Congreso Visible

Sustaintability. After a decade of hard work and continuous learning, we believe that it is a weakness that the private sector and other institutions are not supporting our efforts. They are not aware of their social responsibility on political affairs. It is a pity to rely on the generosity of international donors and small contributions by partners on specific projects.

We want to show to our donors the relevance of our work for the public good and for the future of our country. It is really hard to obtain funding, even after a decade of hard work.

Basically we fight against obscurity and uninformed political decisions. We promote transparency and accountability in Colombia's congress and provide tools to different sectors of civil society to help them better understand the activities that take place inside Congress, and its impact on their lives. Also we want to create and promote a culture of accountability and political responsibility both from the politicians and the people who elected them.

1. We track, analyze and distribute information about the Congress and its activities.
2. We create profiles of candidates and members of the Congress to promote a responsible, informed, conscious vote among citizens.
3. We build partnerships with local actors to train them and inform them about the importance of political processes inside Congress.

Too often authorities just don't care about real access to public information and citizens are not aware of the impacts of laws on their lives. That is why access to information is not enough, it is necessary to provide tools to help people understand the information, evaluate it and form their own opinions about the current political affairs in Congress. As a result, citizens become proactive, participative and will have arguments to demand accountability from their representatives.

I am a researcher. I just graduated from the university and one of my professors was the Director of Congreso Visible. It was inspiring for me to become a member of such successful initiative. Most of the members of the team are young but qualified professionals in different areas. We are a multi-disciplinary team.

Yes, we provide accessible and comprehensive information. The government does not go beyond the requirements by law, and sometimes the laws are discretionary and the information channels are too slow. Our work is helping the congress, media and politicians to improve their work, but also to interact with the people and communities they represent.

The law does not require the Congress to go beyond access. They do what the law orders them to do: to provide access to public information without requiring timely access in adequate formats. In the dynamics of bureaucracy it is acceptable to publish a document six months after it was produced. That is acceptable according to the law.

Also it is a problem of technical skills - or lack thereof - inside the congressional staff.

It is transforming and improving the quality of our representatives, of the laws they approve and of the relationships between citizens and politicians. It is radically changing the congressional information system. Information per se is not relevant. It becomes relevant when we use it. Our main objective is to share information and by doing so, to empower citizens and incentivize an exchange between citizens and institutions, to build bonds between citizens and their authorities, to modernize our Congress.

The Congress invited us to comment on their Information System Renewal Project. They want to implement a similar system, to follow our steps. It is a recognition of our efforts and good results, and it inspired us to work harder. It is important that the Congress will improve their communication channels with citizens. It is important to provide adequate access to information that matters for them.

It is a full time job as a researcher together with a team of 11 peers, young professionals that are just starting their masters.

The value is to provide a tool to access updated, systematized and comprehensive public information. It allows citizens to easily track the activities of the members of the Congress and it is an important statistical tool to analyze data related to elections and the efficiency of the Colombian Congress.

We built engagement combining our online tools with offline activities. We facilitate workshops to educate people with our partner organizations and we also organize face to face meetings with representatives of the Congress.

CongresoVisible.org does not require registration to access and download all the information on its Website. One can registry using different options such as Twitter or Facebook accounts to leave comments, write articles and other collaborative activities, but such registration is optional.

It depends and our methodologies have evolved with time but for Colombians it is attractive to read the profiles of the candidates. The interest increases when elections are close. The increase of Internet access in Colombia increased our potential followers. There are up to 9 million Facebook users. Now we are increasing the use of social networks, adapting our project to the new social networking environment. It allows our project to attract youth and students who are more engaged in our project than before.

It depends on the audience. The printed press has closely collaborated with us, and also radio. Social networks are playing an important role as well. Our transition to Web 2.0 tools and an interactive Website is transforming the way we communicate with citizens. Colombia has active social networks, almost 9 million users in Facebook. Virtual communities are important to spread awareness or our project. That is why we are using Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and a YouTube Channel.

Social networks matter in Colombia. We changed the design of our website and incorporated social networks as part of our strategy to reach people.

Our ideas and debates are spread via different media, not exclusively on line. Many of our team members also write for private publications and it helps to gain visibility among civil society organizations.

No.

- Numbers of unique visitors in our website.
- Number of information requests.
- Number of contributors in our online forum.
- percentage of visited pages.
- New information available in our Website.
- Website usability.

On top of it, we built a visibility index to provide information about the number of members of the Congress engaged with our project, here you can download the most recent Index of Visibility (in Spanish).

Congreso Visible works with students as volunteers. It is an attractive experience for students of political and social science to engage in an initiative closely related with the law making process.

We need an expert on funding and international aid, to understand the dynamics of such complex field in order to obtain the resources we need to sustain our project. Sometimes it is really difficult for a researcher to obtain good results when applying for funding.

It is necessary to increase the awareness of local sectors, to increase their contributions to our projects.

We have alliances with different organizations. Local NGOs play an important role in our project. Since 2004, they have been actively involved in training and collaboration programs. We organized meetings to connect them with their representatives in Congress, we have trained them and provide them with tools to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their representatives. Local NGOs went beyond the expected: they have replicated our efforts and spread our knowledge among grassroots.

Journalists from printed press and radio are important partners as well, they contribute with their information channels helping us to distribute information about our work. They also benefit from our network, a useful tool for their research and analysis that help them improve the coverage on issues related to the congress and its activities. As a result, citizens have better sources of information. Among our partners I can mention Caracol Noticias, Revista Semana, El Espectador, El País, Vanguardia Liberal, Colprensa y La Opinión.

No. Our tools are developed by Monoku

We are in touch with the members of the Congress and their advisors.

No.

Yes, in fact we facilitated workshops and shared our best practices with different sectors from the civil society. Our most important achievement was the meeting we held with the Colombian Congress and their efforts to replicate and institutionalize their work based in our models.

Also we provide technical assistance to the provincial program, "Nariño Visible."

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