[Update: Take a look at the case studies compiled throughout the event in Brasilia last month!] 

When the International Anti Corruption Conference team pinged us this month about an idea for a hackathon that they’ll be holding at their event, I’d been thinking a lot about barriers to citizen participation in civic information hubs. I had just been in Peru, where I’d encountered two legislative information hubs (131 Voces and one still underway), one legislative monitoring hub, a public works hub, and a multiple themed PDF directory. I left wishing that there were more incentive for organizations to collaborate around such projects. After all, I suspect that the more websites for finding civic information there are, the harder it is for the average citizen to navigate to the information they want and become more engaged.

The duplication of platforms doesn’t apply just to civic information hubs. It also applies to tactics and tools like the sort of new software applications that often emerge from hackathons. That’s why I’m excited about our role at the IACC this year. We’ll be live blogging short (200-600 word) case studies that surface during the workshops and the hackathon, and then we’ll aggregate them and extract lessons learned with an eye towards future technology for transparency and accountability work. We will, along the with the good folks at the IACC, present the lessons learned we capture a brief on emerging tactics in anti-corruption advocacy. It will targeted and distributed to practioners.

By documenting tools that emerge from the hackathon and tactics that surface in the game changer panel discussions, we hope to make it easier to disseminate this information in a targeted way to those practitioners for whom it would be most relevant.

Do you want to be included? We’re looking for individuals or groups who have either created new code intended to spotlight and mitigate corruption, or who have used new technologies – for example web portals, SMS, social media – in innovative ways to fight corruption. Get in touch with me so we can meet up at the event.