 to get started. So thank you so much for joining. I think we're going to have people wandering in for quite some bit of time because sessions are a little bit staggered given the intense security this morning. So my name is Stacy Donahue. I'm a managing director at Luminate, which some of you may know previously as the governance and citizen engagement initiative of Omidyar Network. We have recently, as of last October, spun out into an independent entity with a new name, so great new name, same mission. So with that I would like to introduce to you our panel for today. We have three innovators in the Latin American civic tech landscape who all are investees of Luminate, by the way. And the topic for today's panel is impact, not surprisingly. And what we're going to do is a bit of a fishbowl format, but it's going to be modified fishbowl. Have people done this before? I actually had not, so this is new for me. But the concept is that the panelists are going to speak for 15 minutes about their experience in trying to create impact and challenges to impact. And then we're going to have 15 minutes where those of you in the audience can feel free to either talk about your own experiences or ask the panelists questions. And the reason it's called a fishbowl is because theoretically you would actually get up and go tap one of these panelists on the shoulder and sit in their seat and they would move out of the way. So it is a way to make things more interactive and lively. The issue, however, with our setup today is that it's not really conducive to a lot of getting up and moving around. It's like the dead fishbowl where everyone is in place. So we're going to do modified fishbowl, which is that just stay where you are, but just raise your hand if you want to take the floor and speak for a few minutes on your experiences. So we'll do that for 15 minutes and then we'll go back to the panelists for 15 more minutes and then back to you guys for 15 minutes. So that should keep us all awake and energized. And if anyone sort of speaks too long and starts to dominate the floor, I reserve the right as the moderator to give you the fishbowl hook to no pun intended to let others speak. But hopefully that'll be a way that everyone feels comfortable speaking. I was a little concerned that that format might inhibit people who are more introverted. You don't want to get up and actually go sit in someone's seat. So I would love it if everyone will really feel comfortable speaking. So with that, I will turn it over first to Alessandra Orofino from NOSAS, who you heard in her amazing keynote speech yesterday, and then followed by Fabro Staibel from ITS in Rio, and followed by Lucia Abalanda-Casale from Avina Foundation. Yeah, hi everyone. I think most of you probably heard me yesterday, so I will let most of the time to my colleagues here. I am the ED of NOSAS, and for those of you who weren't here yesterday morning, NOSAS is a laboratory for activism and civic engagement in Brazil. And we also do work in other Latin American countries, mostly through trainings and partnerships with existing organizations. We don't operate campaigns in other Latin American countries. We did, however, just anecdotally give a training to a bunch of Colombian activists just a few days ago. And yesterday, apparently the president of the Colombian Congress was treating out that he was being harassed by thousands of emails on his inbox about the campaign and complaining about it publicly, but it did get the activists a meeting with him. So there you go. But essentially what we do is that we create different, what we call different civic engagement infrastructures, so different groups that are very locally focused in different cities in Brazil, or have a very specific cause orientation. And we start campaigning using these infrastructures for a long period of time, enough to build a community around them of trust and sort of common identification. And then over time, we take people that have already campaigns on issues that we consider to be relatively easy or consensual into more difficult issues, either more technical or that sort of provoke more debate throughout the city or for that cause. Usually our issues were multi-cause by nature, but usually we focus on either sort of human rights at large, sustainability also at large, or transparency, good governance, and just effective government. And interestingly, in the case of Brazil, usually human rights issues are more associated with the left, transparency, corruption, etc., those issues more associated with the right, unfortunately, but it's the case in Brazil. And then the environmental issues are the ones that are less polarizing for now, so it's an interesting sort of way of thinking about it. We use a lot of technology for the work that we do. All of our campaigns have sort of a technical backbone or a digital backbone, and we use digital essentially to organize more effectively, but we also always have at least one tactic or something that we're doing in the world that happens offline, and that helps us sort of get closer to decision makers and with a guarantee that impacts. So the way we think about it is that we use digital to aggregate huge numbers of people, to make it easier for people to identify topics that are interesting to them, to identify other people in their communities that care about the same things in a very sort of low barrier to entryway. So even if you're, I don't know, commuting back and forth every day and you have a family and you don't have a lot of time, you can still get engaged in your community by something easy to do on your phone. But we also have that sort of offline footprint as a way of sort of raising above the noise and also signaling to decision makers that whatever they're perceiving is not just something that is sort of a social media phenomenon that will go away very quickly, but there's a real infrastructure around it that is capable of keeping a pressure over time, and that usually elicits quicker sort of government response to whatever communities are asking for. We've been doing that for a few years now, so we're, we have almost, almost a million and a half members registered in different parts of the organization in different areas in Brazil, and we're able to also raise money from our members, not enough to cover all of our costs, but enough to do a few interesting things that we wouldn't necessarily be able to do otherwise. And all of our technology, all of the, so including chatbot technology, and we now developed our first WhatsApp chatbot through the API that WhatsApp is testing out, all of that is sort of embedded or talks to each other through one common platform, that is our internal platform, that we're now starting to open up to third parties, partner organizations, friends of noses. So we're just testing that out as well, and the fact that we use a common platform actually gives us a common database, so we're able to evaluate impact through this sort of common database. So that's just initial thoughts. Hello everyone, thank you for the invitation. My name is Fabra Fabristaba, come from ITS, Institute for Technology, Society of Real. I would say the cause of ITS is to identify causes. So I always try to understand what would be the next thing that we're not paying attention to. So two years ago, one of the directors came and said we should talk about digital identity, and he said, what? And right now I can see how digital identity is kind of like an infrastructure to discuss everything. Last year, the referendum for gun control rights went for a discussion in the Congress because it was not a digital identity system. 