Today, our guest post is written by Mario Roset and Rosario Gonzalez Morón of Wingu, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Wingu is a Latin American NGO that helps local non-profits leverage technology for the benefit of civil society.

For some years, we have been working with nonprofits all over Latin America to improve their use of the Internet to fulfill their missions. The region has many challenges in terms of technology, starting from low – though fast growing - bandwidth penetration, to a common lack of incentives in the public sector to jump into the digital age.

Like any other, public advocacy organizations also have their own issues: they are poorly financed, understaffed, and usually prefer a “let’s repeat what has worked before” offline approach for their programs, cutting back on innovation. For them, the Internet may be the big thing, but also the unknown.

Our answer for them to this dilemma is simple: don’t invent anything; just adopt what’s out there. We believe that the best way to be innovative in the context of extremely limited resources is to find new uses for mainstream, standardized tools, or to adapt successful initiatives to your context. Here are some examples:

Dinero y Política is an initiative of Poder Ciudadano Foundation ("Citizen Power Foundation") is an interactive database and a wiki that aggregates political finance data in real time from 23 different provincial databases and tracks 713 recognized political parties (414 of which participate as members of 97 different coalitions).

Drug Map of Argentina is a citizen-lead initiative, created by the Anti-drug Association of Argentina that uses a blog and Google Maps to gather information about drug production and distribution around the country.

Congreso Averto is a Brazilian initiative that makes public the information about lawmaking in the national congress. It follows the path of many other proven projects, like OpenCongress (US), and TheyWorkForYou (UK). Vota Inteligente is a similar initiative from Chile that takes information from Congressional websites to make it accessible to citizens. Congreso Visible, from Colombia, depends exclusively on a massive volunteering force to keep their site updated with information that is not on the Congress’ website.

Cuidemos el Voto is a Mexican website that uses Ushahidi standard technology to crowdsource information about improper conduct and fraud in Mexican elections, and display it on a map. There are many more examples of Ushahidi implementations here.

If you’re interested in a more detailed account of each of these initiatives, and also want to discover many others from all around the southern hemisphere, we recommend that you visit David Sasaki’s Technology for Transparency Review.

Wikipedia is the world’s most successful model of citizen engagement and collaboration. It began ten years ago as an experiment in information that challenged the top down approach to developing encyclopedias and now boasts millions of active users with 400 million visits a month. Its staggering popularity ultimately proved the power and wisdom of the crowd in developing online resources well beyond simply creating an encyclopedia.

From the very beginning of the Sunlight Foundation, we were impressed by the philosophical ideals of Wikipedia and sought that kind of access and collaboration to government information. This shared ethos brought Jimmy Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, to our advisory board and soon after our founding we pursued a wiki model for Congressionally oriented research.

The first project the Sunlight Foundation launched in April 2006 was Congresspedia, a collaborative wiki project with the Center for Media and Democracy that was designed to shine more light on the workings of the U.S. Congress. It was an explicit homage to Wikipedia and operated on the belief that a healthy democracy is built on a public informed about the inner-workings and connections of government and its officials. The Congresspedia project followed relevant public figures and tracked special interests in the wiki collaborative writing format that Wikipedia popularized ten years ago. That project eventually became part of Open Congress (which Sunlight proudly supports as its core funder) where the Transparency Hub page is a great collection of resources coordinated by Sunlight’s policy director John Wonderlich and our policy counsel Daniel Schuman.

Happy 10th birthday Wikipedia!

Today, our guest post is written by Joshua Gay, a programmer, activist, and community organizer whose interests revolve around technology, government, education, and computer user freedom.

My personal interest in the Open Atrium project came about this past fall when I began volunteering to help with the Public Equals Online Wiki. The so-called "PEO" Wiki has a lot of potential for being a good place to coordinate and collaborate on state and national transparency initiatives and projects. However, the software it is built-upon, MediaWiki, needs to be highly customised in order to make it a compelling platform for a community to start using. In my efforts to customize and improve the wiki, I have been using the features and design of Open Atrium as a sort of roadmap for improving the wiki in hopes that I can make it a more useful, powerful, and compelling tool for the transparency community.

