Alvateli questions / dudas sobre alvateli

[Rodrigo Castilla]

Hola | Hi

It's a pleasure to meet you all,

Just for this time, I'm going to write in spanish and english, please let me know if one is a better option or is in compliance with the community rules. 

---- Español.
Estoy muy feliz de encontrar esta comunidad. Mi nombre es Rodrigo y estoy iniciando un proyecto llamado Transparencia por México, el objetivo es aumentar FOIA request y otorgar datos útiles a los ciudadanos. 

Considero que Alaveteli es una gran alternativa, sin embargo, tengo dudas sobre cómo adecuarlo a la situación mexicana, cómo es que se genera el contacto con las autoridades y si es técnicamente posible hacer que interactúe con la plataforma gubernamental ya existente. 

Me encantaría poder hablar con alguien sobre esto, estaría sumamente agradecido. 

--English

I am very happy to find this community. My name is Rodrigo and I am starting a project called  "Transparencia por México" the main goal is to increase FOIA request and provide useful insights to citizens. 

Alaveteli is a great alternative, however, I don't know how to deploy it into the Mexican context. I have two main questions:

1. How does contact with the authorities work? and
   
   
2. Whether it is technically possible to make it interact with the existing government platform. 

 I would love to be able to speak to someone about this, I would be extremely grateful.

Thank you very much! 

[Jen Bramley]

Buenas Rodrigo,

Gracias por su mensaje :) hay mucha gente aqui que habla espanol pero normalmente usamos ingles para incluir los que no hablan espanol :)

It's really interesting to hear about your project! Mexico is one of the places where we've not done a lot of work on FOIA because there's a well established government platform. 

Alaveteli contact works via email: the system sends emails with unique addresses which the authorities can respond to as they would a normal email. The platform then threads the email into a page which will show the original request and all the related responses. Each request has a unique address and a unique page on the site. 

In terms of integration with another platform - it could be possible to do an integration but it would require the government website to accept to integrate and it would also depend on what system they're using and a lot of complex technical details about integrating. If you want to go down this route I would suggest forming links with the government department who run the platform, as well as technical groups in Mexico (for example https://www.codeandomexico.org/ ) to explore what is possible.

I hope this helps!

All the best

Jen

[Rodrigo Castilla]

Hi Jen, 

First, thank you very much for your answer and the resources, I'm very glad to meet you and find this awesome community. The work you all are doing here is amazing 😀

Yes in México we have a government platform, I believe it is a first step in the right direction, and I will look forward to contacting the authorities and proposing an integration with alaveteli and other systems if necessary, or at least the creation of an API, if you want we can be in communication and I can tell you how does that work, please let me know. 

(--- Let me expose my reasons and my project, this part is optional I know there is a lot of things to do, I don't want to be a hazard---)
Even though we have the transparency platform I started the project due to the lack of citizen participation, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography only 3.6% of the adult population have made a FOIA request in the past year, and approx 1/3 of the people didn't receive the information requested. After the negative, 70% of people did nothing, the "commissioner" | comisionado Oscar Guerra said that he hopes this is a consequence of the "good service" ..... I don't think so.

The last year approx 10 million mexicans wanted to make a FOIA Request but they didn't do it based on the next reasons: 47% thinked that is no necessary, 26% said that it took a lot of time and effort, 20.5% didn't know that was possible, and 3.5% doesn't trust the government.  Additionally, 64% of the active users of the government platform are not "very satisfied" with the FOIA request being 23.7% "very unsatisfied". I'm not an economist or marketing expert, but if your customer satisfaction rates are those, maybe you're doing something wrong. 

My project proposal relay in the conviction that a good user experience, better usability, good design, compliance with international guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, better frontend technology, better backend and search engines (no that thing proposed by the government), better notification processes we want mobile and customize notifications that use twilio or something, not only the government platform, specially better data, we want raw data and open formats for analysis (no more pdfs please), will drive to a better, easier, useful, inclusive and aesthetic access to information system. The technology is great, but  is even better when it is designed taking into account the people's needs. 

