 Hello, everyone. My name is Jorge. I'm a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electronics and Informatics at the Catholic University of Paraguay. Today I'll be sharing with you our experience of using technology to strengthen your participation in Paraguay. A bit of context, Paraguay is a developing landlocked country, as you can see in the map situated in the heart of South America. The long dictatorship that governs the country in its recent history has strongly shaped the culture of participation of Paraguay. For most of the population, for example, engaging in democracy is almost exclusively associated with voting and protesting, and other forms of more propositive participation are still relegated in Paraguay. The potential of today's information and communication technologies, we understand that give us the possibility to promote new and innovative forms of civic engagement, where people can participate not only by casting votes every certain years, but by generating knowledge, proposing ideas, and by making meaningful contribution to democracy. Inspired by the increasing number of governments and serious society organizations that have begun to use technology to engage citizens in democracy, we decided to explore how technology can facilitate impactful processes of civic engagement in developing countries like Paraguay. In this sense, we have been participating in the design deployment and execution of three real cases in which technologies was used to engage citizens in public consultation oriented to address issues of public interest. The first case is what's called Vos Ivoto in Spanish or Voice and Vote in English, represented an initiative in which the citizens were invited to submit ideas on how the services and infrastructure of the city of Asuncion, which is the capital city of the country, can be improved. The initiative lasts for three months, from October to December of 2015, during the electoral period of the municipal election. For this case, we partner a local political party, which was running to occupy seats in the municipal council of the city of Asuncion. The candidate of the political party led the outreach media efforts by promoting the initiative through their personal social media profiles and also in newspaper and radio shows. IdeaScale, which is an idea management system, was used at the main ideation space and also a Facebook group was used as an alternative channel of participation. In the middle of both platforms, we had an application that synchronized automatically the content of both platforms. So users, independently on the tool they choose, could access to exactly the same content. The idea of using Facebook was to reduce participation barrier by allowing people to use a familiar tool. And we also wanted to give them the possibility to participate by using a tool that they know and without having to learn a new tool or to have to create a new username, etc. 154 people participated in this initiative. They generated 36 ideas, posted 88 comments, and casted 429 votes. 26% of them submitted ideas and less than half of them, less than half of them only observed what happened during the process. The second case, sought to engage the public in discussion around the public education of Paraway. By using the same platform as in the previous case, meaning IdeaScale and Facebook, citizens were invited to submit ideas on how the public consultation of the country of Paraway could be improving three main themes, school attendance, teacher training, and education infrastructure. The initiative was organized by my university and last for six months from September to February of 2017. The promotional strategy in this case was heavily based on weekly Facebook ads and posts. 67 people participated in this initiative. In total, seven ideas, 13 comments, and 37 votes were generated in both platforms, Facebook and IdeaScale. For people who submitted ideas and 73% of the participants only observed what happened during the initiatives. The third case, which is an ongoing initiative, we just started this month, a few days ago. Here we are not using IdeaScale, but we are using another platform very similar, which is called AppCivis, and we are also using Facebook to facilitate participation. And here the people are invited to submit ideas on how an iconic public part of the city of Asincion can be renewed. An organization of the civil society and my university are running the initiative, and here we are following several promotional strategies. For example, for the first time we are combining the online activities with offline events, where people can go and submit their ideas, propose their ideas, and also deliberate. The idea with this is trying to reach a sector of the population that are not very familiar with technology. We are also partnering public institutions and an organization of the civil society to advertise the initiative through them. And also, as in the case of education, we are using Facebook ads to recruit participants and promote the initiative. Since we have just started, we don't have much data about this initiative yet. So from here I would like to focus the presentation on the two cases that have already finished, the voice and vote, and the one about education. By drawing on data collected from a mix of quantitative and qualitative research methods, such as online surveys, semi-tractor interviews, and analysis of the platform activity logs, I'll be sharing with you the profile of the participants of this initiative, their motivation and expectations, and