Case Study: Citizen Integration Center achieves rapid open-data transparency and civic engagement with Socrata

Managing the Shift Towards Transparency: CIC Experiences Open Data in Mexico

The Citizen Integration Center (CIC), a Monterrey non‑profit, launched data.cic.mx in response to Mexico’s National Digital Strategy to give citizens easy, machine‑readable access to government, academic and nonprofit datasets. CIC faced limited internal development capacity and the harder task of convincing government departments to stop sharing PDFs and instead provide clean .csv/Excel data for transparency and civic use.

CIC partnered with Socrata (hosted on AWS) for an affordable, full‑service platform and launched the portal rapidly—going live in weeks and fully implemented in under three months—by combining one local developer and Socrata’s implementation team. The portal now offers visualizations (notably public finances), fuels data journalism and civic engagement, secured unanimous leadership buy‑in, and is being expanded toward open performance dashboards to track government outcomes.

Citizen Integration Center

Jesús Cepeda

Director of Technology, CIC