24 Organizing through crises featuring Codeando Mexico's Alma Rangel
We sit down with [Alma Rangel](https://twitter.com/almarngl), from [Codeando Mexico](https://twitter.com/codeandomexico) to talk community organizing, responding to crises, and the state of civic tech in Mexico.<br><br>### Resources and Shoutouts:<br>- [Codeando Mexico](https://www.codeandomexico.org/)<br><br>##### Music Credit: [Tumbleweeds by Monkey Warhol](http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Monkey_Warhol/Lonely_Hearts_Challenge/Monkey_Warhol_-_Tumbleweeds)
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Transcript
Hello. I'm Ryan Cook, and this is Civic Tech Chat, a podcast about the civic technology movement. We seek to harness the power technology has to improve the delivery of public services to people everywhere. Welcome to another episode of Civic Tech Chat. This week, we're joined by Alma Rangel, innovation director for Codando Mejico. We're gonna get into the topic of how their organization does community organizing, how they responded to an earthquake event, and what that says about how a brigade can go about crisis management, and we'll talk a bit about the state of civic tech in Mexico. Now before we hop into that discussion, I do have an ask of you. If you've liked our programming so far, please head on over to your podcast app and give us a five star review. Doing so helps us reach a broader audience and helps us keep making this quality content that you crave. So So with all that said, let's go ahead and hop right into the interview.
Alma, thank you so much for joining Civic Tech Chat this week. Could you introduce yourself and tell the audience a bit about what you do?
Thanks, Ryan, for reminding me. My name is Alma Ranjel. I'm the executive director of Calleendo Mexico. Calleendo is an organization that promotes the use of civic tech and open data to solve public problems and, make governments more efficient in Mexico. So that's basically what we do.
And what would you say is your personal why? You know, what drives you to get out of bed each day and do what you do?
So ever since I started college, I was trying to find ways. I studied international relations. I actually didn't study anything related to tech to begin with. And I was just trying to find ways in which we can make our communities and our cities and our country better. And when I found the civic tech ecosystem and the civic tech space, it combined two things I really liked a lot, which was technology and basically this social sciences background. And what drives me up in the morning is, one, the people we work with who are amazing. There are a lot of people in Mexico and your in an in our communities trying to find better ways to solve our public problems. And two, the belief that sweet tech and citizen participation are right now the two biggest leverages we have to face the challenges that we're facing right now all around the world, which are very complex and which are turning every time more complex with the lack of resources and urbanization we're going through, especially in Latin America.
And what would you say is your civic tech superpower, and how do you make use of it in support of things like your personal why?
I definitely think, my civic tech superpower is actually I have really good people skills. One of the most important parts of every project and the hardest part of every project is how do you get each actor and each person to collaborate and to actually be able to bring to the table their best skills and put them to use in something that's gonna have impact. Apart from the technical skills, I think that's definitely my biggest tech superpower. I have a really good ability to bring people to the table and work together.
That's a good skill to have. That's, I guess, a challenge that's come up, pretty frequently in these episodes is that idea of, like, trying to bring the right people together on the right thing. So it's definitely a good thing to be good at, I would say.
I don't think it's only having the right people. It's actually also having the right processes and the right communication. Because sometimes you can have actually the right people and the right skills, but if there's no common understanding and there's not a base of trust and confidence and people feeling comfortable working together, you cannot get where you need to get.
And speaking of getting where you need to get, what's the story behind how you ended up involved with Codando Mexico?
