Rosie is a Twitter bot that tweets suspicions of misuse of public money by Brazilian congresspeople. This project – which uses Python in all its architecture, from data scraping to data science, including web apps and the bot itself – is a flagship for civic tech, being the top GitHub repo under the “politics” category.
This talk first offers an overview of its implementation to, later, focus on other elements (than technology) that made the initiative successful: namely the communication strategy based on the philosophy of information, sociology of law and hacktivism. The idea is to share how thriving projects in the civic tech world are cross-functional, mixing both technology, social sciences, and communication in order to use coding and data to tell appealing stories to the general public.