 Welcome. I'm really, really excited to be kicking off our second tic-tac show and tell event here. As we said, we've just been waiting for other people to join, but we don't want to be too tardy. This is supposed to be a really quick snappy punchy event. So let's kick off and other people can continue joining as and when they are able to. It's fantastic. We're actually up to nearly 90 participants already, which is amazing given we are over a year into just doing Zoom events. I'm astonished no one else is bored. But yeah, welcome all. It's great to see you. So I am Rebecca Rumble. I'm head of research at My Society and we've been running tic-tac now for nearly seven years. Obviously, this used to be a annual conference event with some little research events in between, but we've been online for the last year, as has everyone else. So yeah, welcome. Thank you obviously to all of our speakers for joining us and putting together some incredibly interesting sessions for us. And thank you all for participating. It's really, as I said, it's really, really great to see so many people are still willing to join a Zoom call at this point. So really, really pleased to see you all. And so pleased as well that we've got such an international audience testament to the fact that some of the fantastic presentations that we've got here are so relevant across borders. So just a quick housekeeping reminder. We are recording this event for those other people that aren't able to join us live. It's nighttime in various corners of the world. So I'm sure some people would like to access this when they're actually awake. Please ask questions in the chat. It's there for interaction because of the nature of this event. We're not going to be asking speakers just to answer questions live. What we're going to be doing is we will collect all of those questions and we will ask the speakers to provide a substantial answer afterwards and we will email that around to everyone so that they have access to that. It enables us to keep the kind of pace going. And it means that speakers can actually put a little bit of thought and maybe a little bit extra into their answers to you rather than kind of being on the back foot, trying to be very quick about it, but also trying to give you a good answer. Still absolutely please put all your questions in the chat. We will collect them all. We will send them all out to the relevant speakers and you will get an answer very, very soon. Please tweet as well. Obviously tweeting is still a thing. We're using hashtag tech tech. Details again will be posted periodically in the chat for you to see, but it'd be great to know what you think. And yeah, it's up to you if you want to have your camera on or not. Obviously I love to see all your faces, but it's very, very exhausting as well. I know having your camera on and being on all the time, so if you want to turn it off feel free to do so. We have some collaborative notes as well. The link again will be in the chat if you would like to contribute to the note taking on the presentations that are going on here. Please jump in there and do so. So I think I was supposed to be going through these slides. As I said, tech tech is one of our flagship events. It's mostly focused around impact research and hopefully I'm keeping my fingers crossed really tightly. We will be able to meet in person again next year and have kind of wonderful interaction and conversations that we would normally have in person. As I've said, I think I've been through all of those. And one last thing before I pass on to all of you speakers, next Wednesday we are going to be launching a report about reforming freedom of information in the UK. We've done a lot of work on how freedom of information operates over the last few years. Many of you will know that my society run the What Do They Know and Albert Halley websites which assist people in making freedom of information requests. And we've got some what we think are really, really exciting ideas for how freedom of information can be reformed and can be better, especially in terms of being able to use it and benefiting the public in terms of holding the government to account. So please do join us for that event next week if that is of interest to you. So moving swiftly on, each speaker will have seven minutes to make the presentation. We are going to be very brutal with the cutoff. There is going to be a time effort for all of our speakers. And once that seven minutes is up, we will be moving swiftly on. They will be muted if they go over seven minutes just so we can keep to time. So I have utter faith that all our speakers are well drilled and we'll be able to do that. Without further ado, I am going to hand over to our first speaker. It's Chloe Poad from Sivok Krissi. Chloe, excellent. Very, very quick. Okay. So Chloe, over to you. Hi everybody. So I'll try to be sharp for seven minutes. So my name is Chloe. I'm the founder of Sivok Krissi, a citizen engagement platform. We work with over 50 government organizations in Europe, helping them gather their community around goal projects and policies to collect their feedback and insights. Our mission is to foster inclusion, transparency and collaboration between government and their citizens. So we all remember 13 months ago when the whole world came into lockdown. This was such a shock. And it was time also for hard questioning. I think about what this crisis was pointing out on our deficiencies in our society. And of course, our team at Sivok Krissi was no exception. We felt that we could play an important role to facilitate a dialogue and the emergence of idea about the changes people wanted to see in the world after COVID. The problem is like the many cities we work with were so overwhelmed with like restriction and all this emergency they had to face on, they couldn't tackle this momentum. So we had to find another way. We have 20,000 French people subscribed on our platform on Sivok Krissi. So we decided in a few weeks to launch a complete independent consultation asking one simple question. What do we want for the world after COVID? We called this movement Construisons Demants. So let's build tomorrow together. And we launched online questionnaire, open discussion webinar to collect this idea. We partner with several organizations specialized in the transition. After a few days rolling on this project, one of my very good friends, Marc-Hon-Tuan, who is also the CEO of a Sivik tech platform named Toguna, he called me saying that they were doing exactly the same thing. And actually that many several initiatives similar to us was appearing everywhere in France. So