4,000 people voted yes, and then if from a participatory experience in the Congress, it went for a vote in the Congress. Luckily it stopped there, but things could go really wrong with votes and so on. First of April, there will be a Berkeley article on how Android is leaking privacy and so on. If you read it, one of the things is about that they cannot identify who does what, and where. This is also a digital identity issue that we are trying to understand. And for bank inclusion, participatory inclusion, all this is about digital rights. So digital rights, digital identity made no sense to me until I started to understand that. Around 2007, we are discussing Internet rights, and we come again, we come together with the Minister of Justice of Brazil to create the first collaborative portal for the Brazilian Internet Bureau of Rights. By then, there was no this idea of having a collaborative portal to co-create public policies, and today, Tim Barns Lee says that the Brazilian Internet Bureau of Rights is a right to Internet build, done with Internet people and so on. So ITS is kind of trying to understand what to be the next cause that will cause, that will kind of create infrastructure for a good civic debate. Particularly in terms of our area of democracy and technology, we have a chatbot, Alda. Alda works with public security in Rio. So if we can do something public security in Rio that is connect government and civil society, I say it works anywhere. It's worked with current existing mechanisms of public participation and helps people to follow and track sense suggestions for the next agenda meeting and so on. And it's being adopted by policies by police and as well as civil servants. We also have Mudamos that uses blockchain to promote trust in the signature of digital identities. So government was not trusting signatures collected by paper, people were not trusting government systems to sign petitions, and in 25 years, only seven petitions passed Congress that collected enough signatures. So it said we can use blockchain, very little blockchain, just a necessary one, to create trust. And now three cities have adopted, we already passed three bills using the systems in the legislative. And we also have the botcatcher, which is an algorithm to identify if Twitter profile is a bot or not. And this is about media literacy. So we want to enforce ownership in the audience that they can know if the bots, if the Twitter accounts around them are bots or not. So instead of explaining the propaganda, computational propaganda or the bot systems, we want to provide media literacy and ownership. So like Gnosis, that is a huge inspiration for us. Sometimes we use their tools, they are very good. We exchange lots of thoughts on that. We try to understand what's coming next and then less sentence that I would say, I'm an optimist. I think we are in a very, very innovative moment to create new networks of civic participation. I come from Brazil, Bolsonaro is president, Golden Shower, I know what it is. It doesn't seems like it, but we see lots of emerging movements coming from civil society, from private sector, from political parties to occupy politics. And I think our job is to counter support these new movements coming so they can have intra-movement participation, they can have a intra-transparency, intra-contability, that I think if you don't have in the base, you cannot claim later on by product YouTube. I hope everyone followed the Golden Shower controversy involving the Brazilian president, otherwise that would have been a very strange comment. Google it, online. Google it, yeah, you'll get a kick out of it. It's a official tweet from the president. Why is Golden Shower? Yeah, anyway, that's the time's really beginning. Perfect. Hello, everyone. My name is Lucia. I work in Fundación Avina, and in Fundación Avina I manage Altec, that is an alliance focused on civic technology, an alliance that is from Lumidate and Avina. The alliance, very connected with Fabrio, have the aim to create networks. We focus in collaborative process in order to have also to reach the gap between civic technology developers on the civil society organizations that have been working for many, many, many years in Latin America, and also with journalists and also with people from government. So we try not to support projects related to civic debt, but really try to focus on problems and opportunities and try to involve different people related to this problem and trying to build an idea. And after that, develop a project that sometimes have to use technology, but sometimes not. Sometimes they use campaigns based in some way with technology, but not specific to develop an app. This process has allowed us to, for example, create different networks in Latin America related to journalism, for example, a very specific network related to water and journalism that works in Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, and Mexico, because the privatization of water is a big, big, big issue in Latin America. Also, for example, we create a network related to the monitoring of elections that works in Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, and Uruguay. They work together and develop teams that follow up and oversight all the election process in the different countries, and after that exchange practice about how we can improve the oversight and the participation in elections. Also, for example, we create a specific project that related to participatory budget in different countries, like Argentina, for example. So we try to develop with our allies different practices of participation that try to be more inclusive and try to be more connected with the civil society organizations that work in this specific area. One of the main issues that in general civic tech have is that it's difficult to engage and a real amount of person for a long time. Sometimes they have a very specific moment that is the high moment of the media, of the specific context, but we try to look who are the owners of the process and try to maintain this process for a long, long, long time. For example, the participatory budget process in Argentina keeps rising for about five years, like what is a lot for civic tech. Also, we work a lot with new technologies trying to explore, but in a really good connection with civil society. For example, they use blockchain, but blockchain was not only to develop the technology and try to taste it, but also