Episode 259: Giulio Carvalho on Civic Tech and Querido Diário  ## Metadata - Author: [[Sustain]] - Full Title: Episode 259: Giulio Carvalho on Civic Tech and Querido Diário - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/89297784-75a4-4b20-bf0f-ec1da25e050e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Network Boosts Civic Tech Influence** - Civic Innovation Ambassador Network connects scattered local civic tech communities across Brazil. - It coordinates national efforts to promote political transparency and open data through pledges by politicians. Transcript: Richard Littauer How is it relevant? Giulio Carvalho Okay, Civic Innovation Ambassador Network is a network of people who mostly don't have a hub of connection and want to do a civic engagement and arrange that in a network manner. Because in Brazil, we actually have some localized communities that are mostly municipal, and we always have difficulty to engage in a coordinated manner at the country level. So mostly our projects, our civic tech projects and our civic engagement campaigns are disconnected and don't have a lot of power to actually bring some change and everything. So in 2019, the previous coordinator of the Civic Innovation Program at Open Knowledge Brazil, Mario Sergio, he was trying to bring people together to actually help building our projects At Open Knowledge Brazil, the open source projects, and engage in some activities like the one we started in 2020, that was prompting our politicians that were candidates in our elections To make a pledge to make policies that were related to open data, open access, transparency and everything, and put that in their government programs for their candidatures. So as a network, we contacted them via social networks or in person, people who had access to them and pressured. And many politicians actually made that pledge and some were elected and actually that brought us to some cities having new policies for having access to information and things like That retaining their law mainly by peer pressure and civic engagement. And that was something that could not be done in an organized movement, decentralized, but having a lot of capillarity that we actually achieved. And we did that in 2020, 2022, and now in 2024, because the election cycle in Brazil is two years and two to three years. ([Time 0:01:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/757f603f-0c73-4a9e-8845-ed0473107ee2)) - **Brazil's Advanced Access Law** - Brazil's Access to Information Law mandates government response to information requests. - The law encourages transparent, proactive publication of government data, not just reactive access. Transcript: Giulio Carvalho Because here in Brazil, we have quite an advanced situation regarding access to information. Mostly in 2011, it was a movement that was started before was gained a lot of force by the promulgation of the law of information on access, lei de acesso e informação. So it's a federal law. And basically, it says that every citizen can request access of information to every instance of government. And the instance of government has the obligation to respond to that. They may tell that the data is not available or something like that. They can argue the request, but they have to respond. So it's a citizen right. So in 2011, it was the birth of the lie. We say that L-A So the law was promulgated, but it has to be implemented in the government instances. So the federal government rightly promptly implemented it. The states, they also implemented it, but the municipalities, some have yet to implement it. In 2024, we still have cities that don't implement the law of information access. So this pledge, the first topic was, I promise to engage in promulgating and making viable the implementation of the law of information access in my city. And the other points of the pledge to the opening letter was building upon that. So if you are making a pledge to provide information after some information, you also make a pledge to provide active transparency. So publishing your data actively without anyone requesting it. It was from the ability to request some data until the publication of data without being requested. So it was a bunch of bullet points from this low level until the higher level. And that was what the pledge was about. ([Time 0:04:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b8ccc3b8-dcd4-4646-8779-15a000b0c5c2)) - **Anonymous Info Requests Protect Citizens** - Queremos Saber is an open source project enabling anonymous information requests in Brazil. - This protects citizens in small towns who fear identification when accessing government data. Transcript: Giulio Carvalho Yeah, actually some projects in Brazil, like the project Caremo e Saber, we want to know. It's a project that's still maintained by Open Knowledge Brazil. It's actually the governance is changing to another organization right now. They're thinking something to organization, but it is a open source project that allows people to make these information requests anonymously, completely anonymously, because It's made by the project. You put your request and the organization that you are requesting is from, and then you basically save your ID that the system outputs for you. And that saves your ticket ID. And from that you can follow your request in the Queremos Saber interface and you are completely anonymized. And it's very important for mainly