Not all of our clients know it, but Sigalei maintains a solid relationship with Higher Education Institutions.
Today, we have partnerships with courses from three institutions:
- Superior School of Advertising and Marketing of São Paulo (ESPM-SP)
International Relations Course - Getúlio Vargas Foundation of São Paulo (FGV-SP)
Law School - Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Political Science Course
In addition to these partnerships, we also support Strategos Consultoria Política, a junior enterprise formed by students of Public Policy Management and Political Science at the University of Brasília (UnB).
This link with academia is part of our origin.
It is worth remembering that Sigalei's history began in 2015, when I was doing a doctorate at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar), after graduating and getting a master's and doctorate in Political Science.
Alongside brothers Frederico Oliveira and Danilo Oliveira, both engineers, we started to assemble the project, which counted on decisive support from my advisor, UFSCar Political Science professor, Eduardo Noronha.
Upon learning of our idea, Noronha was quite excited about Sigalei's proposal: to incorporate the academic concepts of Political Science into a technological solution capable of providing a broad understanding of the Brazilian political scenario.
He liked the project so much that he made a generous non-refundable donation of R$ 15,000 so that we could enable our first movements, when we didn't even have a CNPJ. At the time, he just asked that our counterpart be to support academia.
And so we have done.
Check out statements from professors and researchers from three universities showing how Sigalei has been relevant to their students:
1. Superior School of Advertising and Marketing of São Paulo (ESPM-SP)
According to Marcello Fragano Baird, professor of the International Relations course at ESPM, the course has a strong emphasis on understanding, in practice, how the decision-making process of public policies of the federal government works and how stakeholders articulate themselves to assert their interests, pressuring the public power to implement public policies.
"I think Sigalei is a very useful tool for students," he says.
"On the platform, they can see a series of factors that influence public policies. They can have access to information from social networks, news, they can do a systematic follow-up of how a bill is processed and they can evaluate stakeholders at the federal, state, and municipal levels. They can also do a systematic, intelligent follow-up, which would be much more work than if they had to do it without any technological resource," comments the ESPM professor.
Another gain, according to Marcello, is in intelligence.
"Sigalei has several tools that help to understand, more intelligently, what is happening: you can know if that bill, which you follow, is being processed or not; what the chance of approval is... so, all these elements make life much easier for those who want to work especially with government relations, which is the path chosen by many students," adds the professor.
According to him, Sigalei has contributed a lot to the students' training, who are quite motivated by the prize offered by Sigalei – the franchise of free access to the tool for those who present the best-evaluated work at the end of the semester. "They make an effort to do a cool job analyzing bills, the stakeholders involved, the processing... It's cool that they learn, get motivated to learn and compete for the prize."
Another professor of the International Relations course at ESPM, professor Denilde Oliveira Holzhacker, says that the partnership with Sigalei stands out in preparing students to monitor and analyze the legislative process.
According to her, the differential – using more sophisticated technological tools – is the possibility of understanding how the daily life of the Government Relations (GovRel) professional works in practice.
"In all these years, more than 300 students have been able to use the tools to build GovRel strategies," she calculates.
"It is a successful partnership with a great impact for the training of high-quality professionals to further consolidate the GovRel area."
2. Getúlio Vargas Foundation of São Paulo (FGV-SP)
According to lawyer Mariana Chaimovich, a collaborating researcher at the Center for Teaching and Research in Innovation (CEPI) of the FGV-SP Law School, the partnership between CEPI and Sigalei started from a common desire between Academia and an intensive technology-use company: using data to reach well-founded conclusions.
"The tools made available by Sigalei, besides saving a lot of research time, allow CEPI researchers to focus on interpreting the data obtained, because they can already find categorized and filtered information with the help of Sigalei's system," comments Mariana.
One of the advantages cited by the researcher is allowing a wide freedom of data filtering, categorization, and sectorization by themes, dates, authors, and several other options. "The tool allows you to think in a well-founded way about better regulations and, ultimately, how to suggest better public policies, which is - or should be - the ultimate goal of academia's collaboration with the Country and the world," she notes.
"Furthermore, by having greater contact with the results from this data, we were able to contribute to the platform itself, which has been constantly improving. It is an immense joy to be part of this project," points out Mariana, who is president of the Lobby Regulation Committee, director of Editora Diálogos and a lawyer at the Institute of Strategic Studies of Technology and the Cash Cycle.
3. Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG)
In the assessment of Professor Manoel Santos, from UFMG, both professors and students of the graduate programs in Political Science and Law at the institution have reaped benefits from using the Sigalei tool, especially in the production of articles, dissertations, and theses.
"The Sigalei tool is especially useful in optimizing the collection and systematization of data, both quantitative and qualitative. This facilitates an integration between qualitative and quantitative approaches, a characteristic increasingly valued in social research," highlights Santos. "It allows fast and selective access to a huge database on legislative production, both in the states and in the National Congress," he says.
With this partnership, according to the professor, professors and students at UFMG gained agility in the data collection and systematization phases. "Automation leaves the researcher free to use their (usually scarce) time on what really matters: the analysis and interpretation of substantive results.".
One of the beneficiaries of the partnership is the student Lara Andrade Silva Viana, who recently presented a dissertation to the Graduate Program in Political Science at UFMG – one of the requirements to obtain the Master's degree in Political Science.
In her work, Lara says she is grateful to the Sigalei platform for facilitating the process of collecting documentary data, the search for regulatory frameworks and legislative propositions, within the scope of the Legislative Assembly of Minas Gerais.
“We filtered the searches through semantic delimitation, based on the keywords agroecology, agroecological, collecting and systematizing all the results of legislation, bills, requirements, and speeches between January 2000 and June 2022. We found 164 propositions, 115 speeches, and 28 decrees on agroecology or that referred to agroecology,” she informs.
The work is titled “From the alternative agriculture movement to the agroecological policy: an analysis of the agroecology subsystem in Minas Gerais (2000-2022)”.
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All these testimonies are very rewarding.
As I reported at the beginning of this text, Professor Eduardo Noronha (UFSCar) was the first to bet on our work, with the only counterpart being helping the academic community.
We are faithful to this commitment.
An example of this is the new partnership we have just signed with UFMG, more exactly with the Observatory for the Quality of Law group at the Law School.
Here at Sigalei, our mission is to facilitate society's access to government information and data.
We believe that, by making our platform available to universities, we allow students/professors/researchers to have a more complete development of their potentialities.
These partnerships are also excellent for Sigalei. Receiving feedback generates good insights to qualify our platform. Finally, we understand that this coexistence with the scientific method encourages us to maintain a permanently innovative spirit.
We increasingly want to take this knowledge to the market.
We love to show how the Sigalei platform and our service package can contribute to improving the performance of the organizations' Institutional and Government Relations teams.
Let's have a quick chat?
Write a brief message to my email and we will schedule a conversation within your availability!
I look forward to your email.
* Ivan Ervolino is co-founder and Strategy Director at Sigalei
ivan@sigalei.com.br
