Gobierno abierto en la alcaldía de machala: fortalezas, debilidades y desafíos.

Abstract

This research work is focused on the study on Open Government, a term that for some years has been awakening the interest of several countries to seek new ways of doing government, building trust between public management and citizenship in an ethical, responsible manner and always subject to social control. Open Government (GA) officially implemented in Ecuador since July 2018 has motivated different local governments to transparent their efforts and to involve citizens in decision making. In this context, this research is presented with the objective of establishing the importance of the implementation of open government initiatives in the Machala mayor's office, determining the possible challenges it faces.

For this, an evaluation of compliance with basic dimensions of open government was carried out such as: citizen participation, transparency and accountability in said institution, to corroborate that first evaluation, an analysis was made on the knowledge and use of government open both by the public and by the internal public of the mayor's office, specifically departments that handle public information dissemination and socialization processes. On the other hand, it was necessary to consider the criteria of experts, both from the point of view of the institution so that the degree of interest that the mayor has to continue with these policies and how much they are willing to potentiate these information transparency processes can be established and data, as well as from the point of view of government policies to understand the current and real landscape of open government in Ecuador. Among the results obtained, it was found that the mayor's office of Machala, in front of its recent administration, is in a process of readjustment and evaluation of all its functions, despite this, it was determined that the internal public of said institution lacks of sufficient information on open government, fundamental pillars, objectives or strategies, in spite of that, it is possible to demonstrate their interest in strengthening their knowledge, analyzing new strategies under professional advice, and potentiating citizen participation in their decision-making and management processes . Thus, it could also be determined that despite the fact that the mayor's office of Machala considers new technologies in its transparency and accountability processes, according to the bibliography consulted, they do not fully comply with the basic categories of open government, reducing the effectiveness of their services offered to citizens through its web portal; information verified through surveys to determine the level of knowledge of the citizenship about the information offered by the mayor's office through its dissemination channels, specifically its web portal. Thus reaching the following conclusions, the role of open government in municipal government institutions allows establishing a close link between society and these institutions, in the mayor's office of Machala, who faces a process of transition of administrations, will significantly generate more interaction and citizen participation in the decision-making process that, at the end of the day, will show a transparent government that will have as challenges the same fear, product of the same ignorance, both from the authorities that doubt to transparent institutional and political information, and also by the citizens that He fears taking responsibility if he intervenes in the processes. The lack of interest of citizens with respect to public policies or municipal political information, influences the execution of strategies by the mayor's office to use new technologies in transparency and accountability processes. And to conclude, the mayor's office of Machala, despite presenting a novel administration of less than a year, presents a lot of interest in improving the processes of transparency of public information, perhaps its weaknesses in lack of training and knowledge on this issue on servers municipal in different related departments, has encouraged the institution to promote knowledge about this initiative.