Ojo al Voto is a citizens initiative in Costa Rica, intended to inform and monitor political and electoral processes. Ojo al Voto is literally translated as "Watch the Vote".

The first phase of the project covered the recent 2014 presidential elections in Costa Rica, where 51% of the registered voters were young people from 18 to 28 years old. That public, disenchanted with politics, were in charge of deciding the election.

Drupal

Ojo al Voto used Drupal as its primary content manager, and built other tools around it in order to appeal to that public. The site served as a webservice for some tools and it contained a very large source of information of candidates, both presidential and parlamentary, profiles and opinion from bloggers for each: the good the bad and the ugly of every candidate.

Its success comes from the interdisciplinary approach of the project: journalists, developers, designers and citizens interested in transparency gave it the push it needed.

In this talk, we'll go over the benefits of Drupal for these kind of projects with information architecture and as a service. We'll review our discoveries and results, on how to use the platform to reach your goal.

We used several key modules to create our needed features, which include

• Opinion blogs, with author profiles
• OAuth integration
• User generated content
• Web services
• Custom front pages for first and second round of presidential elections
• Deep relations of actors (candidates, political figures, institutions) and content. Large use of entity relations throughout the entire site
• Political proposal comparison app
• "Who thinks like you" app, to find affinity of visitors with political parties and proposals
• Data visualization for national statistics and congressional candidates

What's next?

Being the first part a success, we are currently working in the next iteration of our service to Costa Rican voters: a platform to make the government more transparent and for us, as citizens, to gain more political control over the people we selected.

These services include:

• Obtain information directly from congress in order to minimize human error completely, currently under way and walking!
• An API for any citizen or media outlet to compare and visualize information from our database.
• Monitoring nominal over votes inside congress: Costa Rica does not manage votes nominally, only totals per law.

Is this session for you?
IT IS!
More If you work for a non-profit or as a service provider for such organizations.

Also if:

• You run a similar initiative in your country, or intend to
• You want learn how drupal can empower you with complex entity relationships to deliver content
• You want to learn about statistics and results of initiatives that come directly from citizens
• You want to serve different products, using drupal creatively to fulfil your objectives
• You want to know simple technical solutions for complex human content problems

Who am I?

Im a partner at Manatí, where we have built complex information structures with Drupal, that can be easily accessed. We want to share our discoveries and how we accomplish goals through the great contributions of the Drupal community and others.

Our company was part of the citizens and institutions donating time and work for the initiative, among others.