Civic Technology 101
Colin-Pierre Larnerd
316

This is a really nice approach, Colin-Pierre Larnerd. :)

  1. My community is not very closely knit. There are some group of favelas young residents on Facebook and WhatsApp, but when we talk about citizen journalists or community journalists — they are very divided. There are a lot of hyperlocal newspapers and small websites talking about the same favelas issues and telling stories about its residents, but they don't communicate with each other. I feel that they would be much more efficient if they collaborate to each other to produce more strong content and investigations.
  2. I'd like to develop an online platform to stimulate collaboration in my community. Because most of my community members use mobile devices and don't have computers, I'm thinking about an App or a mobile friendly website where people can share their stories and/or find partners to collaborate and investigate local issues. This App will also curate and share news and stories produced by community journalists. Instead of going to so many websites to have information about favelas, you can have everything in the same place.
  3. I believe my community would benefit a lot from civic technology. I can give you two examples I think are really interesting. The first one is called Nós por Nós, an App specifically designed for favela residents to denounce police abuses in real time and its objective is to map the violence occurrences. The second one is called "PLP 2.0", it is also an App to reduce violence against women. I wrote about this app for BrazilFoundation's website. With only four taps of a cell phone’s power button, police receive information and the GPS location of a woman feeling threatened by a former partner. There is no need to open the app or dial directly to alert the police or friends about the danger. The app even records images and sounds that can be used as evidence against the perpetrator.