I am studying citizen engagement with open government data to tackle societal problems. I would like to share my preliminary research findings of this topic.
Most academic literature investigates top-down citizen engagement led by the government such as open data hackathons, while, I believe that bottom-up initiatives fully organized by citizens exist in practice. One of my case studies is the use of open election data by Indonesians for providing faster results of the election to society. You can find out about the results of this study here: https://doi.org/10.1145/3209281.3209305
Do you know similar initiatives as such? We can start a discussion on this.
I know some examples from my context. In Latin America, there is the AbreLatam event, organized by civil society, that runs parallel and simultaneous to the government-led Condatos.
Specifically in Brazil, there are many citizen led initiatives that do use open data. This post at the Open Knowledge Brazil blog, albeit in Portuguese, links to some of them.
Thank you for providing examples in the context of Latin America. AbreLatam is indeed an interesting event. I would love to participate in such an event.
Examples of citizen-led initiatives are also impressive. Do you know any contacts of the community who built the apps? I would really like to understand how they organize themselves in the initiatives.
Yes, I know many of them. One of them not mentioned in the previous post, but that has achieved notoriety in recent years is Operação Serenata de Amor, and they have their website in English – which should be more approachable to learn from if you don’t know Portuguese. They use machine learning to find suspicious fund reimbursement cases received by members of parliament in Brazil. They have been featured prominently in thenews a few years ago.
I can also point you to contacts in other Brazilian community projects if you wish. I would send you a direct message, but it seems like they are disabled in this forum. You can check my profile here, which has a link to my website, where you’ll find my email address. Or you could ask your Brazilian colleagues at TU Delft, too.