Bring back my Web !

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 23:09:48 +0000

I remember a web before Facebook and before Twitter. It was a place built so that people could talk among themselves, share and collaborate to build things that would make everyone’s life easier.

Sure, you would also use to post funny pictures of cats or brag about your latest party. There was however a different way of doing things online that I can’t explain. Less ego and more community.

I still love that web, and I still think we live in that reality. (Even though it does sound a bit lyrical to say this.) Sometimes I do lose faith on that web, for a little while. Then something wonderful happens, like a new open source project on Github, a new and constructive subreddit, or a blog post to rally time and resources towards something worth doing.

Cidadania 2.0

Lately, it was Cidadania 2.0 that brought my faith back. It’s a conference on using the web to build social tools, forums and ways to practice citizenship and governance in a more effective and efficient way. This year it was filled with amazing new projects, blogs and platforms to help us understand what is going on in our own street or what we can do to improve our education system.

It is also a project built by the love and dedication of three people. Ana Neves, Ana Silva, and Vitor Silva work hard to bring everyone a free event, 1 day full with presentations and discussions and one morning to network with people who are behind new projects and look for partnerships and people to help.

And did I mention it is free to attend? I would gladly pay 50 euros or more to attend and meet so many interesting people. Yet, the team insists on keeping it as easy to attend as humanly possible. You would imagine that government institutions and other companies would jump at the chance to sponsor this initiative.

Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to happen, as this year I didn’t see many public institutions in the list of sponsors. It’s not that the content of the conference isn’t interesting to them. In fact, most of it challenges the status quo or proposes new models of governance and decision making. From where I stand, every city hall in Portugal should be ashamed for not to being present at Cidadania 2.0 and listed as a sponsor.

The people

Every good story needs a hero, right?

My friend Basílio decided to use the web and social media to pressure a number of public institutions into doing their job of making a street safer to walk in. It took him 2 years to get them into doing the job they are supposed to do anyway. Just think about it: they had to be pressured into doing their job.

I talked about this when I was in BledCom last year and you can find the slides in the end of this post.

Upload Lisbon

This is more about the future. Today mostly everyone from digital marketing and social media in Lisbon will be at Upload Lisboa. They will surely talk about Facebook, Twitter, the latest campaign and best practices. They will talk about what is new and exciting, because it is indeed exciting and interesting and shows great promise.

But I don’t think they will all be talking about this web I know and love. Where the main goal is to get people to talk and understand each other, instead of increasing the reach of a facebook post. I risk saying they will forget about the importance of 4chan in monitoring, how to take part in a community on reddit and worst, they may forget to mention why #blogs are still so important.

Well, some of them might but I am here to talk about blogs and about the web I grew up with. How it is still alive and showing great promise even to those who seem to have forgotten about it. And thanks to Pedro Rebelo I know I am not alone.

BledCom 2013: Towards a connected government from Bruno Amaral

X-Ray of a broken political system

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 22:55:19 +0000

The picture in this post is an infographic built by Pedro Cruz. The circles represent portuguese companies. The bigger the circle, the more politicians where involved in managing it. You can find it here: https://pmcruz.com/eco/

He called it “An ecosystem of Corporate Politicians“, I call it an X-Ray of a broken political system.

The dataset includes data from 1975 to 2013. Which shows that this is not just a problem to be fixed, it’s a whole tradition of mixed interests and loyalties. I, for one, have long ago lost all faith in the political parties available. Whenever there is an election, I get myself out of the house to stand in line, show my ID card and push a blank vote down the ballot box. It’s my way of saying that I care, but that none of the options available make any sense to me.

Now, seeing the way major companies are organised around the political system, I can’t help but feel a bit more of dismay and, this is new, a lot more anger towards the political class.

Three players and no communication

Just keep this in mind, our PM is a social-democrat faced with a country taking financial hits from all sides, he is therefore forced to resolve all these issues of alliances between companies and opposing parties to get anything done. While he does that, we get news from him saying that things are looking up with no clear signal that they in fact are. Taxes are still high, starting a profitable company sounds like pulling off a miracle and some families are at the brink of poverty.

On the other side of things, the Socialist Party is a joke. Their communication strategy is to wait for any action by the social democrats and to counter it with an ideological speech. There is no clear plan, no actionable ideas, just shouts and soundbites against the prime minister.

The communist parties do pretty much the same, trying to rally up the middle and lower class towards demands of better quality of life and most of the time undermining any scarce effort for a joining of hands towards a solution.

As for the President, well, there is nothing I can say about him because I haven’t seen any action on his part. Ever. So he’s the non-playing character of this system.

In this scenario I don’t trust any of the remaining members of our government to be virtuous and make the right decision if they have to choose between the people or their own companies (and well-being).

Hacking it to fix it

Have you ever worked with an old computer? Or even an old software at your job that everybody hates and that stopped being efficient a million years ago?

I am going to take a leap here and say that if you answered any of those questions affirmatively that computer or software was soon replaced with a newer model. Sadly we can’t just throw our politicians out of a window like we did in the past. Also, I don’t expect to see this government passing laws that enforce political independence from private companies.

The solution I see is to raise the bar on political scrutiny. In a balanced social system, this scrutiny would come from journalist and media companies. In this status quo journalists have little resources and whether they want to or not, their publications are in some way tied to some of the major portuguese companies.

In Portugal, Political Scrutiny, good or bad, needs to come from hackers and geeks. People eager to learn and eager to build things that help others. And there are already some good examples out there about what can be done.

One of them is a site where people can view what political promises were made by their mayor.

To help fix this system, we could take that idea one step further and list relevant political actions and laws passed, with names of those involved and the private companies they work with. The goal would be to bring just a bit more transparency to politics. Of course it wouldn’t work forever, but it would at least serve as a deterrent.

What’s the use ?

Probably nothing. This idea will by no means result in a complete fix for the broken system. The only good fix would be a full reboot but we simply can’t afford it. We have however entered a time when we must take matters into our own hands.

Patch it wherever possible,
Build new tools to empower citizens,
Make it more transparent,
Throw away ideology in favour of practical and effective projects.

We have sat on our hands and the political class had their opportunity to show results. It’s about time we take action.

Digital Insanity Magazine by Bruno Amaral