Building of internet platform

MOVIN

Movin is an independent political movement focused on influencing and monitoring:

a) the independence and efficiency of governmental institutions;

b) the increase in levels of transparency in their management;

It also works to stimulate citizens participation and involvement in order to get the prior two objectives.

It has the firm belief that it can foster a transformation in Panama through direct participation of citizens in politics, both through political parties and from the independent arena.

In order to attain this, Movin has created platforms for debates and education on their rights and duties in democracy, as well as other relevant topics, always encouraging “a call to action”.

Their plans also incorporate the development of leaders across the country through strict curricula based on our four fundamental values: integrity, transparency, diversity and objectivity.

Twitter @movinpty

Instagram @movinpty

Facebook MovinPanama

Quién es Quién Wiki / Who’s Who Wiki

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The opacity characterizing the Latin American private sector alters the balance between liberal democracy and market capitalism, ultimately affecting national development processes.

Additionally, the lack of an effective legal framework implies that civil society actors, as well as investors and other corporate stakeholders, lack the tools to intervene in corporate decisions that affect the public interest, forcing us instead to rely upon voluntary corporate action or porous legal systems.

However, today there are alternative, innovative tools to compensate for these shortcomings. Information technology is simplifying the participation of individuals and promoting the construction of a context that fosters socially responsible behavior and the exercise of professional ethics.

Increasingly, projects with collaborative platforms specifically designed to promote a culture of transparency and to foster, in the long term, compliance with fiduciary and legal standards are coming on-line.

Who’s Who Wiki combines business intelligence with transparency technology and network visualization to facilitate access to symmetric information about corporations and investors. With PODER’s editorial site, rindecuentas.org, we promote MéxicoLeaks, a secure whistleblowing platform.

The objective of the project is analyze the Mexican corporate network and facilitate public understanding of its individual and corporate members.

Twitter: @QuienQuienWiki

Read More About QQW: here.

Latest **Article (Spanish)**: “CMHN, la política de negocios, las élites y la toma de decisiones en México”.

Publicidad Oficial (Official Publicity)

Soft censorship or indirect government censorship, includes a variety of actions intended to influence media—short of closures, imprisonments, direct censorship of specific content, or physical attacks on journalists or media facilities.

Publicidad Oficial focuses on financial aspects of official soft censorship in Mexico. In this country, the allocation of Government advertising is the more common tool to exert soft censorship and is an integral part of the country’s complicated media landscape. Absent precise and clear rules, it is a means to influence or even a tool to blackmail media owners and journalists.

Federal and local governments use official advertising to shape media outlets’ editorial line and push partisan agendas. Opaque and arbitrary allocation of official advertising constrains pluralism and a diversity of voices by selectively funding media outlets that support officials and their policies.

Read their latest report here: Buying Compliance:Governmental Advertising and Soft Censorship in Mexico

Twitter: @PubliOficial • @fundarMexico

Citizen Action Network for Accountability (CANA)

The Citizen Action Network for Accountability in the Philippines works to improve public services provided in our communities in general and to the poorest and most marginalized in particular.

CANA believes simply that more we ordinary people can understand and engage the government, the more accountable and effective we can all hold it to be.

Latest Work

Citizens force city to improve quality control of public works: A simple story on how citizen action compelled the government to repair a foot bridge previously declared complete yet unusable during rainy days.

Citizens encouraged to monitor government projects, spending: A national broadcast report in Filipino featuring CANA’s views and work in encouraging citizen action to fight corruption and demand for good governance.

Facebook: Citizen Action Net • Twitter: @CitizenActionPH

¿Quién Compró?

Quién Compró? is a data journalism platform designed to monitor and foster transparency in the use of public money in the Chambers of Deputies and Senators in Mexico.

Transparency problems in Mexico

1. Mexico has a Congress with high levels of opacity

The legislative power is one of the least transparent institutions in Mexico. In many cases, citizens have no possibility to track how millions of pesos are spent.

2. Congress spends an excessive amount of money

The Mexican parliament is the fifth most expensive in the world. A Mexican senator receives 13,400 dollars per month, whereas a German congressman receives 10,400 dollars per month.

3. Transparency is expensive

Citizens have to pay in order to receive detailed public information. Very frequently, it is not available in a digital format.

4. Delayed responses

Mexican citizens have to wait up to 8 months to receive a response from the authorities, which as well, in many cases, might not be completely satisfying.

5. Information is delivered in “unfriendly” formats

The Mexican Congress does not have an open database; it provides information only in hard copy or PDF document format. This complicates the ability to analyze the presented data and represents an obstacle for accountability.

Quién Compró? General & Particular Goals

General. To monitor and foster transparency in the usage of public money in the Mexican Congress.

Particular.1. To elaborate a database of the congress expenditures.
2. To facilitate the access to the new created database for the public.
3. To generate easy-to-understand visualizations of important data.

Targeted Users

1. Citizens
Visual material will allow tracking in detail Congresses spending.

2. Investigators
Quién compró? plans to offer the possibility to download data directly from their website so it can be used for investigative purposes.

3. Journalists
Data can also be used easily to increase public awareness.

How they do it?

*Gathering essential evidence, using the Transparency Law to access to official contracts and bills.

*Organizing the information to build an open database.

*Facilitating the access of data by constructing an interactive search engine for the public to consult it.

*Visualizing the data of mayor importance.

Impact

Short Term- To provide citizens, for the fist time, with an access tool that illustrates how Congress spends their money.

Midterm – Journalists will have access to raw material for further investigations that might influence Mexican public agenda.