The Open Atrium project describes itself as a "part intranet, part do-it-yourself project with a kick of open source hotness," and it certainly is one of the hottest Drupal-based projects out there. Its feature list is impressive, and for many organisations or web-based communities, I could imagine it becoming the primary tool for both project management and development. Here is a quick snapshot of it's six biggest features:

Case Tracker - Open Atrium is designed around the principle of users and groups. Every group on the system can create an unlimited number of projects within the Case Tracker, and within each project you can create to-do items. Each item can be organized and prioritized according to categories or milestones, assigned to group members, and discussions and progress notifications on to-do items can be made through a nested commenting system.

Calendar - Although not feature rich as Google calendar, Open Atrium's calendar does present events in a similar, colorful fashion, supports single or multiday features, and syncs with calendars that support iCal.

Blog - This blog contains all of the basic features you would expect with nested commenting, file attachments, and granular notification system. But, what I think makes this blogging system unique is that it is integrated into the system, and therefore, blog posts can be used as a way to discuss projects and share ideas with other members of your group and community as well as with the outside world.

Shoutbox - This Twitter-like update system is a great way to share quick updates with your group members. What I like best about the Shoutbox is that it integrates a social element into the rest of the workflow.

Documents - This is a simple, but nice collaborative document editor that supports: attachments, a revision system with a nice way to compare different versions, and a nice built print function that allows you to export and share the final product.

Dashboard - The Dashboard is where the entire system comes together and gives you a snapshot of all the activity happening across your groups. It is designed around "widgets" (like iGoogle), where users can add, remove, or arrange the widgets on the dashboard however they like. And, of course, it includes a Twitter-feed widget.

One exciting aspect about the design of Open Atrium is that its developers have designed it around the principle of features being designed like "plug-ins." Hopefully, as adoption grows, we will also a growing list of optional features that you can add to your own custom instance of Open Atrium.

I believe that Open Atrium is a powerful tool for transparency, not only for its potential use by government agencies (which would be amazing -- imagine a legislative feature!), but also an important tool for the transparency movement.

Jimmy Wales ,Wikipedia founder and Sunlight advisor, and Andrea Weckerle, attorney, communications consultant and blogger, wrote an interesting column last week  at CNN.com, on how we should create a more tech friendly government.. The duo say that “technology isn't ancillary or extraneous to governance, and instead that it's an integral part of the effective running of a democratic superpower.” In anticipation of President-elect Obama's appointment of  the country’s first national chief technology officer (CTO), they provide five recommendations for core components of a structurally sound, technologically savvy federal government. Their points, in brief:

1.    Ruthlessly modernize: Conduct a survey of the technology used by the federal government, keep what works and replace what doesn’t. 2.    Create openness of information: This will allow transparency and accountability, as well as inspire innovation and collaboration. 3.    Single sign-on across all government Web sites for citizens: Make it so citizens need only to input a single username and password to access all federal Web sites and databases, creating more user-friendly interfaces for citizens that in turn encourage frequent use and participation. 4.    Commit to open-source software and open standards: Such a commitment by the feds would end the practice of adopting closed proprietary software sold by companies with political ties to government. 5.    Create a single government-wide wiki: Large private enterprises have achieved substantial efficiencies by allowing their employees to rapidly share knowledge and disseminate information. The feds should create a single, massive government-wide wiki, which would serve as a cornerstone of a modern federal knowledge management system.

Read their whole column here.

Loudoun County in Virginia just launched a new wiki to collect community news and information. Loudounpedia is run by the Loudoun county library system and has sections for local government information, blogs, job board, recreation and other community related activities.

The government section now has all information regarding the election including a Google map of polling places. This is an excellent resource for the community and the choice of a wiki allows people to edit it with their own knowledge making it a resource that is owned by the community.

h/t to the Municipalist