Access to information and public participation:

Civil surveillance with government data

Abstract

This work aims to discuss the use of the right of access to information during the phenomenon known as civil surveillance, in which citizens come together to apply monitoring action under their governments. The intention was to observe how voluntary projects linked to public transparency demands reach government data and how they deal with them, observing the aspect of information practices studies. Therefore, the objective was limited to verifying how members of civil society technically use public data to absorb facts and information about government actions and, consequently, participate more actively in the democratic regime. By applying the exploratory methodology based on three dimensions, the article was able to observe results that mainly point to objectives centered on surveillance and reporting, including a pattern of “translation” of numbers into facts to provide a more accessible transfer to the population.