work with the government on civil society and how to use it and how to change the internal structure of government. For example, in Argentina, we create a project related to blockchain and subsides that the government gives to artists and single mothers. Also in Chile, we use blockchain to review the quality of the data related to energy and so on. We have many projects, but the focus is to be able to connect different types of vision to create a project, to focus and not to be the technology at the end, but the way to create a more inclusive process. Also, we have a great focus in political education that we think nowadays is a key issue related to civic tech projects. It's impossible to think in to have a better participation with the use of technology without sinking in political formation. I don't know how to say it, but political formation. That's more or less what we do. I heard you talk about two potential barriers to impact. One is the difficulty in maintaining engagement of people over time, and the other was the need to change internal structures of government and how hard that is. Favreau and Alessandra, can you give us in just a few quick bullet points on what you find as some of the main challenges and barriers to impact that you face? So I think one challenge is the policy frame. So if you frame something on the left or the right, you might stay in the bubble. So the problem is how to reach the shadow people. So the shadow people, I say, is the people that are not in the light of a really extreme either left or right. So how do you design something for these people? And I believe it's not about macro trend, I believe it's about micro trend. It's about small changes, small opportunities for participation. And if you can create good opportunities for democratic participation within the people, although they might disagree on gun control, abortion, so on, they might agree on participatory budgeting for school, for example. So for me, the challenge is that we focus too much on the agendas on the left and right, and I'm not saying that it's not important, but there's a lot of shadow in the middle and I think the opportunity is there. I completely agree with what's already been said. What I would add is that and the two main challenges for us are also, I think, in a different way, but are also maintaining engagement over time and broadening that engagement over time and then, of course, soliciting response in government and that requires most of the time changing government infrastructure to some degree. What we have learned, though, is that that's particularly hard if you're trying to do it in the abstract. It gets a lot easier if you have a very specific policy demand and you sort of use that also as a vehicle for changing practices. So if you want to convene government and say, why don't you create an effective way for people to influence what you do? In the abstract, they may even do something, but more often than not, the response will be something very superficial that allows people to participate but doesn't necessarily obligate government to listen. So we'll let the people speak, but we don't necessarily want to listen to what they're saying. However, if you have a very specific sort of demand that has social clout and people really want it to move through, then that becomes a vehicle for how government will respond. We've seen that a few times and I think it's our best bet for that. I think we also have to learn a few lessons from aggressive sort of commercial strategies that different companies have been using. When I look at what, and I'm not by any means saying that they're always ethical, however, they do tend to work and I think there is a way for us to get inspiration from them in an ethical way. If you look at the way Uber, for instance, has sort of created new markets, usually what they do is that they first get adopted and then they say regulate me in a way that allows me to operate because I'm already adopted. I'm already something that the population wants to some extent and there's already public demand for what I do. Now, give me permission to operate. If they did it the other way around, if they said, please give me permission to operate and then I will start running my service, they would never run their services anywhere, really. I think to some extent as sort of promoters of civic tech, we have to think about that as well. How do we create ways of engaging with government that people really use and people really want and then we say, hey, now you can't just close that door, you're going to have to turn this into something that is official and that can have sort of stability over time. I would say that's hacking the system when I hear that expression. What I really think it is, it's sort of hijacking it and I think we need to do it more often than not. So this is the first time we're going to do the fishbowl format of having other people add their perspectives as well. If people have either questions about what the panelists have said so far or want to add their own experiences about where they've seen impact in their own organizations or where they place barriers to impact. Please. So I found it interesting that you mentioned the minister who was saying he was being harassed by his email. Yes. And on kind of our side of civic tech, we're all about the input of civic engagement, right, and building up that capacity for civic engagement. And yet it seems like in my experience working in this field for 13, 14 years, is that we fail to make sure that those on the receiving end can ingest that feedback in meaningful ways that don't just overwhelm their staff and systems in ways that they don't feel prepared for. So a lot of the time when I talk to citizens about civic engagement and strategies, I'm trying to talk to them about strategies that are going to create the lowest barrier for entry into power. And so as you're building these tools and resources that help create this massive pipeline for engagement, what thoughts do you have or what tools are you seeing or challenges that you're seeing on the side where government is trying to absorb that information and make meaningful use of it? Because it's one thing to get tens of thousands of emails that sort of feel like you have to respond. It's a very different thing on those micro issues to be able to see those as a lawmaker and to be able to respond to those micro communities that are engaged. I can react to that. So let me see where I can start. I think from my experience, I haven't been working with this for 14 years, but I have been working on it for, I don't know, 10 years now. What I've seen is oftentimes when governments create platforms for civic engagement, they do it in a way that is similar to trying to pre-define the path of a public protest, for instance. So if you say you can protest, absolutely, your right to protest is being preserved, but it can only protest on this square on Sundays from four to five. You're sort of looking at the least disruptive way of giving people their right to