Chilean Chronicles, Part 72: Gains and Challenges for Transparency

I`ve been digging in the past few weeks on my Fulbright research project about the impact of the 2009 Transparency Law here in Chile.

This week I had the good fortune to meet with Francisca Skoknic, reporter for investigative non-profit outfit CIPER. Although a small shop-Francisca told me on Tuesday that they´ve got a team of just 10 people-they are by far the nation´s leader in hard-hitting news stories.

I also spoke with Felipe Heusser, chief executive officer of Ciudadano Inteligente.org, an internationally-funded non-profit that seeks to use technology to distribute power to the citizenry via transparency, and Rodrigo Mora. He´s the head of Pro Acceso, another non-profit that receives its money from sources outside of Chile, Pro Acceso focuses on legal work to advance its mission of making more information public and expanding the parameters of material covered by the law.

I´ll probably write individually about each of the latter three organizations, and for now here are the major points and current state of my thinking as the law heads toward the end of its fifth year of existence.

The good news

Each of these organizations is a part of a burgeoning civil society that is continuing to emerge in post-dictatorship Chile. Francisca, Rodrigo and Felipe all see the law as a fundamental tool in that process.

Each of the organizations uses the law in two primary ways. The first is to give it strength by having a steady volume of requests. Francisca said CIPER folks file requests daily, Felipe said Ciudadano Inteligente has helped citizens file about 1,000 requests thus far and Rodrigo spoken openly about bombarding agencies with requests on a designated topic so that officials there cannot ignore them.

The second method is to choose issues or aspects of the law that could lead to a lawsuit. CIPER was involved in a successful case against then-presidential candidate Sebastian Pinera around his refusal to disclose information about his foundation. The other two organizations were on the losing end of a Supreme Court decision that held that emails of public officials doing public business are not subject to the law.

More focused on documents than data, each organization uses the law as a tool both for present-day Chile as well as a part of the work of historic reconstruction of life during the Pinochet era.

Rodrigo mentioned that many documents about that time have recently been declassified, but have not yet been requested, while Francisca talked about the special section CIPER did for the fortieth anniversary of the coup. CIPER founder Monica Gonzalez, among other projects, played a critical role, along with John Dinges and Peter Kornbluh in bringing some of the regime´s foreign assassinations and the role of the United States to light.

Finally, all three people expressed a positive and optimistic sense of the direction the country is headed in regards to transparency. Francisca called the process ”irreversible".  Both Felipe and Rodrigo said there has been a lot of progress since the law´s inception.

Series of challenges

At the same time, the organizations and the people doing this work face a number of challenges.

To begin, each of the groups is small and comparatively under-resourced. Pro Acceso has a team of about 5 people, CIPER has but 10, while Ciudadano Inteligente is the biggest with about 17 or 18 employees, according to Felipe.

Their size means that they do not get to some of the projects they want to do.

CIPER would like to better integrate its requests and the documents they produce on its website, but have not yet gotten there due to focusing their limited resources on reporting, for example. Pro Acceso used to do more outreach than it did, and found that it had to focus more on the legal work itself.

A related corollary to this is that, even though they understand the value the community of computer hackers can bring to their work, they have not yet linked in meaningful ways to those people.

Pro Acceso´s difficulty with sustained outreach is both not limited to their organization and a symptom of another challenge: thus far the law has been largely a tool for elite Chileans. That is to say, that wealthier, more educated, digitally-connected people living in urban areas are far more likely to use the law than their poorer, rural, less wired countrymen.

The setback with the court´s decision about emails was a significant one.

In fact, Rodrigo said it was such a regressive decision that at times the folks at Pro Acceso are questioning the wisdom of having brought the case. That an increasing share of public business takes place online and that the case focused only on communication about public issues by public officials on public emails only heightens that concern.

Finally, CIPER is a glaring exception to a largely moribund press.

All three people talked about the concentration of major print media in Chile between COPESA and the Edwards family, owners of El Mercurio, and the resistance those entities have shown to pushing for more transparency. In fact, the editorial page of La Tercera, a COPESA property, sided with the government in the case involving emails.

It is important to note that there are individual journalists who use the law, and the number is few. There’s also the attitude Rodrigo said he’s encountered among journalists and that I heard echoed by a colleague that basically runs as follows: If I have to choose between waiting for more than a month to possible get information that my sources could probably get me in a day or two, I’m going with my sources.

In short, a picture is emerging of a small and dedicated band of transparency advocates, few of whom are journalists and most of whom are based in Santiago. They work in their own areas, and, in some cases, together to give the law meaning and to fight against continued resistance toward Chile’s continued movement into a more open society.

On to politicians and the government next.

To be continued.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 62: Our Community Gathers at Bar Liguria

The sausage sandwich I shared with Eduardo was an artery clogger. I really didn’t need the last pisco sour.