the opportunity to gather those initiatives together and amplify the voice of citizens was too good to be missed. So Marc-Hon-Tuan has already drafted a few days before our website to list those initiatives and I joined him on those spots. And this is how, après maintenant, was born. The requirement for the initiative to join us was very simple and clear. Provide all the inputs from the citizen in open data and open source and explain your methodology of collect and analysis. So in total, we were 14 initiatives joining forces. We received more than 300,000 contributions and 3 million citizens took part of it. It was like very different initiatives, somewhere like professional like us, like Sivik tech platform, somewhere like parliamentarian who launched a questionnaire and question on Facebook, somewhere student and association. Some tried to find a polling. It was really diverse and amazing. The most astonishing part of this experiment was in every platform we found the same consensus around the society people wanted to live in. So there were six key issues that French citizens were expressing. Consideration of ecological and environmental challenge, transformation and consumption and project methods, changing our economic model to something more sustainable and resilient, increase effort in education system, more support in health system and strengthening our democratic functioning. Because in Sivik tech platform, every time the reproach we have was like you are not representative, we kind of like wanted to mirror what we found on our platform with a more scientific approach to show that actually our finding was representative of what French people want. So we partner with a polling institute named Opinionway and we took the 20 most voted contribution on all of our platforms and we ask again through Opinionway the same question. The results were the same, astonishing. People were expressing exactly the same idea of what they wanted for the world after COVID. Our movement got the attention of the French president Macron's cabinet and he mandated after a few weeks an official analysis of the contribution that we were able to present in Paris in July 2020. So I'm not sure it was actually taking into account for the recovery plan but it was still a big milestone like he audited all the platform. We had a very interesting exchange. We were able to present it to several of those institutions in France. So I wanted to finish, I have two minutes left, it's perfect like with explaining a little bit my takeaways on these experiments. I think there are three key things I observed. First, the cooperation between the 14 initiative made it disruptive but also impactful. What we started as like complete independent and all in our corner, the fact that we joined forces made it more visible and actually finished in the end of the president. The second one is for me looking at as a common future was the number one condition for a constructive and meaningful debate. There was no moderation involved and like the consensus that emerged and like the constructive idea was really good. So I think the real question behind every consultation whether it's a local one or a national one should always be what do we want as a community? What do we want in our society? The third takeaway I took care of from last year experiment was the reality. Our reality mirrored in the media and social media doesn't translate what people think and what people want. Those those platforms and I think unfortunately a lot of the I'm happy to discuss this afterwards but a lot of the media are highlighting only the senses and conflict and the fueling outrage and confusion. But again when you set up the condition of actually thinking of a future together there is space for debate there is space for constructive idea and there is very few people that use their work in the media or in social media to actually like amplify it but yeah I think it's a shame but it was still like a very beautiful milestone in my career in civic tech. Thirteen say good I'm very good so I hope I have two questions afterwards I heard we can respond by email and everything so I hope I'll get some good feedback from you guys. Thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you so much Chloe that was really really impressive not only the initiative but the fact you managed to do it within the seven minutes in the second language as well which is not as easy I don't think. Also I mean that last point you made I think we're all guilty sometimes of sort of disappearing into social media sometimes and forgetting that actually the world is very different than just you know the kind of relentless echo chamber you're often exposed to so really really important points and yes obviously everyone questions for Chloe in the chat we will get them over to her as soon as we have finished today. Right so thank you so much Chloe swiftly on we've now got Abigail Selmon from Ideas 42 and Adrienne Kins from OpenUp with their presentation understanding the small hurdles the block community engagement with behavioral design so the floor is yours. Wonderful thank you so much Rebecca and thanks we're really excited to share with you today how we use behavioral design to increase community engagement in South Africa. My name is Abigail Selmon and I'm a senior associate at Ideas 42. Thanks Abigail. Hi I'm Adrienne Kins from a civic organization OpenUp based in South Africa. Next slide. Yeah it's just some background and how it all started in South Africa community engagement in local policy making is crucial for effective governance as you can see in South Africa 65.5 percent of individuals had never spoken to their local counselor 21.5 percent of individuals had never attended a community meeting but would have had if they had the chance to. Next slide. OpenUp developed a digital tool for community members with information on how to engage in local policy making as OpenUp in understanding what to do in terms of civic tech. We realized the following access to information alone was not sufficient to drive engagement between a municipality and its community. We needed to develop a civic tool that went from informing to empowering and allowing a citizen to actively engage government in this instance and municipality. We needed to establish a relationship and ensure buying from the local municipality. We didn't anticipate resistance but we nestled the project around COVID-19 its impact and the likely need for technology to ensure public participation given the limitations as we all know around social distancing. Next slide. OpenUp is focused around user centered development. So