Open government and university teaching: Innovation for the exercise of citizenship

Abstract

A teaching innovation is presented that incorporates the Open Government approach in an undergraduate course at the School of Social Work of the Catholic University of Chile, during the years 2020 and 2022. The course establishes as a premise that people require services from the State, which exercises the monopoly of its supply. This generates an obligatory and unequal relationship in which the state apparatus defines without counterweight the way in which it delivers its services. As a result, access is limited by the information available to citizens and the effective capacity to apply for benefits, which implies that they must know the requirements and the functioning of the bureaucracy in order to apply for them. From there, the course proposes the Open Government paradigm as a mechanism to reduce this problem. To this end, it incorporates content on Open Government, makes relevant readings available and creates practical instances consisting in the generation of citizen material with clear language that is then provided to citizens. In this way, it is intended to influence the training process of future professionals with an open government approach so that they incorporate this paradigm in their subsequent actions.