As I step down as executive director of Open Knowledge Brazil, I look back on the main achievements and challenges since 2019

It’s time to leave. I’m leaving the executive board of Open Knowledge Brasil (OKBR) after four and a half intense years.

It hasn’t just been one journey, it’s been multiple: we’ve been through a pandemic, faced serious threats to our fragile democracy, suffered extreme weather events and followed profound transformations in the technology landscape. These transformations have increased the economic and power concentration of platforms and big techs and have turned the information environment around the world upside down.

Open Knowledge Brasil’s mission has always been at the confluence of these factors. So running a civil society organisation like this against this backdrop is even more challenging. Behind the scenes, fulfilling this role almost requires a dual identity of leading and managing.

On the one hand, leading means envisioning and dreaming up paths, identifying opportunities, pointing out what is possible and working together to build it. When you lead by example and horizontally, as I try to do, you have to put your whole arm into it: writing, organising, analysing and even coding. It requires bursts of energy, getting excited and letting yourself be infected by the team’s enthusiasm, losing track of time a little as you dive into an idea. You have to observe the environment you’re in and be aware of the capabilities that each team member may not even know they have to respond to that environment.

Managing, on the other hand, requires complete mastery of time. Planning and meeting deadlines, taking care of institutions, maintaining the most productive dialogue with partners, the field and public authorities, worrying about getting everything in order so that the future always comes smoothly, keeping bank accounts in the black and cash flow up to date – all of which I navigated much more smoothly with Murilo Machado, OKBR’s operations director. Managing is also about maintaining constant attention to the team, the challenge of cultivating remote ties and maintaining the humanity of long-distance relationships – partly imposed by the pandemic, but which also allow us to have colleagues spread across Brazil and beyond.

When I look back, I see results on OKBR’s three fronts that make me very proud.

The Brazilian School of Data had to reinvent itself during the pandemic, creating its own online course methodology with recorded, live and practical classes. The Data 360º course, aimed mainly at beginners, appeared in the first months of the pandemic and received hundreds of students in all its editions. The demand was so great that it was even adapted for entire classes for municipal administrations and other public bodies. Based on it, we developed a training platform that has helped thousands of people unravel the world of data and programming on topics such as education, public safety, the environment and local data journalism.

We began to interact with new audiences and territories, fostering and strengthening other communities. An example of this new reality is Coda Amazônia, the Regional Conference on Data Journalism and Digital Methods derived from Coda.Br, which is on its way to its third edition in Belém (PA) and whose conception had the active involvement of local leaders. It would be unthinkable to produce an event of this scope without strong local interaction, and so we all grew. In 2023, one of the most rewarding activities was exchanging knowledge with the riverside communities of Salvaterra, in partnership with the Marajó Observatory.

The Advocacy and Research programme gained institutionality and relevance. The initiatives around Covid-19 Transparency have driven the opening up of data in an unprecedented way in Brazilian states and capitals and have impacted other areas of public power, guiding judicial decisions and bills, and subsidising the work of different sectors of civil society, from the press to academia. It was an experience so rich in learning that we made a point of recounting it in a book.

In organisational terms, this initiative was a turning point in our work with public authorities. OKBR, which already had a history of pioneering work and co-operation on the subject, became a benchmark in data openness policy throughout Brazil. The Data Publishers course – which also became a book – was born out of the demand for training in data governance and openness and connected us with management teams from Acre to Rio Grande do Sul.

Many institutional spaces have opened their doors to OKBR as a result of this recognition. In the year leading up to the 2022 elections, I had the honour and responsibility of serving on the Electoral Transparency Commission of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE). There, I witnessed and contributed to the efforts to increase the good practices of the body, which is fundamental to sustaining our democracy. We were also called upon to collaborate in collegiate bodies such as the Comptroller General’s Council, working groups such as the National Council of Justice and public hearings in Congress and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, always dealing with this delicate intersection between technology and the public interest.

On the Civic Innovation front, Querido Diário has brought joy and a lot of hope in new ways to counteract an environment full of information pollution and concentration. We believe that the best hope against disinformation is access to quality information and that civil society must build its own tools with open and free technologies. That’s why we’ve built an open data infrastructure of official municipal gazettes capable of feeding other initiatives, such as the Climate Diaries and Education Technologies. We caught the world’s attention: I was able to present Querido Diário in Buenos Aires, Zurich and Washington, when we were recognised by the Digital Public Goods Alliance during the Nobel Summit in 2023.

Some of the results I’m most proud of, however, are almost invisible to outsiders, but they were essential for us to achieve the others. Since the first day of this administration, we have worked to strengthen OKBR’s governance, its administrative practices, its strategic planning, its hiring criteria and its financial and institutional transparency mechanisms. These are arduous tasks that only those who are involved in the day-to-day know about, but they are fundamental if this small organisation is to grow smoothly.

The quest for sustainability involves diversifying sponsorship and forms of institutional support, but also structuring services in line with OKBR’s mission. We have reached the encouraging mark of 30 per cent of our income coming from the services we provide and the courses we run. In an innovative way for the entire third sector field in which we operate, we publish this accountability updated almost in real time on our website. We are an organisation that teaches how to use data to make decisions, that promotes transparency of information, so I believe it is essential that our management reflects these values.

I close this cycle with the hope of having contributed to distributing leadership on each of OKBR’s fronts, multiplying the capacities of this team that has also taught me so much. I am now passing the helm of this boat into the skilled hands of Haydée Svab, for whom I have had deep respect and admiration for more than a decade. Anyone who hasn’t met her will soon agree with me.

From now on, I’ll be following OKBR’s work as a Governance Board member and part of this community for free and open knowledge.

See you next time!

Text published on the OKBR website.