Or, for that matter, the white chocolate I shared with Dunreith.

But, man, what a night.

I wrote about two weeks ago about the community Dunreith and I had formed in the first two months here in Santiago.

Last night, at Bar Liguria, large swaths of the tapestry we’ve quilted came together at the Bar Liguria near Manuel Montt to eat, drink and enjoy each other’s company.

It was a combination of the old show, “This is Your Life,” with the Chinese food meals I used to organize in high school when I’d call up just about everybody I knew and invite them to join me at lunch. (In a dignity-saving measure, I’ve learned in the ensuing three decades that it’s not necessary for the event convener to stand and deliver an off-tune rendition of “C is for Cookie.”)

There were fellow Fulbrighters-this included Larry Geri and his lovely wife Rachel, who had just returned from Buenos Aires, and cyber-security expert Greg Gogolin and his daughter Erin, who’s made quantum leaps in her Spanish-speaking ability-as well as Matias Torres, the Chilean sponsor of Deb Westin, a third colleague and friend.

Sebastian Perez-Canto, who works with Miguel Paz and whom we met at the Data School event at the University of Diego Portales where my MacBookPro was stolen, drove in on his motorcyle for a brief chat.

Augmented reality ace Eduardo Riveros came.

So did Irene Helmke, a willowy Chilean-born journalist who speaks English, German and Spanish and whom I met at the conference for Latin American journalists at the old Chilean congress.

And Maca Rodriguez and Miguel Huerta, friends whom we met in Chicago at the home of Mark Hallett and Carmen Vidal-Hallett, were there, too.

Since we’ve arrived, Maca and Miguel have picked us up at the airport, lent us bicycles, taken us to dinner and connected Dunreith with a tutoring job that has been one of the highlights of her time here thus far.

Maca spoke to my students on the first day of class and helped several of them with their requests under the 2009 Transparency Law. She’s helped me craft my request, too. Miguel will be speaking to the students on one of the final classes.

In short, it was a group that included many, but not all, of the folks and groups we’ve met.

I’ve written before about Bar Liguria, a popular and relatively pricey watering hole that features waiters dressed in black pants and vests, potent drinks and a rumbling din that only grows louder as the evening progresses.

We assembled outside, then moved upstairs to the second floor, where the waiters combined about six smaller tables to form a long space where we all piled in, sat down, and started talking.

We covered a dizzying range of topics.

Larry and Rachel told us about their adventures in Buenos Aires, their struggles with mastering the tango during a class taught by an Argentine man and an exacting, female Romanian assistant.

Buenos Aires is enormous-it makes Santiago look like a small town, Rachel said- and pulsing with energy at all times of the day. The metro is as jammed at midday as it is during rush hour, they said.

Sebastian and I recounted the story of my computer theft, which was recorded by the University of Diego Portales’ security cameras.

The thief swiped the computer belonging to Miguel Paz, too.

He responded by posting the video on the web site of El Mostrador, a local news outlet.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSv66NyY6SY&w=420&h=315] The video elicited a torrent of commentary, which divided evenly between those people who excoriated the robber as a series of unprintable words and those who used those same words for us for leaving the computers out to be taken.

Fortunately, our insurance policy covered the vast majority of the damage, so I ultimately lost a couple hundred dollars, some pictures and some writing that I hadn’t backed up in the cloud.

Eduardo, who has family roots in Venezuela and who lived there for a decade, returning only to Chile last year, was in the clouds about his recent presentation at an international digital journalism conference that took place the week before the anniversary of the Pinochet coup.

I didn’t attend that session because we were in a memory-related seminar, and Eduardo gave Dunreith and me a book about the coup.

He also shared how his father, a doctor who was educated in the Soviet Union, was nearly killed by the Pinochet regime.

At the end of the table, Matias, Miguel and Macarena talked about the impact of living under that kind of terror for years has had on the Chilean people.

Many Chileans coped by focusing only on their own immediate situation.

"If I have work, I’m all right," was a common attitude, they said.

Matias made the point that the Pinochet overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende was only the most recent in a series of coups the country has seen.

We also had a humorous conversation about what Dunreith and I have experienced thus far of many Chilean’s attitude toward service.

It’s fair to say that the idea that the customer is always right has not taken hold.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

If you go to a restaurant here and ask for something that is listed on the menu, but has run out, in many cases, it’s too bad for you.

You should have gotten there sooner.

Want to divide a bill in three and pay with separate credit cards?

Forget about it.

And so on.

Miguel, Maca and Matias said that attitude of taking whatever is given to you is also a legacy of the dictatorship.

They explained that there’s an expression that means, “The old lady has already left.”

If you decide you want to change your order, it’s too late.