engage, right? And really, activism, if it's not disruptive, it doesn't work. It needs to be disruptive to some extent for people to pay attention. I'm not advocating for violence by any means, but I am advocating for some level of disruption. If everything is allowed to function in the same way it was, then there's very little chance of it getting anywhere. However, and there's a flip side to it, disruption only gets you so far, right? It gets you attention, it may get you a meeting or a decision that it favors whatever cause people are rallying around. You won't necessarily sustain depth over time, and you won't necessarily be the ideal sort of context for complex conversations to take place, and complex conversations are always important to achieve change. So the way we've been sort of trying to think about it is, how do we create disruption initially, but then also once we sort of gain that attention, channel information in a way that is digestible so it can start a new conversation. I'll give you a practical example from a campaign that I mentioned yesterday, so most people already have the context. When we did a campaign on the public school that was going to be demolished, we created a lot of disruption. We flooded everyone's essentially every decision maker on that scene. We flooded their inbox. We didn't flood their WhatsApp numbers because they weren't really using WhatsApp at that level at the time, but today we would flood their WhatsApp as well. We did petitions, we did press, we did the webcam, we did all kinds of things that were meant to be disruptive and meant to be a little bit overwhelming. But then government said, here's how we're going to respond. We're going to have a public hearing to know what the school community would like to do about this, and also hear from the business owners in the region that might benefit from the parking lot. So we want to reach sort of a consensus here through this public hearing, and the public hearing that they proposed was going to happen. I remember very precisely because it was a big debate. It was going to happen on a Wednesday at 1 p.m. So no one from the school community really could go. They couldn't attend. The business owners couldn't really attend either. So it was a way for them to sort of say that they were responding to it, but not really. And of course what we did is that we kept the disruption up. We said that's not good enough. Like if you're a way of creating debate is by calling a physical public hearing at a time and they then no one can be there, then it's not good enough. We kept the disruption up and then they had to come back to us and say, okay, how do we then engage in a constructive conversation now that you sort of overwhelmed us without being a public hearing at 1 p.m. on a Wednesday, and then we ended up settling for a public hearing on a Saturday, a day where people could go. We did a crowdfunding campaign and we hired physical buses to pick up all of the students, the kids, and their parents from the school, bring them to the public hearing on that Saturday. So we also used sort of the power of the crowd to sort of make sure they could attend and we had a digital platform where people could sort of interact with what was going on as the public hearing was happening. I don't think that was a perfect solution, but I think it was definitely easier from the government side to digest and it gave them better quality information than just the sort of over flooding of messages had, but I don't think we would have achieved that without some level of disruption either. So I think both probably need to go hand in hand if we want government to respond, at least from my perspective, but I am working outside of government. Of course, if you're already working inside of a government structure, I think it's different, but the way I would encourage anyone working inside of government to think about activism is that oftentimes when activists create disruption, they also give you the political space to negotiate for a better solution. So you can say, this is not just me as a disruptor internally trying to get you big government structure to be more transparent and open, this is me trying to help you really respond to something that is a public acclaim. It's something that the people want. So activists also sort of give you that excuse to say that to create that political space for better negotiations to happen internally in the favor of more transparency and accountability. Have perspectives on that method of starting with activism and then going towards negotiation. Have you used that in your work or do you have a different method or perspective? Maybe thinking of a few campaigns we did in Burundi or the bloggers network that we support in Burundi. Can you speak up, please? You could use your, oh, be careful of audience. Sorry, I'm trying to eat. So we support blogger networks in restricted settings and among one is Burundi and I think we're media. So we have, I think, pretty large digital platforms running there and I think by scaling. So by having a crowd of young people online already and making sure that a certain issue is read or is being seen by a lot of people. It's actually already a good step to influence government for example. There was an issue there with registering your company as a starting entrepreneur and it cost like, it was an amount that nobody actually could pay and then they started, you know, campaigning about that but also having offline debates but I think at some point things were being retreated and then they kind of asked for the Chamber of Commerce to respond and at some point they said, okay, we have to go ahead. So yeah, it's making, we're working together with media or with, yeah, that comes from media where young people are, how many of the people in the room are working in organizations that you would describe as activists? So raise of hands for that. Hello. And how many people in the room would describe their organizations as more collaborative with government to deploy civic tech or other technologies? And is there another category that I'm missing here? Anyone just shout out? If I haven't described you or put you in a box that makes you comfortable. Can I ask, I mean, is there a clear and mutually exclusive element to this? So we work with government and what I do but there's like a lot of small nudging we've had to do. Sometimes with technology sometimes we make it like there's nothing we can do. Now you have to do this but there's a lot of stuff we've done working with government where I think that, you know, we're not coming with protest placards but where we feel like there's kind of an activist or an implicit activism in how we try to reshape how they have to respond or have to view how they engage with citizens. And so I don't know, I just wonder do people usually do it in kind of very separate buckets because I always kind of feel like a secret activist if that makes sense or sometimes more explicit but we have to be careful about it because we love how we work with government but I