Paper Title
Strategy of Citizens Monitoring of Public Budgets in The Republic of Colombia Through PTE
Abstract
The Government of Colombia, specifically the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, has developed the Portal of Economic Transparency, www.pte.gov.co, a web-based initiative to make visible to the citizens the fiscal figures, the national and regional public budgets, the public contracting all in the form of lists, maps, infographics and indicators. A strategy was then designed with the objective of inviting Colombian citizens to carry out social control of public resources based on the data published on the Portal. The strategy includes several actions of which two have already been carried out in the first semester of this year 2018: a rally-like race of visits to public works projects throughout the country, inviting citizens to upload photos and videos to social networks, thus giving an account of the progress of said works; also a hackathon for the development of collaborative computer applications in order to solve some problems presented in the state student feeding program - PAE, initiative of the Ministry of Education. The response of the citizens was about 70 teams of Colombians from all over the country for the rally and about 10 student teams of programmers who developed applications or computer models in the hackath on. The winning teams were connected with the responsible state entities in order to achieve feedback on the respective processes. The objective of these efforts is to advance the principles of open government in Colombian society as a way to fight against corruption and encourage the public to collaborate in the control of public resources.
Some institutional links of interest:
http://www.pte.gov.co
http://www.anticorrupcion.gov.co/Paginas/una-carrera-por-la-veeduria-de-los-recursos-publicos.aspx
http://www.anticorrupcion.gov.co/Paginas/hackaton-busca-soluciones-al-PAE.aspx
Keywords - Open Government, ICT, Economics, Budget, Portals, Transparency, Hackaton, Public Participation.