History of Participation Technologies in Brazil as a Common Good
Discussion
Ricardo Poppi:
"Since 2000's, the Brazilian society has invested some effort in building technologies for collaborative social participation on the Internet. Walking along the way paved by Brazilian digital culture movement, the most significant of these experiences took place in 2009's “Marco Civil da Internet” consultation that had its technology based on the work of an open source community from digital culture agenda, led by the Ministry of Culture.
As an extension of this experience, a number of other public consultations used the same technology or created other open source communities who were developing collective deliberation technologies on the network. This was the case of initiatives as “Participa.br” and “Pensando o Direito” who adhered to at least three different open source communities: Noosfero, Delibera (Wordpress), Allourideas (Pairwise). The common thread of these initiatives is that they were all based on the use and adherence to software development open source communities who had already been working on the creation of innovative technologies for collective deliberation.
The state’s relationship with those open source communities beyond bringing innovative technology into the governmental processes, also brought the practice to work with the construction of common knowledge goods shared between state and society. Cidade Democrática believes that the knowledge to build and maintain relationships with open source communities and manage the use and development of software as a common good is a state capacity that needs to be present in public institutions, especially to accelerate (or even make possible) institutional transformations (see our change theory). That’s why we keep betting on that, for instance in our more recent grassroots action, “Free Laboratories of Social Participation”. (https://medium.com/cidades-democr%C3%A1ticas/how-pol-is-is-being-adopted-by-cidade-democr%C3%A1tica-in-brazil-1fd744b2aece#.5p7ouso71)