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Promise Tracker is a citizen-monitoring platform designed to help communities track issues they care about and use that information to advocate for change with local government, institutions, or the press.
More than a data collection platform, Promise Tracker is a civic process designed to gather groups of citizens to discuss critical issues in their communities, collect actionable information to better understand those issues, and engage in dialogue with local actors in order to develop solutions.
Workshop map
Promise Tracker has been developed in partnership with a network of civil society partners in Brazil through a series of design and implementation workshops. For more information on partners and themes, see the map below.
Cities
Workshops
participants
Design workshops
Throughout 2014, the Promise Tracker team collaborated with partner organizations in Brazil to conduct a series of design workshops to guide the development and testing of the Promise Tracker tools. Working with Rede Nossa São Paulo in São Paulo and the Office of Strategic Priorities in Belo Horizonte, we gathered community leaders and participatory councillors to identify pressing local issues, test data collection processes, gather information in the community and present collected data back to key stakeholders.
Following the development of the initial prototype of the Promise Tracker tools in March 2015, the Center for Civic Media has conducted workshops in cities throughout Brazil to pilot the process with civil society organizations, gather and integration ongoing feedback on the platform and methodology, and train groups of trainers to multiply workshops in their regions. The Promise Tracker tools are under active iteration. Check out the news section for updates from the field.
Background

Promise Tracker is a project of the Center for Civic Media in collaboration with a network of Brazilian partners including Nossa São Paulo, the Social Observatory of Belém, Projeto SOL, the Laboratory for Innovation and Control in the Public Sector at the Federal University of Pará, and the CoLaboratory for Development and Participation at the University of São Paulo. The Center for Civic Media is a research group at the MIT Media Lab that works hand in hand with diverse communities to collaboratively create, design, deploy, and assess civic media tools and practices.We are inventors of new technologies that support and foster civic engagement and political action, we are a hub for the study of these technologies, and we coordinate community-based design processes locally in the Boston area, across the United States, and around the world.
Press
- Aplicativo é aliado de estudantes em Santarém nas denúncias de irregularidades
- Ministério Público de Educação visita escolas de Santarém para vistoriar qualidade da merenda dos alunos
- Celular é arma para monitorar Prefeitura
- Movimento Nossa São Luís recebe oficina do Instituto de Tecnologia de Massachussetts (MIT)
- CNN article, "Making sure politicians make good on campaign promises? There's an app for that."
- Promise Tracker WRKO piece
- Newsweek article, "Fighting Corruption One App at a Time in Latin America"
Background
- Promise Tracker launches civic monitoring campaigns across Brazil
- Piloting Promise Tracker in Sao Paulo
- Initial Reflections on Promise Tracker
- Workshop Stories from São Paulo, Brazil
- Presentation at 2014 Digital Media and Learning Conference: Balancing Deep and Wide Impacts in the Design of Civic Tech
- Promise Tracker and Monitorial Citizenship