before we even embark on software development we want to know some of the following things. We want to know more about the environment. We wanted to know more about the environment about community participation in terms of the various community dynamics and various assumptions like why citizens were not participating and what prevented citizens from participating. We want to know more about the environment of the municipality and the processes and what barriers municipalities were facing. Abigail will expand more on how we reach some conclusions when some of the above through the collaboration between OpenUp and ideas 42. Thanks Adrian. So as Adrian mentioned we worked with OpenUp to use our innovative behavioral design methodology to diagnose the barriers that were preventing individuals participating and design solutions to help increase participation. So the behavioral design methodology uses insights from psychology economics and human centered design to understand why people do what they do and then design very tailored solutions to change behavior. So through our formative work with OpenUp we uncovered eight barriers to participation and we'll just be sharing two of them with you today that we hope are relevant for your work as well. So the first behavioral barrier that may prevent individuals from participating is that community members often do not consider themselves as a type of person who formally participates. It's not part of who they are. It's not how they perceive themselves. It's not part of their identity and there are many reasons for this but one reason is that even though most of Africans speak another language at home, most of the communications from government and the formal participation channels are predominantly in English. And so what this does is it sends an implicit social signal about who should be participating and those people who aren't English speakers at home might not feel that it's within their identity to participate. And therefore they might not form the intention to ever participate. Four people that do form an intention to participate, they still might not follow through on that intention and actually participate in the long run. And one reason for this is because they face many small houses of participation. So small hassle factors like pushing multiple buttons, navigating to many platforms for finding the contact information or location of a public meeting can have a disproportionate effect on outcomes and really deter people from participating. I mean I'm sure we can all think of a small thing that got in our way of doing something. So we use these insights to develop low cost light touch solutions for OpenUp's platform. First to foster a sense of identity, we simply recommended that OpenUp create the platform in many languages. And second we recommended removing as many hassles as possible and in this case we even recommended that they create a submission platform directly on the tool where individuals could contact their local officials removing all the hassles from the communication The last few things I want to touch on are lessons that OpenUp and Adrian and his team shared with us that they took out of employing the behavioral design process and working with us. So firstly we received feedback from Adrian and his team that the municipalities themselves appreciated the behaviorally designed features. Being able to explain the behavioral mechanisms behind their design decisions really helped open up build buy-in from the municipalities. And secondly Adrian and his team shared with us that they appreciated that some of these behavioral design principles can be applied much more generally. So the insight to remove hassles is something that you can take to any development of any civic technology and the OpenUp team has shared with us that they are consistently now thinking about how they can make their technology as hassle free as possible. And to wrap up we wanted to share these three things we hope you'll take away from our presentation today which is firstly that information alone is often not sufficient for a civic technology to inspire action. But drawing on a deep understanding of human behavior can be useful to make civic technology more impactful and some of these principles while they are very tailored to the context and to the insights we learned can be applied much more widely and are also useful for building stakeholder buy-in. So thank you so much we are in time and I'll just lastly in the last few seconds share our contact information so please feel free to reach out to either of us after this event if you have more questions or want to learn more about the barriers or how you might apply them in your content. Thank you so much Abigail and Adrian that was that was really fascinating and I'm sure everyone on this call will have had some experience of terrible digital design that they've been massively frustrated with in the past. Normally the key perpetrators are normally governments and local authorities I think aren't they so all this kind of work all the research all the design work all behavioral work that goes into making it more seamless is so so important so we will be really excited once it's been running a while to look at that impact and monitoring research that you do on it. So yeah please again share with the network as when that happens but yeah thank you very much for that. Moving swiftly on we've got Luke Jordan up next from Grassroots and MIT GOVLAB with the presentation and I love the name of this presentation Don't Build It a practical guide for those building civic tech so over to you Luke. Thanks Rebecca hi everyone so this is I'm going to present today a guide that we just published a week ago as Rebecca said called Don't Build It and I'll talk about why and why actually we talk about things that you can do when building that represents the experience gained over five six years building a platform in South Africa called Grassroots so Grassroots was a platform that I built with a team over five six years that reached over two and a half million users and had over 40,000 activities called through it it was ran over USSD and four community organizers over WhatsApp it was used in national presidential debates and major COVID campaigns last year including having over 100,000 users use it in a few days and it's something that was built with our users from community organizers to major national campaigns. My personal background is combines policy and technology so both on the code and on working with the field team and on policy questions so the guide tries to combine those. So the guide's headlines very quickly