Bogotá te escucha: one petitions system, with a statutory clock
Every entity of Bogotá's district government must route citizen petitions through one system, Bogotá te escucha, reached by web form, the 195 phone line or the CADE & SuperCADE service halls. What gives a filed request teeth is national law: the right of petition is a constitutional right, and Ley 1755 de 2015 gives officials 15 days to answer a general petition — 10 for information or documents, 30 for technical consultations — "so pena de sanción disciplinaria". District Decreto 371 de 2010 adds a local duty: each entity reports its petition statistics monthly to the Secretaría General and to the Veeduría Distrital, and those reports are published. They grade answers not only on timeliness but on coherence, clarity and courtesy, entity by entity.
📊 Impact
227,022 petitions and complaints logged district-wide in the first quarter of 2026, 20% more than the same quarter of 2025; Engativá alone accounted for 35,102, and only 45.84% of records carried a location (Veeduría Distrital quarterly report, May 2026).
🎓 Lesson
A statutory deadline gives a complaint desk something a service standard cannot: a late answer is a disciplinary matter, not a missed target. The harder problem is what the answer contains, which is why Bogotá's monthly reports score entities on coherence and clarity as well as on the clock — an on-time reply that resolves nothing still closes the case.
Sources
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Bogotá te escucha: one petitions system, with a statutory clock” — Bogotá, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bogota-te-escucha/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
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