So when I first got out of college, I started working in the public service in Mexico. I worked at the state government, in Queretaro, which was the city I grew up in and the city I studied in. And it was just frustrating to see a lot of things that were going around. It's not the fact that public servants don't wanna make a difference, but the system in itself is very hard. And it is a it is a a particular sector that gets left behind in terms of technology. And right now, in in the world we live in, technology, especially digital technology, is shaping everything. The underlying the underlying logic of how we communicate, of how we consume information, of how we relate to others and to the world. And this is something the the public space is not really benefiting from. So when I left the public service, I was working in in the private sector with a company that kind of gave consultancies to to, to public institutions, I found out about Correia New Mexico. I read a blog post. And the mission behind Correia New Mexico is is really, really powerful. It's just a simple idea that drives a lot of people that says, if we have people with technical skills, everyone has skills that they can bring to the table. But particularly people with technical skills, they can really contribute to the public space, and, normally, they're very far away from the public space. They're in big companies like coding for Google or Facebook or Microsoft, and they do not translate their skills to public problems or the challenges we face as a as a as a society. So they were actually looking for someone to start in the team, as a civic innovation director, and I applied for that position and got in, and got the job. So I actually started doing just collaboration, like, building collaborations between NGOs and public institutions in Colombia Mexico and kind of helping projects have strategic objectives that could really make an impact. And since I always like technology, I just started coding from there. I started learning Python and HTML and CSS and really understanding, the tech the tech process, around this project. And, basically, now I'm here. After a year of being the civic innovation director in Coronado Mexico, I started I started position as executive director this year.
So now that you're in it the executive director of the organization, what would you say a a day in the life of an executive director of a group like Correjo Mexico is like?
I think a day in the life is a lot of meetings, basically. Working with a team, trying to understand how we can strategically use the organization and the community to really make an impact. But, basically, it's waking up really early, kind of having breakfast, and then going with with going over the projects with the team, understanding if there's anything that's needed, and then mostly meeting with people from the different projects and understanding how
we can reach our goals. Now I I'd like to shift our conversation a bit to some of the work that your organization has done. And to that end, I found a piece on forbes.com that I believe was written back in January, or at least it was posted then. Mhmm. And it described a project that Codando and Mexico helped with that was focused on reducing commute times for kids going to school and I'm gonna I'm gonna muff this pronunciation up probably, but San Pedro? Is it You actually pronounce it really good. Yes. Got it the first try. Yes. I should probably ask you about that one at the beginning when I have the question out in front of us. But in any event, can you, tell us a little bit about that project?
Of course. We're we really like that project. We actually did only work in commuting times for kids, but we were also working in commuting times for workers in some in San Pedro. This is a project we work with with the GovLab from NYU and the amazing Leonardo Campu. This project started as actually an open government and citizen participation project in which San Pedro, the government of San Pedro decided to open up a process so that citizens could identify problems within their city and their communities and work around solutions for them. So So one of the problems that everyone agreed on was precisely traffic and mobility. And one of the pinpoints that we located was that whenever kids were going in and out of school, there was obviously an increase in traffic in certain streets in San Pedro. So there was actually a citizen team, that came up with this idea of, okay, let's understand how how the parents' kids are deciding how the kids go to school. Let's understand how they are arriving and how they're leaving school and start building upon that. So we actually made, some interviews to the parents and the schools and the kids to understand if they were riding alone, if they were carpooling, if they could arrive by bike, or or if they were walking, whatever whatever was happening. And with all the data, we also asked if they could have a choice, how would they like to go to school? If if they would like to carpool or they would like to ride their bike or they would like to do whatever. And from those answers, we proposed different solutions, and the parents kind of took them over and implemented them. So some people changed and they started curpling. Some kids changed and they they started riding their bikes to school. But the bottom line was, now most of the kids in school changed their habits, and they're changing the way they arrive and leave school. And we also did this but with workers in San Pedro. So we actually conducted interviews with people who got into the city because San Pedro is really close to Monterrey, which is a really big city in Mexico. So people don't really live in San Pedro or not everyone lives in San Pedro. Sometimes they live in, another municipality that's really close by, and they just go to San Pedro to work. So we were asking what their what also what their clothes were when they were going into the city, when they were going out of the city. And after that, we we proposed a carpool lane, during certain hours of the day that we hope we might get to test very soon in Santero. So it's it's really it's been really good to apply kind of data science and data analysis to public policy, how we can change our public spaces by understanding with data how people move around the city.