local requests like small cities and places where you can be easily identifiable and people don't want you to have access to that information. ([Time 0:07:22](https://share.snipd.com/snip/624492b1-7190-4622-9566-d87cf38f9121)) - **Querido Diário Mitigates Data Desert** - Querido Diário centralizes scattered municipal official acts into one accessible platform. - This transforms a 'data desert' into a rich dataset for journalists, academics, and citizens. Transcript: Richard Littauer So if you could correct me and tell me what it is, that would be excellent. Giulio Carvalho My name is Querido Diario. Much better. Yeah, I find it quite satisfactory that you catch the pun that it's Dear Diary. So it is related to Dear Diary because that's our gazettes, our journals, mainly where the official acts are published in Brazil. So that's a project for allowing citizens to access these data from everywhere, for wherever used in centralized space, because we actually tackle the municipal publications. So Brazil has more than 5,500 cities. It's actually 5,570 cities, if I remember correctly. So there are possibly more than 5,000 places where these acts are published. And if I'm a journalist or a academic and I want to do some investigation or some scientific work with any of these publications because there is a lot of things that are published there Because they have to be if these things are non-existent like a contract a exoneration and things like that then some buying governmental buying of school materials They have to be In the official gazettes. So that's a lot of material for journalists, for academics, for other public agents, for activists, for the public servants. That could be interesting. And mostly the cities have their own platform of publication so you actually have to have a team of people to read these diaries because they are still published like it's the 1800s and They are published for print. So mostly PDFs and things like that. And it's very resource intensive to actually make any kind of broad project with this data, because you have to gather the data from a lot of sources. You have to sift through a lot of documents, mostly manually. Some have a, the publication of the PDF is searchable, some are not. So some are scanned documents. So Querido Diario aims to, at first level, bring these documents in a central platform, have some spiders, some robots, some crawlers to get these documents automatically every day, Parse them, transform them into pure text to be brought to an open format like TXT. And then you are able to search everything and filter by the city you want to filter by publication date and basically have a search engine, complete search engine for these official Acts that the amount of data from our administration related to executive business. So if you have access to, we consider it a new dataset because of the situation before, we considered a data desert. Where we have some oasis of data somewhere because they are easy to access, but the vast majority of data is dry and you really don't have access to it. So if you want to build public policies using that data desert scenario as your basis, you are building bad public policies. ([Time 0:10:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd81e587-a157-452f-a5a4-3dcd8541a669)) - **Querido Diário's Grant-Fueled Journey** - Querido Diário began in 2018, launched publicly in 2021 aided by a Latin American NLP grant. - It's funded via grants and partnerships, maintained as an independent civil society initiative. Transcript: Giulio Carvalho Structure. It's mostly, it's always Martin. The project started in 2018 officially, and it was launched to the public in 2021. So it took three years to build from the ground up and have the first scrapers, the first spiders and the processing pipeline and the web platform and public API to be put online. And it was able to be launched with a grant from an initiative in Latin America that was Empatia, Empatia, that was providing resources to initiatives that wanted to mess with NLP. So in Querido Diario, Dear Diary, it's a massive source of text. So the project was, let's study how we can build some tools to process this text data using NLP techniques. And we were able to process some tokens, like some identifiers, like the company identifiers, the company registry, and the personal registry, we call it the CPF, CPF here. So it was mostly that because the data is totally unstructured. There are a lot of barriers to, but it was the first grant that made Querida Diario available to become public because from 2018 to 2021, it was mostly a voluntary project where people Were building some scrapers for their own cities. And that part was very solid, but it was very difficult to see the project becoming a sustainable project in the long run, because it wouldn't be accessed by many people, by many persons From different backgrounds. It was mostly an enthusiastic thing. So, Querido Diario, it started in 2018. In 2020, it started a public grant funding campaign. It is continuous. It is active right now to fund its infrastructure, the maintainability of its infrastructure. It achieved a funding that made it viable. And then the first grant allowed it to have the front-end builds and the API also builds and make it a solid MVP. After that, it was the campaign continued to be maintained and I entered Openology Brazil and then some other grants like that. And with