Two papers from ASSERT Members have been accepted for the International Digital Government Research Conference (dg.o 2014) to be held in Aguascalientes City, Mexico, on June 2014. Kellyton Brito, author of both papers, will attend the conference and present both papers.
The first paper is entitled “Brazilian Government Open Data: Implementation, Challenges, and Potential Opportunities” by Kellyton Brito, Marcos Costa, Vinicius Cardoso Garcia and Silvio Meira. A brief summary of the paper is following:
“Technological advances and real-time worldwide communications hold great promise for transforming the efficiency and effectiveness of public services through the ease of publishing and access to government public information or through the offer of new kinds of services. In this paper, we describe two initiatives, Rio Inteligente (Smart Rio) and Cidadão Recifense (Recife Citizen), which are based on Brazilian open-data repositories from the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Recife and deliver services for citizens and tourists, mainly (i) a health-unit finder based on user location and (ii) an online vaccination card. Based on the development experience of these two similar applications that use completely independent open-data repositories, this paper discusses the current state of Brazilian open-data initiatives, their challenges and difficulties, and draws some considerations towards a framework to build applications based on government data.”
The second one is entitled “Using Parliament Brazilian Open Data to Improve Transparency and Public Participation in Brazil“ by Kellyton Brito, Misael Santos Neto, Marcos Costa, Vinicius Garcia and Silvio Meira. The paper abstract is following:
“Government concerns about transparency date from 1957, but current technological advances and real-time worldwide communications hold promise to transform accountability, transparency, citizen participation and collaboration, in addition to offering better public services, by increasing efficiency and effectiveness and decreasing corruption in government. With these goals in mind, this paper describes Meu Congresso Nacional (My National Congress), a first prize winner application developed during the First Brazilian Parliament Hackathon focused on parliamentarians transparency by obtaining and analyzing data from several sources and displaying them on a user-friendly website. In addition, based on this development experience, this paper discusses the difficulties and challenges of developing applications based on Brazilian government data.”
These papers will be soon available on ACM Digital Library. A new post will be done after the conference, presenting our impressions of the event and the feedback from research community about the work.