also the impact of these processes. We found that in general, the people that participate in this initiative consisted of equally-distributed men and women, young, wealthy, well-educated, technology savvy, mainly internet consumers, not frequent voters, but more directly active in society. We also discovered that people participated mainly attracted by the possibility to contribute solutions to the problem of education, in that case, or to the problem of the city's services and infrastructure. We also found that half of the participants, half of the participants indicated that this initiative represents a new learning and education opportunity for them. By reading what the others said and exchanging arguments, they were able to know what the others thought about their viewpoints. Almost half of the participants reported that they participated mainly motivated by a strong civic duty. We asked the participant about their expectation in the process, and we found that 32 percent of them believed that their ideas will mainly contribute to inspire others. We also found that 31 percent of them expected their ideas to be a study, and a quarter of them thought that their ideas would be implemented. Here it's interesting to notice that people decided to participate, even believing that very likely their ideas will not have an impact. Talking about the impact of these processes, we found that technology allowed people living abroad, Paraguayans living abroad, to be engaged in processes oriented to address issues in their home country. 13 percent of the participants reported to be abroad or to live outside of Paraguay at the moment of these processes. We also discovered that technology has the potential to engage people not civically active. Forty-four percent of the participants reported not having both in elections in the last years. But mainly the main impactful result of this initiative was the possibility to directly influence public policies. Among all of the ideas proposed in the voice and vote initiative, the first one I present, the political party that organized that initiative, especially promoted one of the ideas inside the municipality. The idea about creating a plan for garbage recycling and classification. After some time, the municipality took that idea and transformed into a pilot plan, and deployed the pilot plan in some neighborhoods of the city. Then to this pilot plan, the municipality was able to recycle more than 20,000 kilograms of garbage. An idea that started in a platform during a public consultation process and ended up having a huge impact in the situation of the city, in the cleanliness of the city. Finally, I would like to close the talk by sharing with you the main lesson we learned from running this initiative. First, people show to be more willing to participate. The discussion topic is about day-to-day issues or issues that affect their daily life, such as their cities, infrastructures, and services. Then when the main theme of the initiative is about a broad and complex topic such as education. Second, we found that promoting exclusively through social media is not an effective method to attract participants. We had really problems trying to drive traffic to our platform when we used a structure process, promotion strategy based on a weekly impersonal Facebook post. However, we were more success when we had the candidate of the political party that organized one of the initiatives inviting the public to participate through his personal Facebook profile. Third, one of the most common feedback that we collect through the surveys and interviews was that the people wanted the organizer of this initiative to be responsive. They wanted to see that the organizers cared about their contribution. They wanted to know what the organizer thought about their proposals. For some of the participants said that they wanted to see more clearly on the platform, what will happen with the ideas when the process finishes? It is important to set the expectation of the participants by clearly communicating the goals of the process. In both initiatives, we were currently asked about the future of ideas. People asked, if someone will read, if someone will study my idea, if we will present the ideas to the corresponding authority, etc. They want to know what will happen at the end. You have to be clear with that. Lastly, one of the main comments that emerged from the participant feedback was that they really appreciate the effort of setting this process up, but they want to have an impact with their participation. They don't want to spend time crafting ideas and proposals if nothing will happen at the end. They want to have their ideas on practice. One of the key aspects that differentiate the voice and vote initiative, the first one, from the education one, apart from the topic and the promotion strategy, was that we had on board a political actor with the power to push forward ideas, proposals, and needs of the people. On the other hand, in the main concern of the people that showed to be interested in the education case was not seeing the ministry of education a part of the organizers or a sponsor of the initiative. Given then the impression that this was only a toy process or a toy initiative that we were running for, I don't know, research purposes. All of these lessons that we learned in these two cases, we are putting in practice in our ongoing initiative about renewing the an iconic part in the city of Asuncion. Thank you so much for your attention. I hope you find the talk interesting and useful. Thank you.