Creso Moraes, 56, lives in Curitiba, Southern Brazil, where he shares his work between Enfoque Comunicação & Eventos, the Press and Events company he founded 28 years ago, and the newly-born Enfoque Cívico, a non profit organisation dedicated to help Brazilian citizens in transforming their society -- an outfit having Tom Steinberg's mySociety as a successful model.
An "avant la lettre" work of Enfoque Cívico is the translation of PledgeBank to Portuguese, a language spoken by 170+ million Brazilians and another 20 to 30 million people in Portugal and its former colonies in Africa and Asia. The translation work started in December 2005 and now is almost finished -- there are some adjustments to be made, mainly in the variables that have to conform to Portuguese verb tenses, something that Creso, a non-techie, is trying to figure out with Matthew Somerville's patient help.
To publicize PledgeBank in Brazil, Creso started March 28th its first pledge, atracting ten Brazilians to the site. After that, he started another, motivating Brazilian journalists to write to senators urging them to vote and approve an updated legislation for Journalism practice as a profession. This pledge was also very successful, with a support 95% beyond the target, which was 20 journalists, and responses from two of the three senators who represent Creso's State, Paraná.
Meanwhile, he wrote and sent a press release that resulted so far (April 7th, 2006) in a very interesting feature published by the prestigious Jornal da Tarde, in São Paulo.
The second "promessa", the one dealing with senators, points to the next project at Enfoque Cívico: a replication of mySociety's WriteToThem in Brazil, for which Creso tried for months to get the confidence and the experienced help of Tom's team while there are not local paid and volunteer developers to set up the site. Creso's urgency was due to the fact that in October 1st. Brazilians would be voting in national elections, and they would need to know in which current incumbents they could trust to reelect.
Finally, in September 17th, Matthew sent a message asking if Creso was still interested in that, and of course they started the work in the same day. The original term of the October 1st. Elections in Brazil could not be met, but, anyway, the freshly elected representatives will have the opportunity of receiving their constituences message since the beginning of their four year mandates. The Brazilian version of WriteToThem was named EleitorAtivo, which in Portuguese means ActiveVoter.
So, from April to November, this took most of Creso's time at Enfoque Cívico, besides earning the bread for his large family of seven at Enfoque Comunicação & Eventos.