1. OVERVIEW | 2.VOICE2REP | 3. CIVIC ACTION TEAMS | 4. INTEGRITY ICON | 5. PARTICIPATORY EXPLORATION | 6. IN THEIR WORDS | 7. IN THEIR WORDS | 8. ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING HIGHLIGHTS | 9. STAFF CORNER | 10. BUDGET HIGHLIGHTS

How has the Lab impacted governance and anti-corruption efforts in the country and/or region, with specific highlights.

Over the course of the past two years, we developed two projects with two very different end goals.

On the one hand we are in the process of building a community based approach to develop governance tools in the general population in a structurally underserved community with a long history of civic participation in the borough of Iztapalapa in Mexico City, called Yuguelito. In this community we are continuing to build and strengthen the bonds with community leaders, with the aim of deploying a Civic Action Teams exercise.

On the other hand our Voice2Rep work lead us to deepen our understanding of the need for supporting gender procurement of justice with a gender lens, by bringing us closer to the prosecutors that impacted positively in the case of Dolores de León, helping bring about her freedom in early 2023 and supporting her into overcoming a significant challenge to her freedom through a discriminatory attack from an unfriendly prosecutor.

Through the work of HackCorruption in Latin America, we have also managed to work locally with two CSOs, translating this work into more concrete anti corruption efforts in the region, one in sustainable development by tracking and monitoring the misappropriation of publicly owned land. The second is by tackling a transnational approach to monitoring corruption in public procurement by generating a transparency layer, bridging the sanctions lists produced by Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. government and the Mexican Fiscal Control entity.

What did we learn that has set us up for sustainable work and success in 2024?

The Latin American civil society scenario is rapidly changing since 2022. During this time it has been established, particularly in Mexico and northern Central America, that while technical CSOs produced valuable work into modernizing accountability mechanisms and institutional capacity in the region, that alone is not enough

There is a need to work directly with underserved grassroots communities by supporting civic agents of change within those communities. To this end, we are working to build governance tools for the general population in a marginalized community with a long history of civic action. Using a community-based approach in Yuguelito in Iztapalapa borough, Mexico City, we are working to strengthen the bonds with community leaders, to eventually launch a Civic Action Teams program.

We also learned that supporting institutional development for improvement of human rights and accountability of the institutions in the procurement of justice, is a necessary component of the expansion of the work that has been done with the Voice2Rep campaign. We are currently conducting an assessment to detect the institutional capacity and knowledge gaps on this matter in order to pilot a second stage of the program in northern Mexico.

We are also conducting a participatory exploration project with other CSOs and subject-matter leaders in the accountability field. This will result in a diagnosis of the strengths, challenges, gaps, trends and areas of opportunity in the accountability ecosystem and agenda in Mexico and the region, and a set of recommendations for a renewed collaborative approach to our work. One of the learnings from this exercise has been the critical importance of returning the work of civil society to the grassroots for a more direct interface with the general population.

How did we make an impact and what did we learn?

The workshop gathered 300 people from 3 different penitentiary centers. Out of these participants, 20 were selected to write songs and workshop the lyrics and composition in order to record the album.

Out of the participants we had 3 people who became actively involved in their own cases, with one becoming a key advocate for gender justice based accountability. Dolores de León’s activism in her own case helped us create a concrete institutional network in Nuevo León, building our Integrity Icon campaign with the public defender Susana Montañes as a focal point of the role of the capacity public servants have in their own advocacy capacities.

While we have a clear understanding on how narrative for change is a viable tool for building and raising external awareness, we now have evidence of its capacity to influence institutional change. It can also generate traction in addressing key issues in the area of interest.

We want to solidify this into a workshop for piloting and advancing programs with public justice officials who work in gender issues.

Funding in the region is moving towards organizations that can do bridge work, as well as prove institutional advocacy around key issues in Mexico. Two of those issues are; human rights and gender development, and focus on the population of marginalized communities.

Ali González
Director of Strategy at Codeando México

The open data agenda in Mexico went backwards during this six-year term; there was an abandonment of the open data portal, for instance. Civil society organizations and government agencies do publish data, but no longer do it on that portal, and it has to do with the fact that the digital strategy has been defunded, and rather, funds are now being concentrated on topics such as e-governance. This is symptomatic of the panorama in the country: back in the day, the open data agenda was pushed and promoted as something new and completely innovative, but in self-criticism, it was very technical as it was only about publishing data but not in a strategic way. Thus, we have to think about data governance, and not just publishing data. This requires a reconstruction of the political agenda of the civic technology and open government ecosystem in Mexico.

