Access to Information: Case Study Ciudadano Inteligente

During 2008, the Access to Information bill was approved in the Chilean congress. With the main objectives of becoming the counterpart to the government and protecting and strengthening civil rights, Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente was born the following year in 2009. Since then our focus has been on issues of public information, supporting and working with the government to improve the quality of the data that is open for citizens.

Over the years, we have seen a significant growth in the Ciudadano Inteligentes community. Today we have reached over than 80,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter. Also, we have been experiencing a more relevant role in Chilean media; we are constantly and consistently approached by various media outlets when there is a public discussion regarding the issues in our agenda. In terms of civil society partnerships, we are a driving force behind the wide network of organizations all of which work with the goal of a social change, and the empowerment of civil society.

There are many organizations that have initiatives that aim to promote transparency and open government, claiming to strengthen accountability and civic participation while benefiting from technology to achieve these goals. Nevertheless, there is a lack of empirical studies and analysis that may support these claims.

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente acknowledged this lack and consequently designed an case study to measure how close we are to actually achieving our theories of change. Aiming to move away from more traditional descriptive studies, we hired an expert who had previously led experimental research for JPAL at MIT. To give some context, experimental design studies require the definition of a methodological frame that includes groups of treatment, control, and the implementation of a test to a random group of population.

Two studies were designed to respond our questions:

• An Evaluation of our platform Acceso Inteligente (www.accesointeligente.org): The study analyses how this platform fulfills its duty to manage FOI requests in an easy, open and sharable way. It also review the characteristics of the platform and how they compared to other world FOI platforms.
• The Role of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente in the Compliance with AOI Law The study compared how public authorities responded to different sorts of information requests, contrasting how these responses vary when they are sent from an ordinary citizen, or from a Ciudadano Inteligente email account, or from a Ciudadano Inteligente request that includes a more detailed letter (email) explaining that we are conducting a specific accountability exercise.

The first case study concluded that the platform Acceso Inteligente responds to most of the needs identified by the transparency literature and it leads an effort to fill some of the main gaps in guaranteeing that all citizens in Chile have access to public information. In terms of response rate, the results indicate that 80% of the request received an answer, seems a reasonable large proportion. We identified two critical components that made the difference.

First, the two-step process in which users can browse the repository of previous requests before submitting their own, it is designed to increase efficiency in the flow of information. Our quantitative indicators suggest the two-step process help users to identify information that has already been produced, as 70% of the treatment group was able to find the information in Acceso Inteligente and therefore didn’t submitted the request, saving time and resources to both users and receiving organizations.

Second, our quantitative and qualitative indicators also showed the platform, designed as a centralized system able to manage multiple requests regardless of the receiving organization system, facilitates the demand for information and reduces the time needed to submit requests. Two type of information demand are specially favored by the program features: request to organizations that lack an online system and multiple requests that are needed to perform comparative analysis.

The second case study concluded that Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente is currently playing an important role at increasing and facilitating access to information. Through its program Acceso Inteligente it makes the process of submitting information request simpler and more efficient, facilitating and incentivizing the demand for information. Also by intermediating between citizens and public organizations in the demand for information Ciudadano Inteligente increases the provision of public information.

Given these conclusions, we are very motivated and interested in continuing to exam our work with other case studies. It’s important to increment the empirical results of how the work of local NGO’s impact governments policies of public information; and the real impact of technology driven ideas make on society.

To see the case studies in their entirety please go to (http://datahub.io/es/dataset/case-study-ciudadano-inteligente)