E-Local is promoting access to public information in a governmental system that historically has been closed to citizens. The purpose of this project is to improve communication among the different structures of government and between those structures and the citizenry at large. It is the first effort of a federal administration to encourage the use of IT in municipalities in order to strengthen democratic governance, improve municipal management tools, and promote the building, within the local sphere, of an "authentic federalism" in Mexico.

This paper is an outgrowth of the Ash Institute's Innovations in Technology and Governance (ITG) Project, which seeks to identify the conditions under which innovations in technology and governance can be most effectively and appropriately harnessed to drive improvements in the ways societies govern themselves. A central research question for the ITG Project is how networks that enable wider and more horizontal communication flows, and at more scales, challenge or alter traditional governance. The ITG Project also aims to better understand the causal relationships between polity, technology, and economy.

The ITG Workshop took place on October 30 - 31, 2003 at Harvard University.