If you think about a new topic for a conversation on an ongoing project, the fact that you didn’t mention it the first time means that it’s out of bounds for consideration.

The legacy of the coup has been so profound that it made the recent eruption of memory building up to the fortieth anniversary of the coup so significant.

Matias said that even five years ago not everyone used the word “dictatorship” to describe the Pinochet regime.

Instead, many people said “military regime.”

For the first time in the nation’s history, people are sharing much more openly about what happened, he said.

We talked and talked and talked, and, eventually, it was time to leave.

We settled the bill, hugged everyone goodbye and rushed to Santa Isabel for Dunreith to buy her treasured white chocolate bar.

We floated up Providencia Avenue.

Dunreith persuaded the red-coated gentleman at the front door to let us into the shop, which was in the final stages of closing.

He relented when she said she would only get one item.

We bought the chocolate and a big plastic jug of water, and walked back to our home.

My head buzzed with all that had gone into it.

My heart was nearly bursting, too.

Chilean Chronicles, Part 61: Transparency Troubles in Chile

I wrote the other day about my ongoing project about the impact of the 2009 Transparency Law on investigative journalism here in Chile.

I mentioned in that post that transparency guru Moises Sanchez, who works in the area of open government with countries throughout the continent, believes that the law and accompanying infrastructure of a Transparency Council that investigates and decides on each claim is, with Mexico, among the best in the continent.

Since then I’ve reached out to investigative non-profit outfit CIPER, a stalwart organization that has broken many stories of national impact and participated in international collaborations with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

As it turns out, I also received an invitation that I passed onto my students from CIPER to attend a weeklong workshop toward the end of next month.

Among the first topics: how to file a request under the Transparency Act.

In a positive development on that point, I  heard from my student Doren Lowry that the 20 days since he submitted his request for data has passed, and that he’s going to inquire as to the status of his letter.

More fundamentally, I’ve come with more and more certainty  to believe that it is important to expand my focus beyond a strict look at a particular journalistic outlet, or even the field itself, to get a broader, more textured understanding of how the issue of transparency  is playing out here.

As a result, I contacted Ciudadano Inteligente, a non-profit organization committed to principles of transparency and open government.  The organization, along with two others, has been involved in a lawsuit around the right of citizens to have access to emails written by public officials on their work accounts.

This is an important issue as the Transparency Council and  civil society groups-but not, notably, media outlets-tussle with the government over the rights and limits of the public to have access to what the government that they are funding is doing.

There is historical resonance, too, as Chile continues to wrestle with its wounded past. The society was far from open before the Pinochet dictatorship, and, during his 17-year reign, brutality, information control, and silence were integral and related parts of a ruling method.

The lawsuit builds on the legal foundation that Mario Gebauer, the mayor of Melipilla with whom we spent a number of hours and had lunch yesterday, attempted to establish.

The year following the devastating earthquake of Feburary 27, 2010, Gebauer asked for the emails between Interior Subsecretary Rodrigo Ubilla, and the provincial government of Melipilla about the distribution of funds for reconstruction for the earthquake. (In an analogue to Los Angeles City and County, Melipilla is both a city and a province.)

The government refused to provide the requested documents, citing privacy and confidentiality concerns of the employees, even though they were acting in their public capacity.

The judicial branch ultimately accepted the government’s arguments, and no emails were released.

There was a certain irony in the timing of our meeting with Gebauer.

Today our students heard from David Donald, data editor of the Center for Public Integrity, spoke about an analysis that he helped reporter and friend Kate Golden of Wisconsin Watch of Gov. Scott Walker’s emails.

The number of emails was so copious, David said, that he devised a random sample to get a representative understanding of what the emails said.

Moreover, as Lewis Maltby wrote in Can They Do That, in the United States employers have the right to look at work and private email activity that is done during work time, and even after hours if it is conducted on a work computer.

The Chilean court’s decision is troubling enough.

Yet what is more so is that the government is considering legislation that would place official limits on the public’s ability to receive email from their officials, according to Carlos Gutierrez, a lawyer for the community of Melipilla.

I’ll be looking more into this and report on what I find.

It’s too early for me to render a conclusive judgment.

But a picture is rapidly emerging of an acquiescent press, the majority of which is neither trying to access the rights they have nor to contest the erosion of those freedoms, and of a society whose progressive promises have not yet been with an openness commensurate with those lofty ideals.

Chilean Chronicles, Part XX: Zorba the Greek and My Data Journalism Class

I read Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek when I was a sophomore in college, and many of the book’s moments are with me still.

I remember an old man reprimanding the narrator, also known as the bookworm, character when he asks what dish was his favorite, telling him it is a great sin to say this dish is good and this dish is bad because there are people in the world who are hungry.

