Meu Rio

= Brazilian participatory citizenship movement in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Description

1. Gwendoline de Ganay:

"Meu Rio is a digital interface for civic engagement. Anybody living in the city can log on to the website and denounce a problem and launch a campaign to fix it. The issues are usually targeted and very local, such as the price of a ferry ticket or the cutting of a tree on a specific street. Miguel’s first concern when talking to me was to mention that Meu Rio was both non-for-profit and non-partisan.

However, Meu Rio gives a voice to any civilian who wants to point out things that need fixing and in that sense, despite Meu Rio’s nonpartisan positioning (not supporting any party or politician in Brazil) it is extremely political! Indeed it operates as a tool for direct democracy, by empowering the citizens.

Miguel gave me an example of an interface they have called panela de pressão ( the pressure cooker), in which not only can people denounce an issue, but every time a person signs up to denounce that same issue, it sends an email, tweet or Facebook post to the politician responsible for this issue. The pressure cooker has become such a success that some politicians no longer allow posts on their Facebook page!

The moment you hear something like this, you know that Meu Rio could indeed become a game changer not only in the civic engagement of the cariocas but also in the way the city is managed."

2. Lee-Sean Huang:

"The electronic bricolage of Gambiologia is like this cultural stew: a beautiful mess, and a triumph of bottom-up experimentation and invention. Another example is the digitally driven Meu Rio movement, which is bringing underrepresented young people into the political and civic life of Rio and advocating for greater political transparency and accountability. Launched in 2011 in partnership with Purpose and IETS, a local NGO, Meu Rio is a kind of organizational feijoada, a hybrid that draws from a variety of existing international models. The Meu Rio recipe includes best practices in online political organizing from groups like Avaaz.org and MoveOn.org; elements of Yes Men-style culture jamming and offline stunts; and tops things off with its own “laboratory” for digital social innovations based on models such as the Sunlight Foundation." (http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679295/4-lessons-from-the-social-innovation-hotbed-of-brazil)