Brazil's 1988 constitution presents possibilities for citizen control and government transparency. In the last two decades, Brazilians have seen several experiences of the use of this power to demand better governance, such as the calls for impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello in the early 90s which forced his early resignation. In 2010, the Ficha Limpa movement was created to guarantee that politicians with court convictions cannot hold public positions. At the same time, the Mensalão’l and corporative card scandals have caused a greater lack of confidence among citizens, especially toward the Congress. Despite – or perhaps due to – the lack of credibility of the Brazilian government, the past two years have seen the creation of a number of grassroots projects that use the Internet to promote accountability, transparency and civic engagement. The founders of these projects report that a number of problems face Brazil in its search for greater social control, transparency and civic engagement. These include a culture of passive engagement, a difficulty in understanding the technical jargon used by governments, the lack of access to government data, and limited civic participation outside of the election cycle. To overcome these problems, Brazilian citizens have created online tools that encourage citizens to demand greater government transparency and citizen participation. Adote um Vereador (“Adopt a politician”) encourages Brazilian citizens to blog about the work of their local elected officials in order to hold them accountable. They suggest that each citizen adopt a local politician and write about his/her activities on a blog so that politicians know that they are being watched – and also to create a bridge between their work and online users who may ask questions or leave complaints as blog comments. Zanella, the founder of the wiki, believes that the main obstacles to its success are both cultural and technical: “Brazilian people are not used to the democratic process. For most Brazilians, governance is a synonym of elections, which happens only every 4 years. In the meantime Brazilians have little participation in the political agenda, even if they have a very local problem that involves the government. Usually, when some public problem happens people think it is a problem of the politicians, not them. So, Brazilian citizens don't see a way to construct and solve local public problems policies for themselves.” He also stresses that most Brazilians still do not know how to use the tools of the internet – such as blogs and wikis – to publish information about their politicians. A wiki was created to group and coordinate participants who adopt politicians. They also plan workshops to teach citizens how to use Internet tools to become involved in the project. Another experience is Cidade Democratica (“Democratic City”), which enables Brazilians to document and discuss municipal problems and come up with solutions. The main problem for founder Rodrigo Luna is culture: “Brazilians wait for someone else to solve their problems. This passivity cannot help us build the country where we want to live.” he content published on Cidade Democrática is organized by category, user-defined tags, city, and neighborhood. Registered users can: 1) document problems and propose solutions 2) support proposals created by other users; 3) comment, question, and discuss problems and proposals; 4) publicize a proposal and/or problem by email; and 5) create a profile to follow particular topics and places of interest. Despite its short time in existence, the site already has already yielded some results. A discussion about the city of Jundiai, which revealed that there was no public hearing to discuss the municipality's Master Plan, led officials to schedule a public audience later this year. Other project leaders interviewed in our research emphasized the difficulty in accessing and understanding the government data in Brazil. The website Congresso Aberto (“Open Congress”) tracks, visualizes, and analyzes official data from Brazil's Congress. The objective is to provide official data in a more accessible way in order to promote more transparency in Brazil's Congress. It also includes academic research and basic statistics about the behavior of politicians, such as their voting records. But the founders have had problems in sustaining the site's content because they cannot access the necessary data not centralized on the congressional website. Cesar Zucco, one of the founders of the initiative says, “We have to search the information from all the government’s sites. We hope that when Brazil has a Freedom of Information Law, we can more easily access the data that we need.