My little grain of corn
I remember it very well. Before starting college, I had a thousand doubts and I was not clear on what major to enroll in or what I was going to do with my life.
And despite all that confusion, my inner nerd had something clear. I wanted to do cool things related to technology, that were useful and helped people.
Almost by chance, in college I had my first programming classes and learned about something called free software, love at first sight.
When I graduated and entered the workforce, I started working in the private sector. With each project, I gained a little more experience, but at the same time I felt an increasing disconnection between my personal motivations and my professional duties. Something wasn’t right, I felt like I was missing something.
And suddenly everything changed for me in 2013.
That spring, I was working as a consultant on a project for the National Housing Fund for Workers (Infonavit), a project that opened my eyes to the challenges of working in public administration.
It was then, thanks to an article in the newspaper, that I first learned about civic technology. Do you remember the famous app for the Chamber of Deputies? It was going to cost 115 million pesos and thanks to a call from Codeando México, several civic proposals were generated to replicate it and for a fraction of the original budget. Welcome to the spring of Mexican civic technology.
Before that, I had no idea that multidisciplinary teams of citizens were generating impact thanks to technology and collaboration. I was fascinated.
Obviously, I wanted to be part of it. Thanks to events like Civic Hack Nights, I was able to meet other people, mostly journalists, programmers, economists, designers; very different from each other but united by their vision of rethinking government structures and processes, promoting accountability, and promoting collaboration between citizens and the public sector.
It was just in one of these spaces, between tlayudas and mezcales, where I had my first opportunity to join a civic project.
Years later, despite the community’s achievements, the COVID-19 crisis has highlighted that there is still a huge gap between the growing needs of citizens and the government’s actual capacity to fully address them. Over the past two years, the public sector has worked tirelessly to create web services, publish open data, and establish communication channels with the population, but unfortunately not always with positive results.
Partly because of this, the Mexican government is accelerating its plans to improve internet access among the population and to strengthen its digital strategy, both from a regulatory standpoint and from a human capital perspective.
And it is within the framework of this accelerated change that civil society has a unique opportunity to accompany these processes, promoting not only government digitalization, but also the open data agenda, the protection of human rights and privacy, standards and good practices, and even experimenting with emerging technologies and reflecting on their possible traps and misuse.
Personally, I can’t imagine doing anything else but working for a better society from the trenches of civic technology and open data.
With great pride, today I join the team of Codeando México, a diverse and experienced group of civic hackers, whose mission and values I identify with, and where I hope to contribute my little grain of corn.
If you also want to be part of the Codeando México community, join the conversation on the Slack channel and find out how you can participate.