Yeah. I I think I'm I'm hearing from you there that really a large part of that effort was really focused on that, I guess, for a lack of a better phrase, like, user research. Right? To figuring out, like, where people were at the beginning. Yeah. Am I hearing you right about that?
Yes. We were trying to understand their transport transportation patterns. Normally, how they move around the city and in which manner they do so to understand then how we could change and propose different alternatives for them to use.
Now another, project that your organization has been as notable for is around this competition that it hosted to put together an open source app to provide information about, the Mexican Congress. Now I understand that from some research that, I guess, the impetus for this was a response to a government contract that seemed to be, rather opposed that I think would have costed something like a 115,000,000 pesos or for folks north of the border, that equates to about 6,000,000 US dollars. For audience members, could you talk a little bit about, like, what that story is all about there?
For sure. The this is one of the first things we did as an organization, and I think definitely one of the things that, made us known in Mexico, which was there was you are right. This contract to build an app for a 150,000,000 pesos, which was absurd. So when this was announced, the the organization launched a challenge to technologists around Mexico say, okay. Can you build this app with these features for, obviously, way less money, which was, I think, 50,000 pesos in dollars that might be $2,500, and we launched that challenge. So, basically, we got over a 100 submissions, and we picked the three best ones, and they presented their apps to congress. And we managed to actually stop, stop that contract. It was one of the first I think it was one of the first examples we had as an organization and as a team. And, generally, like, the the tech community in Mexico of, the real impact we could have if we got involved in public problems and if we use our skills to better to better our public spaces and our public problem.
So I think if I'm if I'm hearing you right, it it sounds like this event kind of became a vector for your organization. On the the one hand, to kinda use this event as a way to organize and stop what it sounds like could be argued was a very unfavorable deal for the government. And then on the other hand, it also was kind of almost like you're coming out moment where you could where your organization was unseen as a viable alternative perhaps for other initiatives. Is is is that a pretty accurate way to to see that? Yeah. I think it's actually a pretty accurate way to describe it. Now another, significant event that, Coto de Amajco is is known for, perhaps even, like, outside, its own borders, has to do with the, the September 2017 earthquake that impacted the central region of Mexico. There is a a whole bunch of really interesting posts that talk about the response of folks, trying to, like, help out people impacted by that, with Codan de Mexico in in the middle of it. Could you tell us a little bit about that response and kind of what all happens there?
Yes. I don't know how much you know about the September two two thousand seventeen earthquake, but for us, it was the biggest earthquake since '95, which I think for record history was the the biggest earthquake in Mexico. So exactly on the same day, the day of the anniversary, last year, we had a pretty big earthquake. And I remember this because I was not in Mexico City or any of the affected areas also like Oaxaca or Morelos or Puebla, but I was in Guadalajara. We basically don't get earthquakes here. It's very nice. And we were just watching the news, not understanding what was what was happening or the dimension of of everything that was going on, particularly in Mexico City, which was the place where we had the most information of. And we have a Slack group where the community meets. So we kind of posted, hey. Is there anything we can do as a tech community to help, during this moments? And then it kind of blew up from there because someone, I think also Hinora, tweeted, hey, atechcom like, a tech response is organizing from within the Colombia Mexico Slack. And in a couple hours, we have over 600 volunteers, both with technical skills and not technical skills, journalists, communication people, but also a lot of developers, a lot of data scientists, a lot of, designers. And it was kind of a really, really cool response that in a digital space was trying to accompany the response that was happening on the streets. So we were definitely trying to, organize information better and find better ways to communicate that to the citizens. We were trying to also systematize that information because everyone was kind of gathering. There was a huge surge of Google spreadsheets of people who were trying to organize information about shelters or about missing people or about, places that had gone down, hospitals, etcetera. We were trying to systematize all of that, and we were also trying to just channel it as best as as possible. So in the course of maybe a week, the community built over 30 tools, ranging from fake news to missing people to helping people understand if the cracks in their buildings were significant enough for them not to go back into their homes, because they stayed even though it was trying to help. It didn't have the capacity to obviously, tend to every single person who was being affected by the earthquake. And for us, it was a very, very good example of, the power of a community that organizes. It was also a very good learning process in terms of understanding where during an emergency can tech really be significant or make an impact or really help the efforts that are going on in the street.
