Silvana Fumega
@SilvanaVF
Together with a team of
researchers from Brazil (Ricardo Matheus and Manuela Ribeiro) and Uruguay
(Fabrizio Scrollini), we decided to embark on a project on Open Government Data
policies in local governments in 3 important cities in the Southern Cone of
Latin America: Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Sao Paulo.
In that context, I spent
3 weeks in Buenos Aires during June 2013 in order to gather information to
build the study case. The most relevant aspect that I recall (possibly due to
the influence of my current PhD research…) is related to the civil society
actors surrounding the Buenos Aires Open Data initiative[1].
Independent developers as well as
journalists, academics and members of transparency-oriented NGOs have just
started to become aware of the need to collaborate with each other to better
access and use open data for different purposes. The events held since 2009 in
the City of Buenos Aires have contributed to bring these actors closer
together. However, after several candid interviews and informal talks with many
relevant actors, I realized that even though the actors with very dissimilar
backgrounds and areas of expertise have managed, in some cases, to start
collaborating with each other, to achieve a long-term sustainable partnership was
not portrayed as a walk in the park.
One of the main obstacles for that partnership
is the difficulty of finding a common language between developers and
non-technical organizations. Short-term funding is also a major issue for many
projects, as well as the need of NGOs for "in house" developers.
On the bright side, despite all
these obstacles a small community has started to emerge around the use of open
government data. In that sense, some projects have just begun to be implemented
with limited resources but with a lot of dialogue among several stakeholders
with different backgrounds and interests.
One of the examples of that work is
the app[2]
from Huesped Foundation – and NGOs aimed at fighting HIV/AIDS. I participated
in one of the meeting held in the Government Lab[3]
provided by the General Direction of Information and Open Government. In that
meeting, members of Huesped Foundation together with developers (some of them
volunteering their time) and public officials discussed, in a friendly and
informal manner, the available resources and the possibilities to overcome the
obstacles.
A few months after that meeting,
they launched an application to promote awareness about centers for HIV free
testing and for distribution of condoms. This initiative was developed without
an allocated budget but with the assistance of independent developers and the
expertise of the Office of Information and Open Government. This type of
collaboration could be taken, in the future, as an example of what can be done
with limited resources but with an efficient and productive collaboration from
several actors interested in the topic.
[1]
More info about the study case:
http://www.opendataresearch.org/content/2013/573/opening-cities-case-city-buenos-aires-and-some-other-general-reflections-open
[3]
The Gov Lab is a physical space in the Information and Open Government Office.
This space was created to host meetings, every day of the year, among public
officials, developers, NGOs members, academics, and other actors.
More
info (in Spanish)
http://digital.buenosaires.gob.ar/te-estamos-buscando-laboratorio-de-gobierno-de-la-ciudad/
