Miguel Lago Discusses Civic Technology and Social Innovation

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“We came from this cyber utopian dream and ended up in this current social-media populism nightmare,” said Miguel Lago, the president-director of Nossas and a lecturer at SIPA.

With authoritarianism and far-right leaders on the rise, there is real cause for concern about the future of democracy. But Lago’s recent presentation on Nossas, a digital media platform that promotes grassroots activism, also made clear there is space for hope.

The February 21 presentation, sponsored by SIPA’s Management specialization, was part of SIPA's Entrepreneurship and Policy Initiative. Students filled IAB 1510 to learn more about how technology could be used in a positive way, to promote greater civic engagement.

Born out of the city-focused activist group Meu Rio, Nossas is a website that has grown into a system of civic mobilization infrastructures and a laboratory for activism. It seeks to solve the collective action dilemma by creating a means to re-engage people who once took to the streets by developing a system of online and offline activism.

This duality is what helped Meu Rio gain 400,000 members—nearly 10 percent of voters in Rio—and it has allowed Nossas to rapidly take root in 12 Brazilian cities. Building off this success, in 2015 the organization started spinning off specific parts of its methodology into single-cause projects such as Mapa do Acolhimento (Safe Haven Map), which helps match health services with survivors of sexual violence; Beta, a feminist chatbot which identifies mobilization opportunities and automatically notifies her followers on these issues; and Bonde, a system by which Nossas shares its technology and resources with partner organizations.

Today, Nossas is one of the largest civic engagement groups in the country, with hundreds of thousands of online registered members taking part in mobilizations around change, work which has already promoted over 90 local public policy shifts.

Not only has the organization been extraordinarily effective in transforming the ways that Brazilians inact democracy, but they also take time to audit campaigns, testing to see what are the best ways to mobilize and activate people with calls to action.

Drawing on more than 300 campaigns in 10 different Brazilian cities and crossing over 800,000 data points, the organization presented preliminary finds on these audits. The presentation was led jointly by Lago and Arthur Aguilar, an economist and data scientist.

“The internet has the ability to create solidarity against fascism,” said Lago.

And the new data collection provides an interesting key to solving this puzzle. These initial findings covered three basic areas: narrative, offline actions, and online actions. That is, the organization wants to understand what sorts of stories motivate people, how effective are different types of offline actions, and what ways citizens engage online.

While the presenters were quick to point out that this data was only recently collected, the fact that such extensive research was conducted alludes to the powerful ways in which Nossas can draw on technology to iterate and improve on its work. And in doing so, it suggests that some semblance of a cyber utopia is still possible.

— Alexandra Feldhausen MIA ’19