Alessandra Orofino and Miguel Lago launched Meu Rio in 2011 with the mission of making their city more inclusive. “Citizens need to organize themselves as intelligently, use technology as ubiquitously, and share knowledge as efficiently as the public and private institutions, in order to really participate in the definition of public policy at the city level,” Orofino wrote in an op-ed forlast year.

In Orofino's opinion, petitions aren’t the most useful tool for social change on a city level. “Especially when you’re talking about local politics, you can’t rely on sheer aggregation of numbers as a tool for pressure,” she explains. “Many campaigns initiated by our members are talking about a specific street or public square or hospital or school that only concerns a relatively small number of citizens. Who are you going to deliver a couple of thousand signatures to?”

Meu Rio has focused on designing tools such as Multitude, which lets campaign organizers connect with volunteers for tasks like creating a sign, taking pictures, or showing up for a meeting; and Nós do Meu Rio, an initiative to connect neighbors so they can get to know one another and plan new campaigns. Their most popular organizing tool is called the Pressure Cooker. When someone creates a campaign around a particular issue, this helps them find the specific official responsible for that issue and contact them directly via email or phone. Whenever said politician’s phone line is free, Meu Rio robo-calls campaigners who provided their phone numbers and connects the call, creating a line of people calling all day long about the same issue.

In the last two and a half years, 150,000 Rio residents — overwhelmingly Brazilian youth under 34 years old — have used Meu Rio to tighten Rio’s woefully unprotective environmental protection laws, demand transparency from bus companies hiking fares, and even amend their constitution to keep officials convicted of corruption from occupying high offices in Rio, a valid concern in a country where former President Fernando Collor was impeached on corruption charges in 1992 and went on to become a senator again in 2007.

Meu Rio receives requests across Brazil to implement their tools in other cities, but only had the resources to support their work in Rio — until now. The organization received a $475,000 grant last year from the Omidyar Network, an investment firm funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to foster advancement in government transparency and social media, and received a $500,000 grant from Google.org, the charitable investment arm of Google, to expand access to Meu Rio’s organizing tools across the country. (Incidentally the most famous recipient of Omidyar’s wealth, journalist Glenn Greenwald, also lives in Rio.)

One of the more creative uses of Meu Rio's social local mobilization tools is a crowdsourced neighborhood watch program to stop people from pilfering trolley cars in the bohemian neighborhood of Santa Teresa. Since 1877, residents in Santa Teresa and the adjacent Morro do Prazeres favela relied on the bondinho, a yellow trolley, to climb a steep hill of cobblestone switchbacks to their neighborhoods. In 2011, the trolley went off its rails and killed six people, and Rio discontinued the service indefinitely. Despite a series of promises and timelines, the city has yet to bring the historic and beloved bondinho back into operation.

Last year, bondinho aficionados started noticing that pieces of the historic trolleys were starting to show up for sale all over the city, and the only place they could have come from is the trolley warehouse in Santa Teresa. Residents started a campaign on Meu Rio demanding respect for their historic patrimony and put a plan in place to monitor what was left. Nine hundred and eighteen people put pressure on Rio’s transportation secretary to publish an inventory of the trolley warehouse, and 2,748 residents signed up to monitor a live webcam feed Meu Rio set up in a neighbor’s window overlooking the warehouse entrance. Leonardo Eloi, who handled the technical production for the campaign, says that not a single piece has gone missing since.

But Trolley parts are far from the most pressing need in a city where almost half of its residents don’t even have access to basic sanitation. “If I had to choose the most important issue in Rio,” Orofino says, “it’s that we are such a crazily unequal city, in virtually every regard.”