The Centro de Integración Ciudadana CIC (Center for Citizen Integration) is a citizen network in Monterrey that aims to reconnect the citizens between each other and with the municipal authorities. One of their goals is to awake the citizens to work for a better society. The CIC takes advantage of mobile technologies to enable the citizens to generate reports about the city and send them to the authorities.

The CIC is an NGO with a core group of employees who run the site and develop new services, their work is supported by citizens contributions and some donations, making it non related to the government.

One of the main features that the CIC have is called Tehuan (Us in Nahuatl). Tehuan is a platform to recibe and share citizen reports that are made via twitter, SMS, web or by a Mobile App. All the reports are stored in a public data base where anyone can access and see what’s happening in the city. At the same time the authorities have access to the data base, so they could interact with the citizens reports and take action. With this tool the interaction between citizens and authorities leaves a digital trail, meaning there could be statistics about the authorities responses. All the data from Tehuan is public and they have an API so more people could build up on them.

Tehuan reports heat map. Source: CIC (2014)

Tehuan is working since 2011 and they have processed more than 100,000 reports, just in March 2015 they already have 295. The most interesting part, at least for me, is the follow up to the authorities, the platform process the data from the citizens and the government so they could know when the authorities take action, and they deliver insights about that, making the process more transparent, and kind of a competition between the municipalities.

Efficiency by area and municipality. Source: CIC (2014)

The platform has been really successful with the Monterrey citizens and the municipalities, one of their main success has been to get the citizens to participate again and to inform the government, building up the link between citizens and government officials is something that could seem difficult, in Monterrey they experienced a high wave of violence during the last years, and the use of this tools combined with social media channels like twitter and facebook had enabled a new way of public participation.

The other success of the CIC is the follow up to the government actions, get to know in how many days does the reports are closed, who is responding better and when the people are reporting are key points to evaluate the government and call them into accounts if something is not working.

At last but not least the building of trust between the citizens is one of their main assets, in a country plagued with violence and corruption get to trust an institution is not an easy task and they are doing it.