That is an an an incredible effort that you've described. I believe you mentioned 30 different, different project or different, like, systems that you were trying to corral. And then also, did you say there were six hun over 600 volunteers? Yes. Did I hear you correctly? Yes. So that is that's insane because I there's, like, a lot of even a lot of organizations don't have that many people. So it sounds like like, Korano, Mecio was in the middle of all this kind of as, like, the hub. What what was it like trying to coordinate, like, that much stuff going on? Like, it sounds like there's just this, like, tremendous energy of, like, we wanna help these people that have been impacted. Like, how do you wrangle all of that? It was crazy, to be honest, because
I I think we have not spoken about this. Code Coriano Mexico is a community driven organization. So, basically, we have a small core team right then. I think back then, there were only three of us, and we kind of coordinate day to day operations and then coordinate the community. So when you have three people trying to manage 600, it was really, really crazy. I think we came up with a system really fast in which the community itself was helping us manage basically everyone that was arriving. Like, people helped us build a bot that actually told you like, whenever you went into the Slack, whenever you kind of signed up for the Slack, it told you this is what's happening. This is the the channels you have to go to, etcetera. So for us, it was also a really big learning on how to manage a community and how to channel the efforts of the community itself during an earthquake, or during an emergency, really. But it was a very hectic week in which we basically slept very little.
You've alluded a couple of times to this idea. Like, there's a lot of learning that happened about how, I guess, like, technology or civic tech can be used in a crisis. Right? What what are some of those, like, lessons learned that you took from that from this this event?
Like, there are really a lot, but I think one of the first ones is one of the best things you can do is actually collaborate and join efforts with other people. During an emergency, there are a lot of people trying to help, and most of them are gonna repeat whatever they're trying to do. So there are gonna be, like, 3,000 people try like, building a Google spreadsheet. There are gonna be, like, 20 people trying to build the same app. So for us was, one, really how to bring together different efforts. We actually didn't start any project alone other than the original website where we kind of put the information in. But the rest of the projects we've built with different people, different organizations, different companies that we're willing to help. The second one is how to better connect the digital efforts to the efforts on the ground because you can like, it does not help if you build it, but the people are not using it. So, like, in that time, I think we did an amazing job. We didn't have that much information. We I think the efforts were worth it, but if you wanna take this to if you wanna build tools for for another emergency in another context, I think you need to understand the processes better, to understand who are the relevant actors and how to reach them, to understand how to map resources, etcetera. And that's something we definitely learned during the earthquake last year.
And if there was, like, one piece of advice you could give to someone, say something really unfortunate happens in another geographical place where there happens to be a civic tech organization like yours, what one piece of advice would you give to those organizers, especially if, you know, like yourselves, there's like, it started with three of you trying to wrangle and move around a lot of resources. What what advice would you give them if they find themselves in a similar situation?
I would definitely give them the advice to like, the last thing I said, find, the right people to collaborate with and really don't do anything alone. Look around and see how you can join efforts with different organizations and other people already working in what you're trying to do. Because during this, I think emergencies are actually a really good moment to understand that it is not about individual people or individual organizations, but how we can build together. And that's definitely the best advice I could give.
