Radar Político CE: uma aplicação móvel para facilitar o acesso à informação sobre a administração pública cearense

Abstract

In recent years, several corruption scandals drove Brazil into a political crisis. Operation Car Wash, set up to investigate and disarticulate a scheme that would have misappropriated around 10 billion reais from Brazilian public safes, reveals one of the most remarkable scandals to have happened in the recent history of our country. As a consequence, it is possible to notice a gradual attempt of appropriation of the political debate by Brazil’s population. However, Brazil still does not have significant forms of democratic participation, being vote the biggest and maybe only democratic symbol that plays an active role in politics. Considering these facts it is possible to notice that it is extremely relevant to think of a democracy beyond vote. Therefore, upgrade and innovation of public participation in the fulfillment of democracy has been sought, as well as to allow their participation in public administration. Several published studies apply Digital Information and Communication Technologies – TDICs - as a path to amplify population’s participation in public administration. Examples of these studies are websites specialized in disclosure of relevant information about politicians; social media profiles that spread updates on projects; and systems that use artificial intelligence to look for administrative irregularities. Among these technologies, smartphone apps stand out. These apps bring different approaches to the context of population participation in public administration. The purpose of the present work is to develop an app that allows user friendly access to Ceará’s public administration informations. A set of apps, currently on the market, was selected and analyzed according to its functionalities and correlation to the topic. It was noticeable that existing apps present several usability and scope problems. These apps focus on federal public administration, leaving local political spheres invisible, and utilize inaccessible language. These problems interfere with the political education of its users, which is of foremost importance. Based on this, a information architecture was developed for an app for Android platform aiming to help people monitor Ceará’s public administration. This work presents the development of this app, named Political Radar Ce, and its functionalities. A usability test was performed as a mean of validating the app’s implementation process. The usability test received positive responses from its participants. Lastly, future perspectives related to improvement and functionalities were presented.