don't know do people feel like that's something they have to kind of wear a separate hat or? I think that's a lovely, you've drawn out a lovely thing that exists throughout the civic tech film that doesn't really have a good name which is there's definitely, there's vendors to government that would literally do anything for money and then there's vendors to government that come with quite a lot of values and they're sort of like secret campaigners. I used to run my site, it was very clearly in the like secret campaigner sort of like category, I very often wished I would do anything for money but there's no reason to be obvious. Don't we all? But the fact that it doesn't have a name that's really important right because it's really important. Can I raise a question that is a bit unpopular but I'm hearing a lot about the you know civic tech in the system and basically each sector has been you know attached to all the possibilities like tech players, companies, governments, activists, citizens, civic tech but definitely the traditional annual civil society organization was like there's no mention of it, you're paying there's much of a limit presence of attendance here so I just wonder like what is particularly in your case like how are you working with more traditional NGA was like what is the relationship you have like specific tactics in terms of your role, what is your role, what is your role in that sector and you know how do you feel about that? For us we started to work with civic tech because we spend like 12 years working in Latin America with traditional civil CSOs. They have the knowledge about the topics, they are the specialists and know what is the problem, what are the opportunities, how to use technology because at the end technology is only part of the solution so getting involved with the CSOs is for me at least for Mavina, for tech perspective and experience is the first things that we do for us it's impossible to think in developing a project or to implement a technology or a campaign without experience of a traditional CSO. For example in Colombia, also Colombia, Colombia is like the scientist moment, in related to the peace process we work with a very young technology organization that called Mobilizatorio but also with a very traditional organization that called Misangre, that is an organization that know everything about the peace process in Colombia that is part of the group of the organizations that accompany all the process of the peace process in Colombia and they come together and try to mobilize in order to set the preference and the perspective of young people in Colombia about the peace process but perhaps if Mobilizatorio tries to do this alone they don't have all this experience and the knowledge that Misangre have related to all the process and the history of the peace process in Colombia for me is like it's something that they the both perspective create something that none of the organization could reach alone so it's amazing. I was smiling because we always like to think about the intrapreneur, the intrapreneur is the person that doesn't leave the organization to make a change and when the civic tech culture is not within the running of an organization it's very hard to introduce civic tech but there is always an intrapreneur inside who wants to do it so when you think about more traditional civil society what we usually do is that we hear first from the intrapreneur of one civic tech we go to him we prepare something and then take some time until there's a window of opportunity implemented but Transparency International MS International several of these big ones they are struggling to use the civic tools and maybe what we try to show is the civic tool is not an end is a mean so if they can understand how their tier of change goes well with civic tech and how they need to change themselves to use it becomes easier for them to adopt this as a way to do it but it's a very long process if they are young if they're like us that we just yeah let's do it easy but usually we are not the average I think it's a completely long long long process for that reason when we think like a partner for a technology process is not to give up like a product yeah after that okay leave the organization alone when we are thinking to a partnership between a traditional CSO and a civic tech organization we're thinking about two years process that a process that takes at least two years yes and change a lot of things inside the organization but there are changes that for me we we call it resilient changes because there are changes that in some way are difficult to yes come back to the starting point and I would observe from where I sit and working with organizations in multiple different countries that the context varies a lot whether the interaction between civil society and tech organizations varies a lot by geography and Latin America I would say is one of the geographies in which I do see a lot of interaction between the two by contrast in the US I find them to be very separate domains that now are starting to come together a little bit more but historically have not really whereas in Africa there's definitely more convergence between the different sectors and and in some of our emerging work in Asia not so much so I think a lot to learn there but it's an excellent point about kind of who we convene in a room and and the fact that there aren't as many traditional civil society players at it at a convening like this I think it's it's a great point so lots of hands now I'll go to Mika and then I was going to ask if you might reflect on or give us some insight into how much you worry about anti-civil technology and the reason I ask is is because maybe in the United States we have a slightly more advanced experience of what happens when tech becomes ubiquitous a certain type of tech right hyper capitalist extractive tech and and so our advocacy sector for example is suffers the tragedy of the commons everybody is trying to run campaigns and they aren't unique anymore there there's so many of them every viral video beats everybody else's viral video and we have a race to the bottom of brain step which is to say find the most spectacular emotional message because that's what Facebook will amplify for you so I'm wondering if this is a context for people in Latin America as well and whether you're doing anything in your own work or seeing any possibility of pushing back because it seems to me that real civic space is almost non-existent it's mostly colonized by tech companies and most of these campaigns and practices exist on private servers and so I'm curious is this you know play along with it because we don't have a choice or is there some room for pushing back great question we've been thinking about this a lot actually since we started so I have I think scattered thoughts not really a coherent answer but a few thoughts are first of all I think as as in my case as activists people are operating in that space we've definitely seen that race to the bottom and there's a lot of noise