public grants, grants that were put available from other organizations we applied and wanted. And also we had some partnerships with a company that was interested in technologies in education. And we also provided that service to our building a part of Querido Diario that was focused on data that was published related to technology and education. And we mostly funded Querido Diario from 2020 to 2024 for all these great opportunities and these private projects that were made public right now, like Querido Diario Technologies And Education and this active campaign. It's mostly, the project is maintained by Open Knowledge Brazil and it's not government related, actually maintained, funded by the government because it is municipal level. So we don't have a forum that gathers all cities and from this forum, they can elect some things that can be funded or not. ([Time 0:15:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ecd262ff-82b4-4fd1-aa71-6546632a5b9b)) - **Sustaining Querido Diário Post-Pandemic** - Pre-pandemic, Querido Diário had about six dedicated core contributors maintained its complex infrastructure. - Pandemic hit contributor retention, now sustainable through grants and paying part-time developers. Transcript: Richard Littauer How do you manage that in the project? How many active developers are there? And what does a sustainable path look like to get to where everyone's working on it? Giulio Carvalho Just a clarification. Open Knowledge Brazil is independent from Open Knowledge Foundation. So it's a chapter of the network. Okay. But we can do some projects together, but doesn't relate to Open Knowledge Foundation. We Open Knowledge Museum, we use CCAN and everything, and Frictional SD8 and Open Data Hubs or anything like that. But we work as a network, but it's not being maintained by Open Knowledge Foundation. So it's quite confusing, I know. That is really confusing to me. Richard Littauer Yeah. So let's keep that in. That's really helpful because I always mess that up. Sort of like I mess up open source collective versus open collective versus now open financial collective or something. I can't keep it all together in my head. Okay. So Open Knowledge Brazil is different than Open Knowledge Foundation. It's different than Carido Diary, but that makes sense to me. I think my question still stands, which is how do you manage having people from all these different cities working together? Even when you have some sort of grant making opportunity to focus it, how do you build a sustainable movement of developers working on this project? Giulio Carvalho Open Knowledge Brazil acts as a umbrella for this grant writing and receiving money and hosting the infrastructure and everything. So I should mostly act like this person that is organizing everyone and the maintainers and the contributors and everything and the developers. Granting those resources would be actually distributed in a way that made the project flourish. But today, the pandemic actually impacted a lot of communities and it wasn't different with Querido Diario. And we actually had a hard hit on our contributors. We had that launch going on in 2020, 2021. It was already started when the pandemic hit and they were long lasting contributors. They were at most six people. And they contributed a lot in the backend, in the spiders of the project and things like that. And then we actually built a API and a frontend. And we lacked some contributors there. We use Python as our backbone. So all the other repositories of GrisGiardio are Python-based except for the front end. And that facilitates a lot of things because we have a common background of tools and everything that we can use. And that makes it possible to have a project this big work as lean as this community is today. Querido Diario has big community of not one time contributors, but few shot contributors. They, since the pandemic, we couldn't retain a lot of people contributing. So they come, they contribute to their own city and things like that. But those long lasting contributors started to be really lacking. But with the contributors that were since the start of the project, since 2019 and things like that, the main infrastructure of the project was built and it is able to be maintained until Today. So we actually have a very simple infrastructure that can hold it all together, but it is very solidly built. And it holds until today. And we are actually building it from here via the grants we receive to have six month dedicated developer building upon that because we are trying to retrieve our healthy community To have long lasting contributors in the architecture sense in the base of the project to be actually built and thought again by the community. So organizing what I said, the community, the first long-lasting contributors built a solid backbone for the project. A pandemic hit, it affected our community very much. The project is still very popular and accessed by many people. Many people contribute, but they contribute mostly interested in their cities and everything. And we accept those contributions and try to engage upon them to turn them into long-lasting contributors, of course. But since the pandemic, that activity has mostly been more difficult so we focus on granting opportunities to have some structural developments being built by a developer that is Related to our community but can't actually dedicate their voluntary time to