While the Mexican municipality of Tlajomulco de Zúñiga sits in the center of the country, its name translates as “Land in the Corner” in the Aztec language, Nahuatl. The title is perhaps more fitting now. Once one of the country’s most corrupt municipalities, it now occupies a special corner of Mexico as its least corrupt, jumping from a 34.2 in 2009 to a full score of 100 in 2013 as ranked by the transparency organization CIMTRA. Mayor Ismael del Toro and his predecessor Enrique Alfaro are in part responsible for pushing forward a number of innovative policies that include a four-year-old participatory budgeting project, which allow citizens to vote annually on how their taxes should be spent. Read More

A paper by Yuen Yuen Ang, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, explains“Why 'I-Paid-A-Bribe' Worked in India but Failed in China.”

It seems as if the Chinese Communist Party is looking for a little country rebranding for the new year and is taking a cue from the power of viral online videos. In its second installment – its first propaganda video achieved some moderate success – the CCP mysteriously published on new year's day a three-minute video on Youku, China’s version of Youtube. It contains no credits though some officials have publicly noted the video and a CCP logo complete with sickle and hammer appears in the right-hand corner of the screen. Read More

Last month Brazil's lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, passed a resolution creating a Laboratória Ráquer—a space permanently designated for hackers—inside Congress. This is the first such hacker space in the world, according to Opening Parliament.

The French task force for open government data, Etalab, launched the new open data platform in December, one that is open to submissions from anyone. This marks “a world first for a government open data portal,” write Rayna Stamboliyska and Pierre Chrzanowski, of Open Knowledge Foundation France.

When techPresident covered Singapore's new media regulations last June, only 10 websites had been singled out by the Media Development Authority (MDA), all big corporate news sites. Fast forward six months to the death-by-paperwork demise of start up citizen news site Breakfast Network, which closed “company” doors on December 16. The MDA's effective smothering of the Breakfast Network team has led one blogger to suggest they change their name to the Media Destruction Authority.

At the heart of most civic-oriented hackathons, those short 24-hour or so gatherings to code and create innovative apps for public good, is data. But many hackathons suffer from a lack of quality data or knowledge on where to find it, a problem that Benjamin Gans says he and his team at a for-profit data crunching company, Data Publica, noticed after attending and hosting a number of their own hackathons. They have coined the term "scrapathon" or scrapeathon to describe the new data scraping events they have begun hosting to give data a new and more purposeful life. Read More

Just before the new year, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute launched Commotion 1.0, a mesh networking toolkit more than 12 years in the making, also (and misleadingly) known as “Internet in a suitcase.” The toolkit makes it possible for communities to build their own mesh communication networks, which can be used as an Intranet or as a way of distributing access to the Internet without using traditional infrastructure.