Kicking off a new pilot to assess impact

We are very excited to announce a new partnership with Humanitas360 that will support a second pilot phase of Promise Tracker in Brazil starting this month!

Over the course of 2015, we had the opportunity to work with Nossa São Paulo and civil society groups throughout the country that make up the Brazilian Network of Sustainable cities.  In a series of collaborative workshops, we developed the first version of the Promise Tracker tools and worked with local groups to pilot the platform to monitor the infrastructure and service issues they thought were most pressing in their cities.

Motivated by the excitement, energy and critical dialogue generated over and over again in these workshops, we are looking to dig deeper into a question that nags so many of us in the field of civic technology and beyond: How can we better understand and assess the impact of our work?

We are teaming up with Humanitas360, the CoLab for Development and Participation and the University of São Paulo, and a range of civil society partners in 2016 to develop case studies on the use of Promise Tracker in different cities in Brazil and explore new methodologies for defining and assessing some of the key concepts that have driven our work on the project – civic engagement, learning, and participation.

Some of the greatest value we have seen to date with the Promise Tracker platform comes not from use of the technology itself, but rather from the process of gathering groups of individuals to discuss priorities, brainstorm solutions, and explore what our individual roles in those solutions can be. We believe this process provides an opportunity to rethink our cities, the role we play in them, and define new forms of participation.
We are looking forward to shaping this exploration of impact with the collaborative principles that have guided the project to date. The process will be an ongoing conversation between partners and we look forward to sharing what we learn as we go.

We’ll be kicking off the second phase of the project next week in Brazil with a series of events and work sessions with researchers, community partners and folks in the wider civic tech community. If you’re in São Paulo, join us for a launch event and conversation on technology for new forms of participatory citizenship on May 9th!