DATE / TIME:

2018•09•25    14:30 - 15:30

Location:

Guimarães

Speaker

Fernanda Campagnucci Pereira is currently a Government Fellow at the United Nations University Operating Unit on Policy-Driven Electronic Governance (UNU-EGOV). In Brazil, she is a member of the public management career at São Paulo City Hall and, since 2013, has been implementing policies related to transparency, innovation, and civic technologies in the city.

Fernanda served as Head of Integrity at the Comptroller General’s Office (2013-2016) where she was responsible for the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), open data processes and fighting against corruption at the municipal level. She currently coordinates the Open Government Initiative at the Education Department – Pátio Digital.

She holds a postgraduate certificate in Transparency and Accountability by the University of Chile. Prior to that, she graduated in Communication Studies (Journalism) at the University of São Paulo, where she also obtained a Master’s Degree in Sociology of Education.

An open Government fellow at the Organization of American States (2015) and Open Data Leader at the Open Data Institute (2016), she is also a member of the consultative committee of the Technology & Equity Institute, a research and advocacy organisation in Brazil acting on the ethical use of technologies.

Abstract

Digital participation and collaboration between a government and the society may assume different forms, such as crowdsourcing of information, online consultations, policy co-creation, and other platform-based and civic tech solutions. An emerging, and yet less explored form of participation, is the collaboration in the digital infrastructure and software development itself. Adopting the open source paradigm, governments around the world are using public software repositories (e.g. GitHub and GitLab) to publish, share, and receive voluntary contributions from communities of developers towards the source code of a given project. This modality of electronic participation requires further attention from different stakeholders to leverage it on behalf of collaborative policy and decision-making processes. The dialogue between academia and governments may help to bridge policy-driven research and evidence-based deliberations.

After presenting a brief overview of how this type of collaboration is described in the literature and how it is framed in different contexts, the seminar will present in more detail the implementation of open source collaboration in the Education Department of the city of São Paulo (Brazil). Finally, the seminar raises the main challenges and benefits of the open collaboration approach.