I think about the description of Zorba reaching out his huge hand closing his mistress Boubalina’s eyes with “indescribable tenderness” after she died.

I remember Zorba’s seizing of life at every possible instant, his not taking offense when Boubalina’s parrot calls him by a different name, and, of course, his love of dance.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6K7OC-IKnA&w=420&h=315] Yet one of the strongest memories of the book are when Zorba comes across an old man who is planting an almond tree. When Zorba expresses skepticism that the man will live to ever see a single almond, he tells Zorba that he acts as if he will live forever-a statement that elicits Zorba’s retort that he lives every day as if it is his last.

“Two equally steep and bold paths may lead to the same peak,” Kazantzakis writes.

I thought of the Greek legend’s words on Thursday, when friend, lawyer and professor Macarena Rodriguez and cognitive science doctoral student Alvaro Graves came and presented to the students in my Data Journalism class at the University of Diego Portales.

We're just two classes into the semester at the University of Diego Portales, and I can already tell we're going to have a lot of fun.

Now, I will be honest and say that I’m not exactly sure how many students are in the class at this point.

The class list I received from the department says I've got 16.

Six students attended the first session, two others wrote me explaining why they won't be there for the first two weeks, and eight students, including four who weren't there the first time, went to the second class.

By my reckoning, that makes 12, and I won't know for sure until August 14.

That's the date when the students have to make their final decisions about what they actually are taking for the semester.

Whatever the total we ultimately will have, I can tell we’re in for some lively exchanges and some learning from each other.

In the first class I explained that working with data entails acquiring, cleaning, analyzing, incorporating them into your reporting and displaying them.

There are four major ways to acquire data: writing a freedom of information request; scraping data from websites by writing code and transferring them into a format that can easily be analyzed; downloading existing data; and building a dataset.

Macarena and Alvaro came to talk about the first two options.

Maca spoke first, explaining to the students the origin and key elements of the country’s landmark 2009 transparency legislation.

“There’s no greater disinfectant than sunlight,” one of the slides said.

Macarena proceeded to explain why.

She put Chile’s law in the context of the move by governments around the world over the last 62 year years to institute similar legislation. Finland and Sweden were first in 1951, the United States followed in 1966. Maca also showed a slide of a 2011 world map of the world that indicated by country the states of national transparency laws. (Northern and Central Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia had the biggest holes.)

Although 11 Latin American nations have freedom of information legislation, she talked the students through the history of secrecy that has shrouded many of the countries before going on to talk about key features of the Chilean law like the transparency council that decides on individual requests.

The students peppered her with questions about the council’s composition and the types of records that are subject to the law.

Although the volume of questions meant did not have time to see the sample of a successful information request that Maca had, she has agreed to look at their letters to help refine and make them as precise as possible.

Precision is a critical part of scraping, and Alvaro talked the students through what he and other members of the winning team in a recent Scrapeathon here in Santiago. (For those who don’t know, a scrapeathon is when teams compete in a specific amount of time to pull data from a publicly available site, organize them into an analyzable file and then build some sort of visualization from it.)

Alvaro and his team were interested in looking at school quality in Santiago.

They used the SIMCE, a single number published by the Chilean government that ranges from 200 at the lowest to 300 at the highest.

After pulling the data, the team then merged that information with geographic location and plotted the points on a map using a free tool from Google.

That was just the first phase for the team.

They then moved to show the amount of distance students would have to travel and money parents would have to pay by neighborhood to go to schools of varying quality levels.

The point, unsurprisingly, was that parents in poor neighborhoods would have to pay more and have their children travel farther to have their students attend high-quality schools than their wealthier counterparts.

Again, the students lobbed a series of probing questions at Alvaro.

How did you know where in the neighborhood people live, one student wanted to know.

Alvaro explained that he and the team had scraped the data, joined it and built the site in eight hours, adding that the code they used was open source and available on their Github repository.

The team plans to refine the project, he said.

Time was running very short.

I reminded the students that while we were going to hear from many American journalists during the course, we were starting with Chilean professionals who had studied in Chile and the United States, were available to them as resources and who are in different ways committed to bring the truth about their society to light.

I also repeated that the students’ assignment was to write a 500-word analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of each method of data acquisition.

One of the students who had taken notes for the class said they were about 500 words and asked if he could be exempt from the essay.

No.

I took a few pictures of the speakers and students.

Maca zipped out of the door and onto her next task. Alvaro lingered for a while.

Several students asked again to clarify the homework.

Writing freedom of information requests and scraping data may not be the stuff of life and death that Kazantzakis wrote about in his epic novel, but they are different paths to reach the same goal.

On Tuesday we'll see where the students land.

We'll tally their arguments into a list in a Google Spreadsheet, thereby showing them how to build a database.

I can’t wait.