Paola Santana (GLASS) and Angela Galeano Colonia (Futuro Público) kicked off the podcast with the first episode, where Paola not only shared our DNA and our purpose as a GovTech startup but also talked about how the idea of creating our GovTech community - Groundbreakers - came about and the reasons that motivated us to launch our second edition of the GovTech Groundbreakers.
📌 About GLASS & Futuro Público
"At GLASS, we're building government ecosystems using software to not only digitize but also learn from current government operations and improve them through software and data. We're focusing our government ecosystems on government procurement. We're focusing on government procurement because it's a vertical within the government with the potential to catalyze change. As they say in the United States, "Show me where you spend the money, and I'll tell you what you're going to change." "Government procurement allows you to see what you need to manage the public, provide public services, how you purchase it, from whom you purchase it, and which areas of the economy you boost through these public purchases."
"Our flagship product is our government marketplaces, pioneering in the world. We create government marketplaces so that any government in the world, through its government buyers with a government procurement card, can come to one place, search for goods, services, software, digital products, add them to the cart, and pay in the government's preferred manner. All these vendors are pre-verified and have a government contract with some government agency."
"We believe these marketplaces can help the government not only become more efficient but also direct public investment – we don't even call it public spending; in Latin America, it's public investment – to maximize these purchases and obtain excellent, high-quality purchases for our governments and our countries. That's what GLASS does, and our mission in the GovTech landscape is to advance the transformation of governments by bringing in a lot of technology."
Futuro Público is an experimental, informative, and evidence-based platform focused on the theme of innovation in the public sector. Their goal is to systematically showcase the efforts, ideas, and practices related to public sector innovation from various perspectives and contexts. With a particular emphasis on Spanish-speaking countries, they firmly believe in the public sector's capacity to foster and incorporate innovation in all its forms, whether it be in products, services, regulations, technologies, and more.
They also recognize that the drive for change can be both possible and visible at all levels of government and across sectors and profiles involved in the process. In this regard, Futuro Publico views innovation as an iterative and expansive process, where reflecting on successes, failures, and challenges is essential to humanize and empathize with the overall process.
📌 Why did GLASS create the GovTech Groundbreakers awards? Where did this idea come from?
"We realized that we were talking a lot, especially here in Silicon Valley – we're not in Washington DC; we're in Silicon Valley, where technology is created. We felt very alone discussing our topics, seeking advisors, seeking investment, and we thought, "Where are people investing in GovTech technology? Where are people hosting GovTech events so that founders, creators, and engineers developing technology for the government can get to know each other?"
"Seeing that this ecosystem didn't exist, we asked ourselves, "What if we build this ecosystem ourselves, and how can we build this ecosystem?" Well, we didn't know. So, we started brainstorming how we could launch a community in a simple, organic way. We spoke with the folks at Platzi, one of the largest learning platforms and communities in Latin America, and they said, "Community is everything. Bring people together, do it in small and large groups, do it however you can, but activate that community." That's how we decided to launch our GovTech community last year."
"One of the community's initiatives was to elevate the GovTech community members. We realized that, for all the effort people in our community put in and the limited exposure and recognition they received because, in government, everything takes a long time, and by the time you've done something, you might have moved to a different institution or started something else. So, the question was, "How can we celebrate these people while they're doing incredible and quite challenging work? How can we give them visibility?” That's how the first edition of the GovTech Groundbreakers awards came about in 2022."
"In 2023, we decided to launch them a bit earlier and open the call for nominations mid-year. We also decided to bring in partners who not only share the award but can help us select the GovTech Groundbreakers not based solely on who they are but on what they have built and accomplished in the public sector. That's the whole idea of creating a community, giving visibility to people who are already doing the work."
📌 Who are these partners, and what can you tell us about them?
"Part of creating a community is to stop doing things alone. That's very important because the things we're already doing are quite challenging."
"We approached Agência Moove from Brazil, represented by Gabriel Fuscaldo, its Executive Director; PUBLIC from the UK, represented by Johnny Hugill, one of its Executive Directors; BrazilLab, a key institution in the GovTech ecosystem in Brazil, represented by Guilherme Domínguez; Olga García, a leading figure in Silicon Valley, President of the South San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and owner of an SME; and IA LAB from Argentina, represented by Antonella Stringhini, its Academic Coordinator."
"Agencia Moove is an advertising agency that seeks to create powerful connections using cutting-edge tools and creative experience. It's also an agency specialized in bringing GovTech to the market. PUBLIC, on the other hand, is reinventing digital public services; they started as an accelerator and investor and now have other programs with a government focus. BrazilLab is an innovation center that accelerates solutions and connects entrepreneurs with the government. IA LAB is the AI Innovation Laboratory at the Faculty of Law at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Those are our partners, and they were responsible for selecting the Top 5 GovTech Groundbreakers and the honorable mentions this year."
📌 What was the selection criteria?
"This year, we wanted to highlight three criteria: firstly, innovative solutions, people who have found creative solutions to challenging problems; secondly, projects and activities that are highly sustainable and environmentally friendly. We aimed to understand how to measure sustainability, which is a critical criterion, as projects that aren't sustainable don't have the long-term impact we need in the public sector, especially because the government is a late adopter, taking a long time to effect change and make it visible; and thirdly, collaboration, precisely what we're trying to achieve with our partners who are not only learning but sharing their learnings, wins - what's going well - but also sharing the things that are not going well."
📌 Top 5 GovTech Groundbreakers 2023 & Top 10 Honorable Mentions
"We start with Maria Carolina Martins de Faria, who is the SV Partner Manager and Startup Ambassador at Oracle; Arune Matelyte, Manager and Co-founder at the GovTech Lab in Lithuania; Carlos Santiso, who is the Head of the Division of Digital, Innovation, and Governance at the OECD; Ana María Cáceres, Deputy Secretary of Smart City at the Municipality of Medellin in Colombia; and Enrique Zapata, who is the Coordinator of Data Intelligence, GovTech, and Open Government at the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF). They were the chosen winners this year."
"We also have 10 honorable mentions: Constance Bommelaer de Leusse, Andrea Motta, Diego Fernandez, Ibrahim Koran, Teo Foresti Girardi, Juan Ignacio Gowland, Matt Fox, Juan Carlos Bochicchio, Jimena Sánchez Velarde, and Idoia Ortiz de Artiñano."