the project. So we can make a contract with them for like six months to actually build something for CrazyAidro. And then the project keeps improving. And we think that the way we can maintain it right now until it reaches a point where the project gets very big. The newspapers are using it, the public servants, the public agents are using it, and then we get a lot of attention and the funding will be a bit easier after that. And right now we're still with that MVP, the starting of the project mentality. We actually doing best practice to keep the project alive and building block upon block. ([Time 0:22:26](https://share.snipd.com/snip/25869ba6-7380-4b0e-b8eb-ca5ede2c7f4e)) - **Local Tech Builds Sustainable Futures** - Local talent and problems in the Global South match global standards but suffer from resource scarcity. - Building tech locally for local problems ensures community engagement and reduces vulnerability to foreign solutions. Transcript: Richard Littauer But then you get some proprietary tech service coming out of Seattle that comes in and says, hey, let's just do this instead. And everyone buys into it. And all of a sudden you have Microsoft everywhere. That sucks. And I'm just really curious, how do you think about building grassroots tech movements locally and whether it's a sustainable move? Why are you putting all this investment in here? What's your thinking when you're working with other developers? What are you doing to build the sustainability of your project, especially in the global South, where you do have this leakage from the global North coming in and saying you should use Our product instead? Giulio Carvalho My thoughts related to that is that in the global South, the talent and the problems, the things are very similar to mostly everywhere in the world. And the only problem we have here is lack of resources, mostly financial resources. So if we build something by us, for us, we actually can build great stuff because people here are interested in investing their time to improving their own society. The social network that was ripped apart in the last years, it's actually isolated us a little bit, but I believe that our societies, they are very commoner. So we want to make stuff better. So working with civic tech, you perceive that it's quite easy to convince someone that the time we are investing in it is valuable and it's worth it. So yeah, the candy from Seattle or places like that is very shiny, but it can be somewhat unrelated to our place in the world. So it can be more related to their problems that they're trying to solve and trying to make the most of it by applying to many societies at the same time. But the personalization, the localization of the problem, it will never cease to be relevant. So if we are building something that is more related to our specific problem here, it will bring good people here to help building that. It will not be replaced easily by something that comes from outside. And that's a big advantage. That's the goal you have to think about when you are building a civic tech project. Is it really trying to solve a real issue and it's a local issue, a specific issue that is felt very hard by your own community? Because if it is, it will be at least somewhat successful because people will want to solve it with you and they will go through the tides with their project. So don't mess up. Yeah, there are a lot of ways for messing up stuff. Do the basic, plan it very well. The problem you are trying to solve and work with other people that are interested in the same thing. ([Time 0:29:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/702d5fc6-c335-437b-9e45-4114fdf989c5)) - **PreTalks Streamlines Event Organization** - PreTalks is a Python-based open source tool managing event organization from calls for papers to voting. - Giulio credits it as the best event-building software he's used in the last two years. Transcript: Giulio Carvalho The project that I want to spotlight today is a project that is affecting my work, but it's affecting the communities I participate very much. It's pre-talks. The Python-based project that allows events to be organized, their conferences from meetups to big conference. That allows you to build your call for papers, call for proposals, and then receive everything, evaluate with groups. There are plugins for people to vote on public voting. There are a lot of tools to make things anonymous. You have all the process, very delineated, very complete. You also have the email sending system in the same project. It's by far the best experience I've been having for the last two years, I think that I've been engaging with PreTalks with building events, organizing events with PreTalks. It has been amazing. I'll try to use other solutions. Maybe if in the future I come here again, I'm already inviting myself, look at that. And then I'll be able to spotlight some other projects that usually lead to other parts of organizing events because it's awesome to do that in an open source community, in the programming Language community, things like that. And the software you are using to bring people in is a software that you actually can talk about in that community and have people gather around it and make it better and actually talk About other stuff that can make that experience even better. ([Time 0:39:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/38ae38d3-26b3-48af-8e10-04c019723cac))