“The tech communities slowed down and they stopped getting together. I think it has to do with the fact that the internet has changed in the last 5 years and now the market is saturated. All the apps that could be made were made and, at the same time, the monopolies prevented new things from being made. This is a global trend.

But then there are other causes to this phenomenon:
Communities both in Mexico and globally “adultified” and moved towards a model of the core team doing projects while halting their focus on community-led projects. On the other hand, when the professionalization of members of the communities occurred, there was no strategy for passing the baton and there was no continuity in many of the projects that were born from the collective.
Defunding of the civic tech agenda.
The open government agenda was protocolized, but for the same reason it has been worn out.
Shrinking of civic space: the change of government with a high level of approval removes the need for civil society as a counterweight. This has led to civil society itself falling into inertia, where we stopped being innovative due to lack of a clear political agenda. We have become depoliticized: a lot of protocol, a lot of panels, a lot of reporting but little action, little advocacy and no teeth.

Viridiana Hernández

Independent Expert in Open Data, Open Government and Political Innovation

Understanding open data as a tool that enables citizen participation mechanisms is important. We have to shift away from the discourse about the importance of transparency for transparency’s sake. Government assets, such as public information, can spark innovation that positively impacts the common person. We have focused on developing assets aimed at the middle class, which is educated and trained, has internet access, owns a computer, and so on. We have to create strategies that consider those who are being left out. We have to focus on the quality of the assets and their potential outputs and not, for instance, on the number of visits to the open data portal. We have to aim to enable civic participation focused on processes and their outputs, which necessitates finding out what people’s needs are, including possibilities that had not been taken into account, such as improving services, creating new products, sparking public debates, and influencing public policies.

Martín Szyszlican
Software Developer specializing in Civic Tech and Data Science. Currently the Technology Director at Abrimos.info, a partner of HackCorruption.

“We have to focus on making useful tools for those who use them. It has to be sustainable and, in order to do this, we have to make sure that the projects we work on and the assets we create become essential infrastructure so that people come back and need them to do their work. Without a doubt, it is important to change narratives and public policies, and to do so we must ensure that those who conduct this work, such as journalists and development and advocacy professionals, use the tools we develop and the information we publish.”

Anca Matioc
Founder and Director of La Sobremesa, and a long-standing leader supporting CSOs across Latin America

“Many organizations in the ecosystem are refocusing on other agendas that now seem more relevant and important to them. Those that are not doing it have lost relevance. I believe those working on the transparency and accountability agenda must focus on applied issues and cases.”

“The current lack of resources in the open+ space has to do with the fact that donors did not see the impact they wanted to see because we could not articulate the story nor the real impact. This is particularly clear with the open data agenda. However, the donors also did not know how to consult the organizations and co-create an agenda with us. This led to a rapid up and down of the agenda; it quickly lost strength. The open+ agenda has diluted not only in Mexico but throughout LATAM. This is why we must work more strategically and avoid quick wins or exclusively creating ad hoc projects just because an opportunity presents itself. Moving forward, organizations working on these issues must reassess and reinvent themselves with these lessons of impact in mind.”

Gastón Wright
Director and Senior Advisor at Civic Compass, a program of Civic House. Formerly, Director of Change.org Argentina

“The disarticulation of civil society in Latin America has to do with the fact that it is very disconnected from the daily problems of citizens who do not make much distinction between right and left, pro-rights or anti-rights. The average citizen asks politics to solve the problems. And that is why there is a trend to vote for populist governments and leaders – in the past, this trend leaned towards the left, but currently to the right -, because they create that unmediated connection with citizens that is difficult to replicate by the institutional approach of organized civil society , who presents itself as an intermediary.”

“Democracy is the only acceptable game in the conflicts and permanent tensions that occur in society. Organized and institutionalized civil society, however, is very disconnected from the common citizen. A new civil society has emerged, and it is not formal nor institutionalized, but rather, is informal and is more akin to social movements. This phenomenon, in turn, will pressure organized civil society to change its practices and reconnect with citizens, their interests, their problems and their needs.”