Now shifting gears a little bit, I I'd like to start some conversations about, Code and Omegigos as an organization and a bit about how it does community organizing, which we touched on a little bit, but maybe we could dig into it a bit more. And to that end, I found a medium post that, you yourself are the author of that is talk I was talking about the five year anniversary for the organization. And I believe the group started as five individuals, but now is a network of over 2,000 on your Slack, and that you support something like 50 HackNites across the country, at least at at the time of this post. It might be more now, for all for for all I know. But what are some things that your organization has done to have caused it to grow like that and to be that successful?
I think what has helped us most is being open. I think the what you need to understand is civic tech movements are really diverse. They're not just about tech. They're really about the community themselves and the projects you wanna work on together. So we actually give from the organization itself some minimum guidelines, but we give a lot of freedom for people to kind of work in the problems they wanna work there, to work in different with different methodologies, with different technologies, to kind of just find spaces to find each other. And I think that's one of the best things we've done. Like, really try to build up the processes and the spaces for people to feel comfortable contributing and also to to really make use of their skills and understand that there's room for every skill. Like, everyone has something to bring to the table. I think that's what's what has helped, the the movement really grow, and I spoke about this at the beginning. I think the second thing that really helps us with the tech movement is that the idea behind it is really, really powerful. How we can use tech and tech skills to impact our public life is something a lot of people can relate to.
And related to the area of, like, things that help with success, is there what one might call the Code Ando Mexico model for organizing that maybe folks might try to emulate? And if so, like, how would you describe that?
Okay. So I think there's not a single model for organizing. I think we're constantly iterating how we organize and how we work. Throughout these five years, we have changed a lot. At the beginning, we were five people then or at the beginning, we were five people, but we we grew into a 20 people engineering team. And then we realized that we didn't wanna be an engineering team. We wanted to because we quickly became kind of like a dev shop for NGOs and public institutions, and what that was not what we really wanted to do with the organization. So we really want your the organization to be as open and as as diverse as possible to really inspire other people to get into a civic tech movement. And so we kind of have been shifting what that model looks like and learning from other models in the in the world who have online communities and also in the cultural network. We've learned a lot from culture Romania, from zero, from Code for America. But right now, what I can do is tell you a little bit about how we work. So we have the core team that kind of has day to day operations of the organization and supports the community in whatever projects the community wants to do. Then we have the online community that works around Slack. And then we have local groups that we call brigades in five different cities around the world that around the world, around Mexico that actually get physically together or together in physical spaces to work on local problems with local NGOs and local public institutions. And this is something we're we're trying to incentivize more to build these local groups that find each other and work around projects. And we actually have had really cool projects coming out of the brigades, such as Mapaton and Informa de Jalupa that have been really successful, because they understand their local context.
And I I guess related to the space still, what would you say in your view is the state of civic tech in Mexico in general?
That's a big question, Ryan.
Oh, we we ask the the big questions here on on civic tech chat.
Yeah. I know. I think SIG SIG Tech has grown a lot in the past five years. Like, five years ago, no one knew what SukiTech was or what Open Data was. And we're right now in place where or more people are aware of this concept, and more people are looking at it as an alternative as actually, like, a professional alternative. But I think right now, most of what happens around civic tech in Mexico is volunteer based, and we need to start shifting that. We need to start finding ways in which civic tech projects projects can be sustainable on a long term. And it is alright if you wanna actually do civic tech and leave off of civic tech, you know, like, it it does not have to always be volunteer based. So I think we're right now at a point where we need to have better success cases. I think we have some. We have Gobiad Alfacil. We have Zwicker Hidal, who are companies that work full time on Zwick Tech in Mexico. But I think we need to have more, and we need to keep evangelizing people because right now, I think we also have really strong movements in the main cities around Mexico, like Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, but we also need like, Mexico is really big and diverse, geographically, so we need to get to different cities and to different people in smaller cities who can have also bigger impact. So right now, for example, one of our brigades is working in Guillermoza, which is a really small city for Mexican standards here in Mexico. But they're really doing really good job that we started in Hermosillo, which is in the North, like, really getting into these small spaces and incentivizing the use of civic tech in this use.