are first any piece of technology that you can avoid building you should probably not build if you have to build it make sure that you hire a CTO ship very early and mature as long as you can and no matter what happens you're on a crew that's built over time but lean and fast and get close to and build with your users as soon as possible. Now there's all quite high level and heard often so what the guide does is tries to go into detail on each of them over its length. So the first point on why not build it the point that we make in the guide and that I learned the hard way through multiple projects that we should not have built a grassroots is that technology provides no friction to what you need to build in software anything can be built which means that unlike buildings say a clinic or a school where it's very difficult to do it and if it goes wrong you're going to have an embarrassing building in the middle of nowhere that nobody uses with technology it's easy to build it anybody can write some code these days cloud platforms etc so you need to lean against that tendency and so what we recommend again what we learned and grassroots over the years was always ask a few quick questions which is you know first are people already trying to do what the technology is supposed to help them do if they are doing it how are you sure you know why it doesn't work there's often a lot of assumptions about why it doesn't work and we think we know why technology would help but often it won't help and it won't make a difference. Second if they're not trying to do it why would technology make a difference to that and why would someone who doesn't want to do something at the moment such as participate in a denibration perhaps because they don't trust that government will do anything with that deliberation want to do it just because they have a nice and easy technology to do it so in general first thing is don't build it second thing is if you do have to build it there are a few a few tips and ideas that we've learned I've learned from the practicality but so first outsourcing in terms of outsourcing to developers great as a tactic for bringing on individual contributors but a terrible strategy and we describe the guy why procuring whole development teams tends to end very badly secondly adding full-time talent do that cautiously and at cost levels where you can keep them in the team and invest in growth over time and a few others through the guide but the one that I wanted to speak about a lot today is in the time and apologies that I'm going very quickly through the material but the tech and field connections and this is something that we hear quite often as an injunction to sort of make sure that the technology is close to users I'd actually do that when we sketch out where we say is an artificial way which is you have a field team you have a developer team you have a daily or weekly stand-up and in that stand-up field team and developer team read bullet points at each other and expect each other to understand and then every now and then go in a team building and pretend to have fun and then when one does why sort of the feedback loops aren't working an organic way to do that is to have individual level connections between field team members and developers so for example developers go individual developers go on field trips all the time with field team members field team members bringing direct feedback developers asking field team members directly for help judging the future trade-off and so on so that was something that at grassroots we tried to do over time and what it led to was that on average we were releasing new features or tweaks into the application and I could mention since this was running over ussd we were targeting very squarely people who had no smartphone or had no data the kind of ussd-based platforms that typically are very difficult to get people to use and of course at the beginning we had very low user numbers or usage numbers and over time it was ticked up until we were having 80% plus organic growth and it was largely through implementing these methods of having the developer team and the field team very deeply connected and exchanging ideas at an individual level rather than a collective level now one of the things that we found absolutely necessary is having a CTO now by that we mean somebody who's an engineering team leader more than a sort of large company CTO it's still a little bit astonishing that whereas a public health NGO that had no medical expertise or an education NGO that had no pedagogical expertise will be considered if we would look at that strangely at the same time there's lots of times where we have technology or organizations that sort of build technology but have no technological expertise on the senior management so there needs to be a CTO or somebody at senior management level who knows and understands technology and here's hiring some of the questions that could be asked of that person the guide includes similar hiring guides hiring questions and examples for junior developers UX UI and others a lot of which were used over over the years as we were hiring and building a team so that's a very rapid walkthrough also in the guide there are some examples of of good and not so good team structures hiring guides for the rest of the team some rules of thumb on timelines and budgets some guidance on technology choices languages and the like and of course more reasons and rationales for not to build it so the links on the screen can also contact me in any of those details and hopefully approves useful and we're very glad to hear from everybody so that's me done amazing thank you so much Luke and I'm sure that so many people are going to be digging into this guys immediately there's so much good stuff there and yeah I look forward to going through it myself and I think that an awful lot of people I know an awful lot of my colleagues will completely agree that there's maybe been a little bit too much in the past of people running off to build something and then having to backward engineer a reason why almost I think yeah there's lots and lots of examples that out there so great great stuff really useful and hopefully people on this call will be able to use some of your advice for the future so thank you very much next up we've got number four speaker number four we're whipping through these well done to everyone for keeping time so far so now we have Samantha McDonald of the University of California with a presentation as you can see it takes two when citizens and congress members deliberate online Samantha take it away great thank you so much um sorry