times, thus duplicating the work of the government and may complicate the process for the ordinary citizen.

Acceso Inteligente is designed to make the process of requesting public information easier for the everyday Chilean citizen as well as the government, and make all information requests and responses public. Through Acceso Inteligente, if a person wants to request information from a Ministry in the Chilean government, they can first browse the Acceso Inteligente database and look at previous requests and responses. If they find that the information has not been previously requested, they can fill out a user-friendly form through the website. Once an individual submits an information request (protected by FOIA regulation), Acceso Inteligente automatically connects to the public agency to which the information requests are addressed. Acceso Inteligente provides documentation of the actual request, as well as information on when the request was made and when and how the government responded. The website reduces the amount of work for Ministries, since government responses are publicly available in the database.

Promesas 21 de Mayo

Every year on May 21, the Chilean President addresses the nation to review what they have accomplished in the last year and to outline his or her priorities for the coming year. A few days before the Presidential address of May 21, 2011, Ciudadano Inteligente launched Promesas 21 de Mayo, that showed the results of a study done by the organization that analyzed and compared promises made in the May 2010 address to what the government achieved in one year, in each of the subject areas that were in the speech. The information was displayed in a user- friendly and easy to understand way.

This work will be repeated for the 2012 Presidential address, measuring the degree of fulfillment of the promises of programs and laws mentioned in the 2011 Presidential address.

Donar

Donar is a web platform that connects non-profit organizations(wiki link to nonprofit organisations) and people interested in donating money to organizations in Chile. This will incentivize, facilitate, and promote the act of informed donating in Chile. Donar’s goal is to help people make informed charitable donations, by providing the public with the access to information about the activities and finances of Chilean non-profit organizations. Many Chilean NGOs are unable to make these elements of their organization transparent to the public because of a lack of resources or technical knowledge.

Donar’s work is the promotion of the development of less established organizations by featuring a diverse and wide array of causes. The platform does not discriminate against any organization and works to allow for the opportunity to obtain resources equal for all Chilean non-profit organizations that are trying to raise funds. The objective of Donar is to give all associated NGOs equal opportunities to promote their projects and receive donations. This can serve to benefit both the individual donor as well as the organization in need. The project will connect donors with an organization from within the platform, facilitating the ability to donate their time, services, or resources.

Globo Ciudadano

The project, Globo Ciudadano is a live, online transmission of protests in Santiago. Using a camera connected to the internet, which is attached to balloons in the air, the camera captures and transmits the protest live, from above. This technique is called "balloon mapping". The project’s goal is to show social movements from the public’s perspective rather than the media’s.This idea originated through collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s (MIT) Public Laboratory, which supported adapting the balloon mapping idea to Ciudadano Inteligente’s idea of covering protests. .

Globo Ciudadano is designed to give a moment to moment, complete view of the action of the protest. In two of the July student protests, Ciudadano Inteligente showed them through the website and had more than 10,000 people follow the livestream, for each individual protest. Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente also shows the protests through livestreaming on the ground when there are certain obstacles, such as the weather. .

¿HayAcuerdo?

Hay Acuerdo is a website launched in September 2011, following the development of the negotiations between the students protesting for education reform (wiki link to education reform?)and the government. Starting in May 2011 university students all over Chile, along with thousands of supporters began protesting in the streets, demanding education reform. Hay Acuerdo, without taking a political stance, explains the demands of the students and the government, and at which points they have arrived upon an agreement.

Desarrollando América Latina

Developing Latin America (Desarrollando América Latina) will be the single largest collaboration effort in the region. It is due to take place in December 2011 for a total of 36 hours. Web designers or, "civic hackers" from 6 Latin American countries (Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, and Mexico) will simultaneously come together in their respective countries to find digital solutions to distinct social problems. These problems will be by civil society organizations and governmental actors, opening their databases to the participants of the event for the creation of web applications. Once the 36 working hours are over, the best applications will be awarded prizes. Since the applications are developed using Open Source formats, all the applications created during the event will be made available for further improvements, modifications, and implementation, aimed at ultimately helping overcome the assigned problems of the countries and citizens of Latin America.