Now that you've, I guess, the described, like, what the landscape looks like for for civic tech there, are there any, kinda, like, big trends going on that you think, like, yeah, these are good. We should keep doing those. And then are there also ones that you think are are negative that maybe should stop?
I think one of the the bigger trends that we should continue is this movement from focusing on a federal and national scope to focusing on local scopes because that's really it's something that's happening not only in Mexico, but literally worldwide. We're we're realizing that places where we can have the most impact in citizen's life, everyday life, is in is around the cities. I think this is a trend that should continue. And not not that I think that it should stop, but I think right now there's a trend moving towards, artificial intelligence and blockchain and, chatbots. And I think the trend in general should continue, but I think we should be really careful on how we apply it to civic tech and if it really solves the problems that we want them to solve. Because we tend to think about technology as something that needs to be really flashy and futuristic and whatever. But technology can be literally an SMS message, and it can actually solve a problem. You can actually solve certain problems with SMS messages. So we need to understand, what we talk about when we talk about technology and not only think about these big trends with with which we should experiment, but we should experiment cautiously. And I also think there's a a trend within the ecosystem to be more honest and to be more conscious about how we measure impact that should also continue.
Now for folks out there that maybe are listening to this and they're kind of in the early stages of organizing their own groups, what advice would you give them as they're just starting out in in that sort of endeavor?
If you're just starting out, definitely, like, I think build the correct message. A simple, powerful idea really is something that people rally around. And the second is just kind of be open and diverse and really conscious about how you integrate people to your civic tech organizations, what their role is, how can you help them invest the time they're investing with you in a meaningful way. And also work around objectives. Like, CITEC can be very broad because it can apply to anything. And that's both a blessing and a curse. So if you're just starting out, I think pick your battles, and really understand the problem you're trying to solve and how technology enters into that solution. Because then you can start having impact and not just kind of build a lot of sick tech or tech tools that no one will use. I think that would be my advice. Like, really understand your objectives, first. Second, make it about the people because, people are the most important part, I think, of civic tech movement. And the third, just, be open and diverse and inclusive and understand the power that we'll have, within your projects and within your organization.
Alma, again, I I wanna thank you for the time you've taken to be on here today. But, one of the things that we do on Civic Tech Chat, of course, is we try to make time at at toward the end of our episode here to allow the guests to decide, like, what thoughts we should leave this conversation with. So what what sort of concluding thoughts would you have for us, for this episode?
Firstly, thank you, Ryan, very much for inviting me. It's always really exciting to know that people in other places are also working and thinking around to tech. And if I could say something to conclude this, tech really does have an amazing potential to reshape the way we do things, and it's already reshaping the way we do things. And right now, I think we have a really good opportunity to decide how we want, tech to reshape everything in our cities, in our communities, and in our countries. It really does take people who believe in this idea to move it forward. So we need more people involved in civic tech. We need more people willing to invest their time and their abilities in social problems. We need more people willing to collaborate and work. And I'm just happy, that there are spaces like this one that let you know more about what's happening in other places in the world and give you ideas to start. So if anyone needs anything or wants to know more or or models or anything we do, like, please feel free to contact me. I'll leave you my email, and you can put it in the in the podcast.
Excellent. Yes. If you can, if you give me that email there, I will make sure that it is in the episode description, both in podcast apps as well as on our website. And, again, Alma, I I just wanna thank you for taking the time to come here and join us and and share the wealth of knowledge and experience you have, running an organization like Codano Mexico. I I can only imagine that, folks out there in the audience have all taken something of tremendous value from this conversation. So, again, thank you so much. Thank you, Ryan. You can follow us on Twitter using the handle at civic tech chat. Visit us on the web at civictech.chat, or subscribe to us for content updates wherever it is you download your podcasts.