out there in the case of developing countries like Brazil I think in some extent it's even worse because we're exposed not just for our own noise but also to the American noise everyone everyone else's because the level of influence on that way it's just a lot greater than it is on the other way around one thing that we've been careful to do and I don't think that it's enough by any means but I think it is one step is ensuring that we do not confuse audience with membership and community I think a lot of especially when you talk about more traditional civil society organizations when when they finally say we need to be more tech driven or more digital driven really what they mean is we need to build an audience on social media and they hire someone to do it which they should they should have some audience on social media it is good for reputational issues it is good now for interacting with certain elected officials even which are living on Twitter and like doing governing on Twitter really so it has become a political space and we should be there but but that audience is highly contingent on the commercial policies of providers and it can be taken away from you very quickly so building community is is fundamentally different from that and it is a lot more resource intensive and it requires boots on the ground and real meetings and real sort of FaceTime and I think it goes back to the question that we were raising in the beginning of the session of how we measure impact I think the funder community is not prepared necessarily for for resourcing at the intensity that building community requires and from for following impact measurements in a way that is that honors the different numbers that you get when you're really trying to measure a community not just the audience so become as a sector I think too accustomed to the very high numbers I have a petition it has five gazillion million signatures and we sort of value that implicitly or explicitly when I think maybe 10 years ago that was a really great way of achieving real world impact I don't think it's the case anymore because of that noise whereas a community that is able to re-engage often that has other ways of connecting and is also ready to standing solidarity with each other actually give work time and value to each other I think that's that will necessarily give you numbers that are less impressive but it will give you the ability to raise above the noise and and not be so dependent on the tech companies when it comes to the servers that we use the security apparatus that we have yes all of that it touches upon commercial interests too I think it's less to from my perspective it's less worrisome than turning social media intermingling intermingling civic space because the companies that operate the services tend to be a bit just commercially different from social media companies but it's the worrisome and we have few technology companies that are mission driven that resemble what he would just describe being but from a civil society perspective right like they're not just trying to do anything for money they're also but they do exist they exist in this room and as vendors through government I think they don't exist as much as vendors to civil society one of the things that we're trying to do is make our technology available to our partners not just because it could bring us some revenue we could but also because we've noticed that in the global south the technology that is available to campaigners is usually provided by some company in the U.S. the like that has that really builds a product for marketers and usually they're great products that's why we use them it's hard to copy them because that requires real investment so we won't be able to replace them completely not with the resources that we have but a few of the functionality can be done with relatively sort of low low levels of investment in technology and we can price that using our own currency we're not going to be necessarily subject to currency like currency fluctuation in and of itself is one of my biggest issues as a user I have a user of digital technologies that are developed in the global north because they're all priced in dollars and the hell my currency has lost 50 percent of its value in the past two years which means that that big chunk of my budget has fluctuated like crazy now I'm big enough to sort of absorb it but if you're talking about a small grassroots group in Latin America they won't they won't use the technology anymore because just they literally cannot pay for it I'm not even getting into the ethical and other implications of of being so reliant and big tech but we don't have a perfect answer for that yet I think we definitely need to work on it what we did well two agendas the one is how to make social media more community driven like button share button so on this is one discussion but what we launched six months ago was the ITS TV so ITS TV is not a TV it's like MTV in the 90s any program we do the algorithm is the format so if Facebook prioritized lives then our format is live with podcasts then podcasts is what's up and so on so we're trying to use all the networks as possible to create content to reach out audiences where they are and then put in the projects we have within this reach does it work is a try and error but we see membership coming we see people engaging and then we use it strategically so what I'm trying to say is that we know we'll never win the game of not using private tools for that what we're saying is that you're diversifying the tools we have so we can have it works for us but it's very costy see a lot in latin america that we develop the same technology once and again again and again and again so also we try to create a big and strong community using the offline space spaces for example there is a huge event in latin america that called abre la tam y condatos that more or less showing all the community related to civic tech open data and government and journalists that are interested in that file in this field sorry so we support this space this space has seven years that is a lot for an event and we use this annual space in order to share technology and for example in many countries you start to see that the organization start to share the same tool and also they start to develop in as a as a as a team for example uruguay and paraguay they are working together in a tool in order to I don't know support the the the offenses to human right the offenses for human right in activism so they start to find ways in order to develop and to adopt technology but in a showing showing way in order to be cheaper and also easier to use finding that space between like the highly polemical types of issues and the kind of really practical that people can dig in on and how that changes the kind of framing and how you're received the type of activism you're doing and I think a lot of touch a little bit what you're saying about the difference in geographies and I was wondering so I work a lot in Germany and France and Netherlands