my own time or just in case I can't see that one but thank you everybody my name is Sam McDonald I am a PhD kid well I just passed my dissertation on Monday so I guess I'm almost not a kid anymore I want to talk a little bit about the research that I did as part of my dissertation testing online deliberative session with US Congress so as a high level overview members of congress represent lots of people with an average being over 700,000 and for the past five years now I've been studying the communication structures within congress and trying to understand how they work and to sum it up in a very brief note a lot of the current communication structures really do not provide meaningful methods for dialogue and understanding for members of congress here in the federal government of the US to come and engage with their constituents in a meaningful way for constituents to also have impact so I thought methods for deliberate engagement would be a great way to explore new opportunities to have this engagement especially online so I did an experiment as part of my dissertation to do so and essentially what I looked at was how to design a platform for deliberation between members of congress and their and their constituency that allowed the member to come in and say that they want to talk about a topic with them and their staff supporting and having these discussions online and I ran this experiment as an online week long asynchronous single topic forum for deliberation that's a lot to understand so let me break it apart a little bit first it was online I worked with the company pop fox which is a small civic tech company here in the US to run these deliberations on the online platform and also something that could be used for longevity once I graduated that these things could still be tested and used long term by members of congress it was a week long to support slower moving dialogue instead of having a two-hour town hall or just a uni-directional dialogue through emails or phone calls we actually had this experiment run for a week and it was asynchronous and that people could log on and log off whenever they like to have these discussions there was no set time where they had to engage to sort of open up opportunities for people who could not come during certain times and also allow for that flexibility it was a single topic and that the member congress specifically chose a topic we asked them to choose the topic that would have impact on their decision making and in this case the member which I keep anonymous chose homelessness in america and that specific county to talk about those issues in which we created a single topic uh fact sheet for everyone so they could be informed and engaged and this was reviewed by different congressional experts and used all just government information and lastly it was a form for deliberation so taking some of the theories and these big lover big level academic stuff of deliberate democracy we recruited a representative sample of constituents that represented the district of demographics and we also brought in this sort of quasi-anonymous stance where we knew that these people were being represented by the member of congress but the constituents could actually use usernames to keep themselves anonymous among their peers to see if it would provoke different kinds of more open discussions online so we recruited 300 constituents from that district using random representative sampling half attended the forum and half were in a control group and we had out of 150 people we did invite 51 people that attended in some capacity and it was fairly represented district of the people who actually did engage in a 10 it was slightly over represented by males and more educated people within the district but we had some really good and uh diversity within the group of people for sake of time and also for the anonymity of the site it kind of looked like this we had a post by the member of congress and then there was a formatting structure that was allowed on pop box that allowed people to comment on the post and then for the lawmaker to respond in their own capacity so general findings what did we find from this well constituents really did engage substantively offering lots of different solutions for what they think should happen with homelessness wanting to engage a member and asking and bringing up their own personal experiences uh often referencing something that's called a lot in the US NIMBY or not in my backyard to talk about the tensions around homelessness in America the members conference actually were very interesting because they reflected more of these theories called presentation itself where the member of congress really focused on responding constituents to show that they're qualified for their job that they could identify with constituents and really have empathy which is really interesting sort of the capacity and how the member was responding to constituents and overall actually some constituents were disappointed by the overall engagement with the member asking that the member engage more and it felt like they were kind of playing it safe which kind of was really interesting looking at the results of what we asked people in a survey and in a survey that we did with constituents there wasn't uh significant changes to people's feelings of internal external political efficacy essentially the way to feel like if citizens are empowered and having engagement and impact and discussion um but also feelings of the the institution is responsive to them that being said constituents did overall feel a significantly higher impact with the members decision making from the conference uh from the conversation compared to previous engagements that they've had with the member in the past and how they come to connect with the member so that was really enlightening um and most constituents actually really wanted forums like this a quarter which actually lasted longer than a week and wish that these were slower moving dialogues um so there is some sort of appetite at least here in the US within this particular constituency to have these longer slower online dialogues with their representatives we also did uh interviews with staffers that were part of the member congress office after this was done and most surprisingly to us which I think is the whole it's safe to this thing here is that um because the staffers were actually the ones leading most of the conversation and that the member was not really involved in the actual engagement this is actually really interesting from a from a standpoint of congress because this is an accepted norm where staffers are a huge part