I have a back­ground in Com­put­er Sci­ence and pro­gram­ming. My expe­ri­ence using these skills to help solve the democ­ra­cy cri­sis start­ed in 2012 in one of the first inde­pen­dent online jour­nals in Guatemala, sup­port­ing data jour­nal­ists in all their tech­ni­cal needs. In 2018 I moved on to a civ­il soci­ety orga­ni­za­tion in Mex­i­co that used pub­lic pro­cure­ment data to pub­lish gov­ern­ment con­tracts in a web plat­form suit­able for inves­ti­ga­tion and jour­nal­ism. I also took part in many projects that used data to point out inef­fi­cient gov­ern­ment spend­ing and inequal­i­ty. From 2022 onwards, my co-founders and I start­ed Abri​mos​.info and have worked in 7 coun­tries in the Latin Amer­i­can region. We are using open data to fos­ter trans­paren­cy and make the use of this data eas­i­er and more acces­si­ble, par­tic­u­lar­ly pub­lic pro­cure­ment and FOIA requests. Our projects have helped oth­ers to inves­ti­gate gov­ern­ment prac­tices that endan­ger democ­ra­cies in Latin Amer­i­ca. I believe that a tech­ni­cal back­ground is very help­ful to over­come the ten­den­cy of gov­ern­ments to obscure infor­ma­tion, iden­ti­fy­ing ways to extract data and make it use­ful for trans­paren­cy and gov­ern­ment account­abil­i­ty, which are some of the best ways to strength­en democ­ra­cy.

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