Belgium where there is kind of this space and you're you're allowed to kind of go in on these issues but I see places around the world where and I wonder about the Latin American context where kind of what should be a very reasonable request or idea is taken as like there is no there is too much heat just kind of generally that kind of very reasonable ideas are very reasonable suggestions are you are suddenly kind of painted with a label and you're suddenly kind of there isn't that space I think kind of the US sometimes is that way where you know sometimes reasonable ideas so when Miguel and I talked so also from you know we got the points that okay here's a region in a country where all of the men voted on whether or not to let women vote and they all decided in a gradation and so like how do you how do you engage with that and you see that America where there are regions or or issues where there just is no space where you immediately kind of get needed as a political actor and kind of shove it aside and how do you deal with that I'll hijack one of your sentences yesterday they asked you why don't you join politics and I said first I am in politics and second running elections may be not the right time so I think it's very important to create bridges instead of breaking so when you have like opinions about something they will say you're left and right and this will be the first tag you have keep going and focus on the topic there's a very good report I love and I learned lots of from Institute to update update Institute in Brazil and it's on civic tech from the peripheries so he goes to places I don't know and I can't go and he got innovations on landing rights heritage rights constitutional rights lots of things at me as a civic tech I know everything is going I was not aware of so there's lots of these activists are trying to occupy institution happening and they are not left and right they might be evangelical they might be from the militaries they might be from the favelas we don't know so what I will try to say is that we need to get institution how institutions work hack their system their rules and create tools that join there so there's always an opportunity to to join I'll finish with a promise I made my mom and I never fulfilled my mom asked it hi son what can I do to change the world how can I join politics and I can't give a good answer to her until today because about mechanism of civic participation is about impact and so on there's so few windows of participation so the reality is that usually you have to create pain points to enter or we have to create a slowly cultural changes so few windows of participation but there exists and our job I think is to hack the systems and to create the change there with tech from our perspective in the sort of bridging the gap issue well first of all we're not going to shy away from an issue just because it's become heated I think you're absolutely right in many places in the world it's not just that they have become more far right it's that the center of the political debate has shifted right so things that were once considered this is the things that we can all agree on these are sort of the basic rules of civilized civilized sort of societies have then become oh that's actually the far left so things like human rights or freedom of expression like all of that has become very politicized we're not going to shy away from that just because of that but what we've learned is that the who the people hear something from oftentimes matter more matters more to their perception of it being to political or to radical than the content of the message so if they hear something from us but they don't have a relationship to us already established over years and they perceive it to be radical they won't necessarily engage with it but they if they hear the same message from their mom or sister or whoever someone that they trust they have affection for that reception may be entirely different so when we tackle issues that we know are going to be very heated we tend to hyper segment only talk to people that we know are going to agree with it so we go the opposite side of trying to burst the bubble we don't pretend that we can unless it's people that have a very long history of engagement with us and then we'll also include them in that segment so we either talk to people that we know are going to agree with the issue because we know their engagement history or they may disagree or they may see it initially as something that may be too radical for them but they have such a long history with us that they will listen and we only talk to them but then we give them that information in a way that is easy for them to share and pass along so we trust that they will be our main vectors into their own communities families friends so we trust them to burst the bubble essentially because trying to do that ourselves just hasn't worked because we're not the main we're not necessarily the best interlocutor so if we're talking about something like women's rights we're either going to talk to the community that we know already is on board or we're going to talk to people that have done many things with us before however when we do our main request of that community will not be just take action it will be convince your family to take action and here are a few arguments that you can use and these arguments are often going back to your question about traditional civil society organizations these arguments are often the arguments that civil society organizations will not use because they perceive them as being somehow counter not counterintuitive but somehow opposed to a tenant like a principal tenant of the work that they do in the case of abortion for instance oftentimes the argument that we have tested this but the argument that works best with that sort of second audience the audience of our of our members is saying that if you legalize abortion abortion rates will drop and traditional abortion rights organizations or women's rights organizations will never use that argument because most of what they've been saying is that abortion is not necessarily a bad thing anyways like the whole no one one subortion they don't want to go there because it could be a it could be a good option for for some women in some situation so they don't want to make that argument but it really works and there is data to to back it up I mean in Portugal has been the case in Uruguay has been the case when you legalize it women get it through the well anyway it's a big story but it drops right so that's the kind of argument that will sort of create content on and will serve it not directly to the public but to our community and the community that we know already agrees with the whole legalized abortion stands and let them use that argument with their families and friends so when we're writing content when we're writing it for that second tier and we talk about the second tier a lot but we try to get the right vehicles to get there and and I think it's also an exercise in humility knowing that you're