I believe that these improvements will have a positive impact in the citizen participation and therefore in the right to know and the quality of the data generated by the government. 

Thank you very much for everything, if you need a lawyer in Mexico to do things related to this topic, please don't hesitate to tell me (I'm a lawyer), also if you need someone with programming experience, databases and frontend development I'm not a software engineer but I may be helpful.

Best regards.

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[Helen Darbishire]

Dear all

 

Just to note that, for many countries, 3.6% of the population making requests would be high. That would be 1.6 m people in Spain … in fact we have no more than 30,000 requests per year total in Spain, which means that, even if each were unique, it would be just 0.06% of the population.

At the EU level, if each request were by a different person, it’d still be just 0.01% of the population.

 

And a 66% satisfaction rate is also high. The last time we did a survey in Italy it was about 70% administrative silence!!!

 

I am not saying that everything is great in Mexico, but it’s interesting to compare the data.

 

Abrazos/All the best

Helen

----------------------------------

Helen Darbishire

Executive Director

Access Info Europe

www.access-info.org

@helen_access

Mobile: +34 667 685 319

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/alaveteli-users/CAJu022gNUSk47pMG3wR5bWa8n9tFxYZREuokhHZad-s6GL6vhA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Rodrigo Castilla]

That is a good insight, thank you a lot for sharing.

Compare this data is super useful and interesting, I have two questions:

1. The rate in Spain takes into account all the population or only the adult population?
2. Where do you get the 66% of satisfaction rate, is something that I said? If not, it will be awesome if you can share the data source.
3. Please can you share your sources (I'm doing my thesis and it will be a great help 😂)

And wow, there is a lot to do in all those countries too! Maybe, there are several factors that I'm not aware of, like information accessibility without FOIA requests, it will be awesome if anybody has statistics about that.

As in other countries in Mexico there is too much to do yet. Web accessibility is one of the main problems, today it is nearly impossible for people with disabilities to exercise their human right of access to information. The government platform lacks proper accessibility settings. 

Thank you a lot !

Pd. All the best, and here are my sources:

- National Institute of Statistics and Geography

https://www.inegi.org.mx/programas/cntaippdpf/2019/

-Government Platform

https://www.plataformadetransparencia.org.mx/web/guest/inicio

Rodrigo Castilla Aranda, representante del proyecto Transparencia por México, con domicilio en av. Revolución 1187, San José Insurgentes, Ciudad de México, Benito Juárez, c.p. 03900, México, avisa que sus datos personales serán usados y tratados  de conformidad con nuestro aviso de privacidad y la legislación aplicable.

TXMx

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/alaveteli-users/03c201d6c1b1%240cdeaba0%24269c02e0%24%40access-info.org.

[Helen Darbishire]

Dear Rodrigo

 

Sorry not to answer sooner. I took the whole of Spanish population into account and did a back of the envelope calculation based on the number of requests. Whichever way you calculated it, it’s less than Mexico.

 

You said “” approx 1/3 of the people didn't receive the information requested” – which leads me to calculate that 2/3 did J

 

Yes, there is still much to be done!

 

Abrazos / All the best,

Helen

 

----------------------------------------------

Helen Darbishire

Executive Director

Access Info Europe

www.access-info.org

@helen_access, @access_info

Mobile: +34 667 685 319

 

From: alavete...@googlegroups.com [mailto:alavete...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Rodrigo Castilla
Sent: 23 November 2020 19:26
To: alavete...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [alaveteli-community] Re: Alvateli questions / dudas sobre alvateli

 

That is a good insight, thank you a lot for sharing.

 

Compare this data is super useful and interesting, I have two questions:

1.The rate in Spain takes into account all the population or only the adult population?

2.Where do you get the 66% of satisfaction rate, is something that I said? If not, it will be awesome if you can share the data source.

3.Please can you share your sources (I'm doing my thesis and it will be a great help 😂)

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/alaveteli-users/CAJu022jwiKJakwagLxF7ie633BMTtMOO6P6maHLJdbY7fBB8Dg%40mail.gmail.com.

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