Claudio Luis de Camargo Penteado

Democracia digital e experiências de e-participação: webativismo e políticas públicas

The article explores processes of interaction between the State and organized civil society in an effort to assess the weight of the various social mobilization strategies utilized by different social organizations active in the city of São Paulo. The study is particularly interested in analyzing how the use of information and communications technology (ICT) influences the development of public policy as a means for shaping citizen opinion and establishing demands. A Political Participation and Influence Index was used to evaluate experiences in Internet activism in the city of São Paulo. Findings suggest that the movements and collectivities with the most inventive and broadest diversity of strategies achieve better results, signaling a new method of action in contemporary politics.

Olhares sobre a hidreletricidade e o processo de licenciamento no Brasil

Hydropower plays a strategic role in energy policy in Brazil and worldwide. Despite advantages such as cost competitive and low-polluting and renewable nature, negative impacts undertake its expansion. The size of the development, the impacts and the number of actors involved translates into conflicts increasingly frequent and difficult equation. The article presents the views of stakeholders in the process of environmental licensing Brazilian hydroelectric, collected through questionnaires. We conclude that, even with the advances, there is still a social immaturity highlighted by a segmented view, where individual and group interests prevail, which does not rule out that a systemic and equitable be established.

Civil Society and Online Citizen Participation: A Case Study of the Nossas Cidades Network

The article presents a study of civil society’s use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to promote e-participation. The focus is on the Nossas Cidades [Our Cities] network (www.nossas.org) formed to facilitate civil society groups’ advocacy on local public authorities. Based on the paradigm of networked society, organizations act by meeting the institutional norms through ICTs to promote different types of activism. The Nossas network uses interactive and collaborative technological tools to broaden political participation in cities’ civic affairs. To evaluate Rede Nossas Cidades, the methodology of the “Index of Political Participation and Influence” (IPPI) of civil society was used to identify the effectiveness and efficacy of the organization in the policy-making process. The results demonstrate that Nossas Cidades represents an important experience of e-participation toward the development and practices of digital activism.

User profiling of the Twitter Social Network during the impeachment of Brazilian President

The impeachment process that took place in Brazil in April, 2016, has generated a large amount of posts on the Social Networks. These posts came from ordinary people, journalists, traditional and independent media, politicians and supporters. The identification of the impact of this subject on each group of users can be an important analysis to verify the real interest of common Brazilian citizens on this matter. As such, we propose a way to segment the users into popular, activists and observers in order to filter out information and help us give a more detailed analysis of the event. The proposed segmentation may also help other studies related to the usage of Twitter during important events.

The People Have Spoken: Conflicting Brazilian Protests on Twitter

Despite having won the Brazilian elections in 2014 the president Dilma Rousseff faced a wave of protests in 2015 asking for her impeachment. This sentiment of dissatisfaction was reinforced by the tight results together with accusations of corruption. Protests were organized and reported chiefly with the use of Social Networks. Two main protests occurred on March in a two day interval, one supporting the elected government and the other against it. There were multiple requests coming from the protesters. In this work we perform an exploratory analysis of these protests by using two topic modeling algorithms. We analyze how the protesters organized themselves into groups, how they acted, and present a summary of their main demands and opinions. We could identify the groups, the multiple subjects of each group and the tactics used by the supporters to disqualify the opposition.

Brazilians Divided: Political Protests as Told by Twitter

After a fierce presidential election campaign in 2014, the re-elected president Dilma Rousseff became a target of protests in 2015 asking for her impeachment. This sentiment of dissatisfaction was fomented by the tight results between the two favorite runners-up and the accusations of corruption in the media. Two main protests in March were organized and largely reported with the use of Social Networks like Twitter: one pro-government and other against it, separated by two days. In this work, we apply two supervised learning algorithms to automatically classify tweets during the protests and to perform an exploratory analysis to acquire insights of their inner divisions and their dynamics. Furthermore, we can identify a slightly different behavior from both parts: while the pro-government users criticized the opposing arguments prior the event, the group against the government generated attacked during different times, as a response to supporters of government.

Connectivity Public Policy in the Network Society: The Case of “WiFi Livre SP”

Abstract Purpose In 2014, the city of Sao Paulo began to implement the public policy “WiFi Livre SP.” This policy created the infrastructure for a WiFi network providing unrestricted internet connectivity in a 120 public squares, distributed in 5 geographical regions of the city (center, south, north, east, and west). In order to monitor the effectiveness of this public policy, a series of surveys were administered to users. The survey ascertained their views about the quality and frequency of the signal in the public squares. Methodology/approach To carry out analysis of this service a survey was used. The researchers camped out in the squares and flagged people down asking whether they could participate in the survey. Data was collected between August and October 2015, using an application for tablets developed by the research team. Findings The data showed that the networks functioned effectively and provided good service to the users. Another positive factor is the good signal evaluation in the public squares, since it was an initial concern of the project makers. Further, access to these networks made it possible for residents to use several platforms to communicate in an intensive fashion. Social implications The findings show that a connectivity policy should be geared toward promoting the right of all citizens to access the internet regardless of their ability to pay. Free and full access without any sacrifices of privacy should be guiding principles in policy implementation.

Mídia e políticas públicas: possíveis campos exploratórios

The centrality of the media in the Brazilian society assigns to the means of communication an important role in contemporary social dynamics, whose influence attains several fields of human activity, including the political. The debate on public policies has been dominating most of the agenda of the social sciences. In general, the approaches preserve a tendency of institutional character, with the analyses centered on decisional or evaluative processes. The article observes, however, a gap in the researches developed on the theme, i.e., the lack of an assessment of the media’s participation on the cycle of the public policies. In this sense, the article seeks to infer the relations between media coverage and public policies processes in contemporary Brazilian society.