of the um the whole engagement process especially online and it really talks to some of these dynamics that are going on of empowering staff in this part of the situation but overall the staffers actually found again that the engagement from constituents was really substantive especially what they see on other platforms and like that and most important to the staffers um was that there was opportunities for collaboration and for people who don't know understand who people who don't understand how congress works inside each member of congress's office they have staffers um that focus on communication and staffers are working on policy and actually this opportunity of asynchronousity allow them to collaborate in a way that they thought was really helpful and it's really unprecedented in some ways when you see these collaborations which in my opinion talking to the staffers may actually have more impact on the members of congress decision-making than actually going to the member themselves um so it really does bring up these interesting questions the dynamics when it comes to the values of people behind the scenes and not just the representative so what does this all mean essentially I believe there's a lot of potential here still lots of testing that I have to do and for people to test out with members and asynchronousity could play an important role um there are institutional barriers to exist this was a really hard project to do lots of stuff to do and lastly staffer vital and kind of rethinking the role if we're looking at policymakers and thinking about the people behind the scenes as important part of these discussions there's a lot of work going on the environmental justice committee is working on things like this but yeah so that's basically it for me amazing thank you so much Samantha that was a lot of been a lot of information in seven minutes um so yeah great great to great to hear that um and really I think fascinating point there about staff working for for representatives I don't think that gets enough attention a lot of the time people kind of see their representatives and they forget that those people do need staff around them to help them do their jobs and it's it's not being given much attention I don't think in terms of engagement and the research we're doing around that so really really fascinating that you've kind of highlighted that and hopefully that will that will enable more people to kind of shine a light on that and see how we can make that better in terms of participation and engagement between representatives and citizens so thank you very much really really interesting um we're on to speaker number five uh we now have Craig Morby from future future gov and scott betterfield from blackpool council again junior junior duo uh with presentation leave no one behind overcoming hurdles to online citizen assemblies so take it away thanks uh everyone for having us here so I'm scott and blackpool councils policy and strategy manager and we're going to talk about blackpool's climate assembly um so by way of a background uh councils in england are very big on climate emergencies at moment there's over 300 in the country it's a kind of uh generated from the grassroots a kind of challenge to government policy on the agenda in blackpool we want to go net zero in terms of carbon emissions by 2030 that's both the council as an organization and companies we control and the town as a whole there was a real desire when we declared the emergency to put residents businesses and young people particularly the heart of the process and one of the major factors that we have uh to deal with in blackpool is the fact that we are britain's most deprived town um my colleagues from visit blackpool would emphasize that we're also britain's most popular seaside resort but nevertheless there is deprivation in the town and we knew we had to go the extra mile to make sure that we had a representative process to involving communities in ways which worked for them in terms of the format of citizens assembly I'm sure you're aware is a deliberative approach to decision making it allows participants access to information and time and space to talk about that consider it and come to conclusions before making recommendations we commissioned fuchs guff uh to design and deliver our assembly kreg will talk about a case study as a result of that we brought 40 people in uh residents we selected them for a random sample and then we made sure we oversampled in certain areas where we knew we would have issues in terms of deprived communities and then we used a process called sortition to make sure that those people represented a mini version of the town of blackpool so representative in terms of age sex their home location disabilities and also views on climate change we made sure that we included a question do your views on climate change tend to differ to people nearby you so that that way we also got the skeptics and we also got hopefully some of the more engaged people on this issue we ran sessions over four sessions of two and a half hours each which worked very well it was really a response to covid that the sessions moved online but the process of using zoom to get through the sessions and to break out rooms was really kind of intuitive and our citizens really enjoyed that we feel one of the main issues in that was making sure people were ready to go with the technology and so we made sure that we got those groups that have already mentioned and anticipated the barriers to need so we provided ict equipment for those that weren't familiar and craig particularly spent a lot of time and effort with people one to one sessions on how to use the zoom call technology and the tablets that we provided to certain people we also provided webcams to to a couple of other people who had online access we were ready to provide internet access but actually we seem to recruit people who already had access to the internet through some routes and we also had potential for paid child care translation and signage sign language support and a point of contact which was craig to access before each of the sessions and so all in all we wanted to reflect on the needs of the people and deal with those appropriately yeah hi everyone my name is craig from future gov community engagement and participation manager so um when eric a 78 year old man who was living in shouted housing received a letter asking him if he wanted to take part in the climate assembly said yeah because he'd heard a lot of distressing news on the tv but didn't quite know what to do about it other than sorting his recycling out into the right boxes and when