not always the best you're not always the best messenger um and yeah so if you don't want to be killed as the messenger you might as well find a good one I know that's kind of tactical but I hope it helps you've all been combining technology and civil society for years and you've done loads of things can you tell us about some things that didn't work yes in the technology space specifically well any any attempt in the broadest possible way where some tech and some civil society has met and what happened sure I mean um tech and civil society have met and it wasn't helpful for our own work for many years we ran a sort of open platform where people could create their own campaigns similar to other open platforms that then flooded the market after we had already sort of worked on that in Brazil they existed elsewhere um it worked for a while then it stopped working because again too much noise not enough community being built around it um it became a vehicle for creating many audiences but not necessarily for building the membership that you need to sustain it so we killed it so that worked and then didn't work and then from a more sort of things that I've seen not necessarily that I've done um I think in general the whole I don't know if that exists in other countries I'm sure it does like the whole like petition the senate petition like there is a open consultation process for the senate in Brazil it's essentially a poll and people take it and it's on bills and it's a it's a huge I hate it it's a huge disaster usually the way it works is that if it's really sensational people will take part in it and then it will be somehow weaponized by senators that want to pass outrageous things but if it's something that is really important and and it gets more it also gets sometimes the same level of engagement but it's not interesting to the senators themselves then they don't use it so because there's no binding process it doesn't go anywhere so I think in general like any technology that is sort of put on top of government but it doesn't actually change the institutional pathways and doesn't create any binding processes around it tends to be sort of participation washing and and worse yet it can be weaponized so when when something emerges out of it that somehow a political group wants to capture they will but if it's not interesting to them they won't so I've seen that a few times too yes a lot of experience yes the first one I think arrange marriage when yes when you for example have an excellent problem you are convinced that you're going to change the world trying to I don't know I got to develop a project related to elections of some issue and you decide which are the organizations that are the key organizations to involve in this process without thinking in the process like in a more brother way that in general that type of project are a disaster because sometimes the organization don't want to work together or there are some part that is missing so we have like a lot of experience with projects that started as a good idea but with partnership that in less than a year they broke down and okay the project is isolated without our owner the other thing and related to that is to to don't have like an owner of the project besides that sometimes there are many actors involved in a project even when the project is related directly to government there is someone that is going to use this data in order to advocate for the process for example if we have like a a platform of participatory monitoring okay the the platform could be connected with a local government but also we need an owner I don't know the ombudsman or the I don't know community of some of the community agency or someone that is going to use this data in order to advocate and create changes if we don't have this like person or figure it's so difficult that the that the project continues because at the end it's a empty space because you have data you have the government's approval but at the end you don't have users so it's like an nightmare and we we have like an excellent project that are like the best best cases at at a world level that is that are mentioned in different books for example a case in udy that is the the platform is connected with the local government I was one of the first platform that was really connected with a local government and the platform changed the whole structure that the the local government react to monitor your reporting was also an an adaptation of fix my street I'm saying too much but it's also in Montevideo but the thing was that there wasn't like a no owner of this process so the the platform besides that was really important for their relation between government and and civil society the platform is empty so at the end the platform died more or less yes yeah more or less that is the two two like big things that we learned related to that unfortunately we are just about out of time for this session I wanted to just sum up with um repeating a few of the points here that really stuck with me um and a lot to think about the first one is uh activism needs to be disruptive to work uh I think that that is going to stick with me um but the corollary point about our activism and collaboration mutually exclusive or is there some area in the middle or can an organization be activist sometimes and collaborative at other times I think there's a lot of interesting room for exploration there um another point for me was don't confuse audience with community that is something that speaking as a funder funders have done for a very long time and we've learned a lot of painful lessons from that so I think that's something we should all be taking to heart um Fabra's point about diversifying the tools that you work with because you won't be able to avoid them um but but at least if you're not completely beholden to one that gives you a little bit more leverage uh also creating bridges uh the fact that you will be painted left or right in the world we we live in today but just keep going to build the bridges I thought was very good advice um also who you hear from matters more than the content of the message and that sometimes um if you can't build bridges you shouldn't uh try to burst bubbles but uh can can get your message to people who can then do the work of trying to bridge rather than you trying to bridge it uh with your own organization uh is something that I think is really worth thinking about uh and gave gave me a lot of positive and then um finally to sum up uh Lucia's excellent point about no arranged marriages I think um we've seen a lot of those challenges and in the work that we funded as well um all with the best intent of bringing together constituents um towards a common goal but um uh it needs to have an organic component it can't be forced uh or it won't work so so those were some takeaways for me I hope that all of you have found this useful and please feel free to engage with the panelists afterwards or over the course of this event um because we have our next speaker starting in 15 minutes thank you