Señal Alo

Señal Alo is a web application that shows the telephone signals of the major Chilean phone companies on an interactive map online.

Partnerships and Collaboration

Open Government Partnership

Executive Director of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, Felipe Heusser, is a participant in the Open Government Partnership through the State Department of the United States. At the first high-level meeting, Felipe Heusser spoke in the section on Civic Participation, about civic engagement through technology.

Omidyar Network

A partnership between Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente and the Omidyar Network was formed, in which the Omidyar network will grant $500,000 to the organization over a period of three years.

LALT Network

Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency (Red Latinoamericana para la transparencia legislativa) is a network of Latin American organizations working for government and legislative transparency and access to information. Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente is one of the three civil society organizations that are involved in Chile.

Global Voices

In 2010 Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente worked with Global Voices (wiki link), an international network of bloggers interested in media from "voices that aren’t normally heard," citizen media in assisting in the organizing the Global Voices Annual Summit at the Biblioteca Nacional de Santiago, in Santiago, Chile. (Citation, global voices) The theme was "Next generation citizen media, public access, and citizen participation." The conference brought together various organizations to discuss the use of the development of technology and media in areas outside of North America and Europe.

Personal Democracy Forum

Personal Democracy Forum conferences have been held in the United States and Europe, since 2004. The purpose of these conferences is to discuss how the internet is transforming the political and social arena.

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente organized the first Personal Democracy Forum in Latin America, on November 18 and 19, 2010. Felipe Heusser, the chief executive of Fundacion Ciudadano Inteligente, is also the legal representative for the Personal Democracy Forum. Over 40 organizations presented work on technology and electoral campaigns, citizen engagement and participation, and public services.

Taller de Transparencia Dígital (Workshop on Digital Transparency)

In 2011 the organization was selected by the World Bank Institute to organize a workshop that was set up to bridge both the transparency advocate community of Latin America, with the rising "Civic-Hacker" groups of the region. The workshop aimed to teach traditional NGOs focused on transparency how to improve their work through web-technology. It also connected web innovators with real policy problems and organizations that needed help understanding how to utilize technology for their purposes.

Ciudadano Inteligente has partnered with Chilean, Latin American, and International organizations for various other projects:

Chilean NGOs: Transparency International (Chile), Proacceso (Chile), Ciudad Viva (Chile), Probono (Chile),Casa de la Paz (Chile), Participa (Chile), Poderopedia (Chile), Un Techo para Chile (Chile). Foreign NGOs: Sunlight Foundation (USA), Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), The Public Laboratory (USA), My Society (UK), Información Cívica (Mex), Fundar (Mex), Citivox (Mex), Congreso Visible (Colombia), Escuelab (Peru), Transparencia (Peru), Poder Ciudadano (Argentina), Directorio Legislativo (Argentina), Wingu (Argentina), ADC (Argentina), Cubox (Uruguay), W3C- (Brazil), Accessinfo (Spain), Personal Democracy Forum (US). International Organizations: Un Techo para mi País (ORG), Global Voices (ORG), Ashoka (ORG), UNICEF (ORG), World Bank (ORG), Open Government Partnership (Several Countries), FOIANET (Several Countries), Open Society Foundation (OSF).

Media Appearances and Coverage

Media in Chile: TVN, Canal 13, CNN, El mostrador.cl, Eldinamo.cl, The Clinic.cl, La Tercera, Radio Zero, Radio Uchile, Radio Duna, Radio Paula, Subela Radio.

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente was featured for its work and projects in an article in a Chilean magazine,¿Qué Pasa?, called "La Armada Dígital" (Digital Army) on August 28, 2011.

Awards and Prizes

In September 2011, Ciudadano Inteligente received a prestigious international award, given by Prix Ars Electronica´s International Competition for the Arts , based out of Linza, Austria; the Golden Nica in the category of "digital communities". In the past this award has been awarded to Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and Pixar. It was the first time that a Chilean organization was given this award. There were six winners selected out of more than 3,600 projects and 74 countries.

External links

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