he recor received a call saying that he'd been selected he was really happy actually and he said i didn't think at my age i'd forget to learn something new again but you're never too too old to learn but he said one of the things which was concerning him was about the fact that it was on zoom and that he wasn't um able to use it at that point so i ran him up along with everyone else um in the assembly and um just had a chat with him we organized a one-to-one zoom session and then i talked him through how to use um how to download zoom and then once he was on it how to use the microphone and the video and the chat function and gave him a number as well that he could give me a ring if he ever had any issues and he said um when i spoke to him after the assembly is that it must have worked because he got into every single one completely fine and i think in the first sessions he really enjoyed like the informal atmosphere when he first got on and people were like sharing like song lyrics and stuff of um of um of things which remind him of climate change although he said at least your keys this world has gone far was a bit depressing but um but then when um went into the presentations they were obviously all virtual and stuff and he found them really good and informative um and was able to use the chat function to ask questions as well and he said he started really looking forward to to Tuesday evenings and really and particularly enjoyed being able to talk through what he'd heard um with very good groups with four other participants and he said what what he felt worked there was where the facilitators really got to know the people in the groups and set some good working agreements about how people would work together and um as well as guiding principles for making decisions um but AerosGoo was really passionate about um using Blackpool's natural resources to generate and buy clean energy because it's on the sea um and they had some really good conversations and generated solutions and captured those in that information by using the google slides and um in the final session we lied to the fact that he was able to meet move between different groups because we set up a world cafe style event where they could go into different breakout rooms and he was able to have his voice heard on all of the issues and he was really pleased that um all of the um things that he put forward ended up in the in the report but um perhaps um one of the best things about was actually an unintended consequence which he said to me I haven't actually been able to see my grandkids space for every year now but now because I can use zoom I'll be able to see them on that which I thought was lovely it was one of those benefits that we all kind of felt uh was it was made it all worthwhile regardless of the deliberation actually helping somebody in that way um so we actually had a hundred percent attendance the 37 people who started finished we did have actually one disruptive participant but because we had a behind the scenes WhatsApp group we were able to deal with that quite quickly and resolve what could have been an issue that took over the assembly but we had a hundred percent of the participants saying the technology was at least somewhat easy to use uh and that was a council we've got an evidence base we're going to bring that together with a road map to net zero from the carbon trust make sure that we're including people's views at every stage and now we're moving on to identify funding for meaningful activity the assembly members want to keep involved in future and so we're looking at ways of doing that too. When's the thought thank you so much um Craig and Scott for that um it's really really lovely to hear those kind of individual user stories because I think a lot of us because we work slightly away from from the actual users we we don't get those um and and we forget sometimes that it's so so very impactful and so you know has so many other wider kind of implications and consequences for people's lives rather than just taking part uh in in a citizens assembly um and I think you know it seems that citizens assemblies are only going to kind of get more popular in terms of engaging uh with the public and any lessons that we can learn and pass on to make sure that future ends are more effective um are really important so thank you thank you very much for that again um I think there are plenty of questions uh being thrown up in the chat so we will send those around to you uh finally um speaking number six we have Mike Saunders from Commonplace uh with his presentation as you can see here engaging for the future what do the public want from engagement and how can digital deliver Mike your headlining off you go thank you very much hi everybody um so just as a bit of a context Commonplace is a digital platform um and we've engaged over three and a half million people in over a thousand online conversations um really focusing on the places that people live in work in play in and care about um we facilitate very open trusted conversations and through which we get high response rates uh we collect lots of robust data and produce insights from reporting for our customers and our customers are local authorities typically um but also planning applicants mainly property developers so we work across both the the public and the private sectors um we've always been fascinated about what people want from civic engagement around places and even more so in the last year when we've seen such a huge in fact an order of magnitude increase in online um engagement and lots of research showing that people feel more connected than ever to the neighborhood so when the government published their planning for the future white paper we took it as an opportunity to run our own research um a representative sample of a thousand people two focus groups and seven years of commonplace data and I just want to take you through some of the findings so firstly there's a huge appetite for long-term public involvement in planning 76 percent of people thought the local uh local people should have a greater say in what goes on in their neighborhoods and 71 percent said that they wanted regular updates on planning issues but despite this huge appetite only 27 percent of people have ever taken part in any kind of planning engagements and of those twice as many have signed a position a petition to prevent something happening has as have intended any kind of um constructive engagement or meeting so why aren't these people engaging and how can technology help so the first big barrier we found was about lack of accessibility and awareness given the demand