Long term- By revealing the uses and abuses of public money, judicial processes can be initiated, contributing to the fight against corruption.

Scale

Quién Compró? is planing to associate with local groups and institutions, interested in the creation transparency of the local Congresses expenditures, in the different states of the Mexican Republic. They also will offer their platform and consulting services to replicate the model at the local level.

Funding

Quién Compró? is a non-profit organization, but aspires to become self-sustaining through actions such as:

*Donations

*Funds raised via crowd funding

*Financial support from other non-governmental organizations and universities

*Special events

*Collaborations to different communications means.

Facebook: Quién Compró? • Twitter: @QuienCompro •

XNet

Xnet is formed by a group of activists that, since 2008 work in fields related to:

online democracy (participation mechanisms and citizen control of power and institutions);
advocacy of a neutral and free Internet;
free circulation of culture, knowledge and information and the defense of citizen journalism for the right to know, to inform and be informed;
the development of technical, communication and legal strategies for the fight against corruption and;
techno-politics understood as the practice of networking and taking action for empowerment, justice and social transformation.
Anti-corruption legal and communication strategies

XNet does not perceive political parties and public prosecutors as allies, but as a part of the problem. For anyone paying attention, it is obvious that the only victories in the fight against systemic corruption come from citizens, or thanks to citizens. Corruption is a moral, legal and political problem, but it is also a technical problem and as such, it can be pragmatically tackled in an efficient and technical manner.

Tired of witnessing how those responsible of the biggest frauds and scams go unpunished, XNet has taken part in the legal fights, some of which have led to the arrests of the main responsible for the misappropriation of funds in very representative cases in Spain.

Xnet have also encouraged, promoted and stimulated a series of citizen-run initiatives and collectives against corruption, among them the remarkable 15mparato, a citizen group responsible for the lawsuit against Bankia upper echelon, because of the scam this firm has proven to be. Starting from the participation of Xnet members in the collective for the Audition of the Debt, another group was created with the aim of auditing the most widely known banker in Spain.

Find more info here:

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Latest projects:

Facebook: RedX.Net • Twitter: @X_net

Fin al abuso (1st Campaign)

The project measures the amount of money annually stolen and diverted from education in Mexico, and holds a permanent campaign to advertise and display what could have been done in the education field in Mexico with the money that is lost to corruption. Additionally, “Fin al abuso” encourages citizens to join electronic campaigns and take legal action to demand that money spent on education is rightly used.

First campaign

Following up a three years movement named “Where is my teacher?”, Fin al abuso is leading a group of organizations demand for a single, complete and reliable registry of basic education teachers. The obligation to submit such registry was established in the enactment of the Mexican Federal Spending Decrees for 2010, 2011, and 2012; however, it does not exist so far.

Fin al Abuso, has detected (by name) 22,353 people, who are paid an income as teachers or principals, yet are not teaching. These people are the so-called “union commissioners” (UC) teacher union workers whose salaries cost Mexicans at least 1.7 billion pesos every year.

Mexicanos Primero

“¡Fin al abuso!” denounced this wrongdoing in 2012 and invited Mexicans to join the demand of more money to be allocated for education and less to be given to the Teachers Union.

The campaign collected signatures at public spaces, universities and forums; and had broad media presence in Mexico City, Tepic, Tijuana, Guadalajara and Monterrey.

In three months 230,240 citizens signed the campaign and 115 NGOs supported the initiative.

With each collected signature a letter demanding public resources to be well used was sent to the President of Mexico, the presidents of the Senate and House of Representatives, and the Ministers of Education and of Finance. If these Union Commissioners are essential to the SNTE (teachers’ union), then they should be paid from union dues deducted from teacher salaries. Those who signed received a reply from the federal authorities.

SEP (Secretariat of Public Education) and the SNTE reacted differing only in regards to the number of UC: SEP reported that there were “only” 12,704 commissioners whilst the SNTE admitted having over 160,000 commissioners.

In a second conference, Fin al Abuso published a document supported by the National Bar Association of Mexico (Ilustre y Nacional Colegio de Abogados de México) concluding that the payment of UC from the federal treasury is illegal.

Twitter: @Finalabuso • YouTube: MexicanosPrimero • Facebook: FinAlAbuso

Improving Coordination and Information Flow in Prevention of Corruption in Montenegro

In June 2012, Centre for Monitoring and Research CeMI has started with implementation of the project “Improving Coordination and Information Flow in Prevention of Corruption in Montenegro” with support of the USAID, through the program Good Governance Activity in Montenegro.

Aim of this project is to increase transparency of the processes of financing of political parties, electoral campaign and processes of public procurement, through creation of common informational platform that would encompass databases of the Commission for Prevention of Conflict of Interests, State Electoral Commission, State Commission for Public Procurement, the Directorate for Public Procurement and Registry of the Commercial Court. Target groups of this project are the organizations of civil society, media and state institutions, which will, through utilization of this database, improve their efficiency in fight against political corruption.

This project will be implemented in three phases. In the first phase a database for the State Electoral Commission will be created and connected with the database of the State Electoral Commission, while in the second part of implementation, remaining databases of the State Commission for Public Procurement, Directorate for Public Procurement and Registry of the Commercial Court will be linked to the platform, in which will already exists register of members of main boards of political parties.

In third phase of the project, a manual for use of this platform will be created and distributed and four workshops for representatives of CSOs, media and state institutions will be held. Each of these institutions has supported the idea of database linkage and signed memorandum of cooperation which foresees possibilities of utilization of data from each individual database.

Latest Article (Spanish): “CMHN, la política de negocios, las élites y la toma de decisiones en México”.