From plebiscitary democracy to digital government, a century of enormous technological advances in
human communication has passed, however, with little progress in the form and depth of citizen
participation in the traceability and monitoring of public resources and decisions, including how to
administer them in the most local sphere or within the reach of citizens. Today we are taking important
evolutionary leaps in the social phenomenon of participation; from cultural expression to politics, from e-commerce to remote video gaming, home working and e-learning, we have the technology and information to make the changes. Perhaps a few tools and the will to get them going is what we need.
Social networks: from student revolts to presidential changes
It is possible that the arrival on the scene of social networks in 2003 to 2006 has caused a certain collective excitement that opened the floodgates to all kinds of participation, including riots and protests in many parts of the world. This is the case of the “Penguin revolution” in Chile from 2006, where thousands of high school students protested massively against the privatization of education, which came to paralyze the country. We lived in that southern country in 2009 to closely study this phenomenon, among others that could be related to local development. On a greater or lesser scale, it happened in the United States in 2008 (Wall Street), Spain in 2011 (Puerta del Sol), apart from various “Color revolutions” and “Arab springs”, some more spontaneous expressions and others more deliberate.
A doctoral exam opened the doors to ten years of scientific adjustments
Field observations and annotations took off in 2012 when we prepared one of the doctoral exams in political science. It was about giving applied scientific channeling to so many concerns regarding
participation, such as the one we exposed in an article made at that time to explain the role of technology in the evolutionary leap from digital government to electronic democracy. This process of responsible participation had to be made viable without falling into populism or revolt, which is why we proposed the development of the App Citizen audit in 2016 as one of the central projects of Brezza Project. We also made a video that can complement your explanation, all of which supports the potential of this project. Finally, we must recognize that the global digitization curve has accelerated incredibly since the pandemic, which gives the proposal a greater technological and sociopolitical context.
Samuel Scarpato, CEO-founder