that I just talked about um almost half 48 percent of people said they'd never even been aware of a local uh consultation 70 percent have never participated but if you contrast that with commonplace where as I said three and a half million people have engaged digitally contributing over two million times in a thousand projects and that's just commonplace alone so digital has a huge opportunity to open up these kind of conversations and meet this demand the second barrier is about motivation and attitude um so as I mentioned current engagements not only low but it's often negatively motivated but on commonplace we have not only large numbers but we also have very constructed set of responses 66 percent of people on average are actively supportive or neutral to the plans that being put before them so just to give you an example of how this works lead city council use commonplace on their transport strategy and it helped them to dial up the scale and constructiveness of their engagement they had conversations at a citywide level as well as neighborhood-based changes and it worked over more than two years and resulted in 65 000 responses and it's enabled the council to build a deep understanding of the community need and their expectations for infrastructure investment taking people from the very local outside their house to strategic feedback that's informed future plans in the city and Lee's was one of the councils that took advantage of a free offer that we made at the beginning of the COVID epidemic to local authorities which has now been taken up by I think 65 local authorities around the around the UK the next barrier is about transparency and over half the people in our responses said that planning decisions were taken in secret specifically to avoid public backlash so there's a huge trust gap there but the trend that we see over and over again on commonplace is that digital engagements are great at delivering social proof through transparency when people see other neighbours taking part they're twice as likely to contribute themselves so digital engagement can harness the public's need to see this social proof the to see proof that engagement is trusted and this encourages lots more participation I wanted to mention Blackpool briefly partly because we were very close with Scott who've just heard from Blackpool borough council used commonplace to run a public dialogue about Blackpool's future and they received over three and a half thousand contributions in just under six weeks they had very very positive responses and we got over two thirds of the responses via mobile which is similar across all of our projects so mobile is an absolutely key platform for these kind of conversations and just bringing all of that together I wanted to talk lastly about Catford and Newisham so Catford is a town in southeast London we started a commonplace there about Catford Town Centre which engaged local people in large numbers because they saw their neighbours taking part that as I've just described the council used our dashboard to analyze respondents by demographic and then they used targeted social media to fill in the gaps they collected 15,000 responses online all of which fed into and provided a transparent benchmark for a subsequent master plan that they developed and the Catford team used our tools such as a special tablet designed for face-to-face events so they could collect not only online responses but also collect responses at face-to-face conversations as well and then we conducted engagement conversations around the rest of the borough in transport, in housing, in parks and leisure and community infrastructure and developers are now starting to use commonplace in Newisham benefiting from tapping into this active community so we're not only doing individual projects but we're also giving the community the opportunity to join up all of those conversations into something that's holistic and meaningful so now two and a half or actually three years on Newisham council are using commonplace to launch their local plan which is a very strategic overview of the future of Lewisham so our conclusions about this are that continuous long-term engagement is what people want and produces both greater volume of and more constructive engagement as I mentioned in Catford we notify people we join up conversations we get five times more people participating if they've already participated and digital tools have the opportunity to really tap into this demand and appetite for local engagement and create a different kind of conversation one that's constructive and one that takes people on a long-term journey so people are more interested never in their communities partly due to the results of the pandemic there's a huge appetite and there's therefore a huge opportunity for digital tools to really deliver the demand that we're seeing and you can download the full reports at our website if you're interested thanks very much thank you so much Mike really really interesting and yeah amen to the ongoing conversation not just a one-off survey point yeah the the conversations around local authority areas and how things are growing and being more strategic I think it's more important than ever so yeah really interesting stuff there and again lots of questions we will pass them on to you so yeah thank you very much Mike thank you very much to all of us because I can't believe that's nearly an hour there that's just sped by so quickly so yeah thank you to everyone we will send recordings of this with subtitles around later in the week so if it went a little bit fast for you or if you want to revisit anything we'll be sending that round so you can do that as I said we'll be sending answers to the questions around as well our next show and tell for tic-tac another session like this is on the 25th of May so we would love to see you all again then same format same great lineup of different speakers um and yeah that's pretty much it I'm just going to remind you all again of that launch of our freedom of information report next Wednesday April the 28th at 4 p.m. British time we're really excited about that we've got some guest speakers on there as well so yeah hopefully we will see you see some of you there otherwise thank you all so much for joining us we really we love doing these events and we're really pleased that people are still interested in joining a zoom event again as I said after a year of not being able to go to a real one so brilliant thanks very much it's we've finished with two minutes to spare hopefully you've got time to make a cup of tea before your next call thanks for everyone see you next time