

Now a newsletterer?

After twenty years of blogging, I have followed my fellow netizens to Substack, where I am publishing a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe via the form to the left and please drop me a note with a link to your newsletter.

Taking Notes

Thinking out loud in my corner of the internets.

About

Best Of

I’ve been writing here for over a decade now. In hindsight, only a handful of those posts are still worth reading.

Colophon

The tools that go into making this website.

See Tools

Latest Essays

Niños Incomodos and Video for Advocacy in Mexico

Last month I caught an interesting tweet from Alejandro Ramírez, the CEO of the 4th largest cinema chain in the entire world: Ramírez was celebrating the fact that De Panzazo, an excellent documentary about the state of the country's education system, was seen by...

Helping Politicians Keep Their Promises

Politicians love to make promises. Here in Mexico, presidential contender Enrique Peña Nieto even spent the morning of the first official day of campaigning at a public notary's office where he signed his name next to his first three campaign promises. But...

[Report] Parliamentary Power to the People

Brazil-based transparency and freedom of information scholar Greg Michener has authored the first major report on the use of online platforms to understand and monitor parliaments in Latin America. Commissioned by the Open Society Foundations, "Parliamentary Power to...

Transparently Advocating for Transparency

Update: I have removed the "within 15 days of the signing of a grants agreement" from the commitment. For a variety of reasons it may not be possible to publish the related information so soon after the agreement has been signed. At times, such as in the case of...

Back to My Printing Press

I started blogging at el-oso.net in December 2003. I didn't expect it to last long; mostly I wanted to keep a travel diary for a road trip around Mexico, and I figured, why not keep it on the Internet? Several months later I realized that I still had more to say. I...

Conference-Slutting Toward Good Governance

2012 looks a lot like a convenient excuse for the Latin American diplomatic jet set to rack up their American Express rewards points while in Cartagena, Brasilia, Puerto Vallarta, Los Cabos, Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere. Looking through a less cynical filter, 2012...