The Github interface of the zoning law debate in Sao Paulo (Screen captured from http://minuta.gestaourbana.prefeitura.sp.gov.br/)

It was curious to research what Sao Paulo, the city I used to live in, has been doing over the last months for improving its relation with the citizens through the Internet. Perhaps the first thing that caught my attention was the lack of uniformity: there are sites with a brutal technological gap and unusual solutions and others with bold and interesting fresh new ideas.

Unfortunately, the first one crossed my way initially. Taking care of the City is a section of Sao Paulo City’s website, the largest metropolis in South America, that, according to the government, “was created to help the citizen fiscalize the public services”. The idea, in theory, goes along with the basics of web 2.0 and government 2.0 defined by Tim O’Reilly, stimulating people’s participation, the collective inteligence, to create a database that, by themselves, public employees would take years to develop – or an eternity.

That, of course, sounds good in theory. Taking as an example street cleaning, one of the easiest public tasks to take care of, as it requires some patience and a comfortable spot by the window of your house. The city site informs the weekday and period when the cleaning of a street should be done. If anything goes wrong, according to the page, it is possible to complain… making a telephone to call a service central. If the person is using a computer or mobile to access the information, the rational outcome would be to allow he/she to continue the process on the same media. Certainly this one walks away from the “design for participation” concept. As a citizen that has used the aforementioned phone service more than once, I can say it usually takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete a complaint.

On the bright side, however, there is a very good example of participative lawmaking that was developed during the final stages of debating the new zoning plan for the city. A version of the project that would be sent to the City Council was put on the internet on the same shape as a Github project, open for participation on every coding line – in this case, represented by every article of the proposal. On the left of the screen, a window allowed the user to compare the project with the existing law, approved in 2004. Again, it finds echo in what O’Reilly visioned as government 2.0: clear rules for cooperation (you can comment on each paragraph and agree or not with the proposal, giving an overview of the region, for instance) with some supervising from the city technical staff.

However, this idea attracted only 1,500 comments, a very small number considering the city has 11,000,000 people that will be affected by the new law. And perhaps this aspect can be considered a symptom of failure in achieving the “true citizen participation”, that, according to O’Reilly, does not rely only in technicians getting inputs from citizens.