Live Tweeting PDF Latin America and Tech@State
This week marks the inaugural Personal Democracy Forum Latin America conference and the kick-off of the State Department's Civil Society 2.0 initiative, both taking place in Santiago, Chile.
The location is appropriate: Latin America is sometimes called a laboratory for democracy, and Chile is in many ways representative of this. The current president, Sebastian Pinera, is the first conservative to win an election since 1958 - in between then and now the country has seen a coup and 16 years of dictatorship - and January's democratic turnover of parties was seen by many as signaling the end of Chile’s drawn-out transition away from dictatorship into a fully consolidated democracy. Both events are likely to be chock full of people from Chile's growing civil society sector.
The two day long PDF conference will be organized according to 5 main buckets: political mobilization, transparency, how new technologies can influence economic development, the new public sphere, and examples of projects that are employing new technologies to address concerns at a local level. It'll bring together activists, NGOs and tech experts from around the region, as well as 16 promising young people attending on Google scholarships for a series of panels and breakout sessions that will hopefully lead to some fruitful collaborations.
Immediately following PDF is Tech@State and the kick-off of Civil Society 2.0, an "initiative to create a self-sustaining movement to connect social good organizations with technology based tools and volunteers to help raise digital literacy and increase their impact in the 21st century." Here activists will present their projects and breakout into smaller conversations, along with people from NGOs and the technology sector, about everything form civic engagement to climate change to disaster response.
We’ll be live tweeting both events from the AYM account, so follow along there. And if there’s any portion of the program you’d like us to pay particular attention to, let me know.
