 Great. Thank you so much. So I'm a designer from frontend.com, which is a design consultancy. So I'm actually a fish out of water here. And this is my first time at a civic tech conference. And my mind is completely blown. So please forgive me if I am seeming a little bit confused at any point. So I'm going to say three things today, essentially in these 20 minutes. And the first is that we shouldn't rely on public consultations as the only means of engaging with citizens. Telling people when you're going to listen to them is the first way of, I guess, reducing citizen agency. The second is if we are in agreement that it's important to open up citizen channels for citizens to raise issues with their representatives or institutions, is that why not use those channels to communicate back directly to those citizens. And finally, if we're creating those channels, and this is a note to practitioners in the room, don't half-ass it. Don't design something that those who are already engaged will use. Let's use this an opportunity to engage those who don't participate in public debate. And let's use this as an opportunity to increase public trust. So invite citizen-initiated dialogue, utilize those channels for direct dialogue from government back to citizens, and then build disenfranchised people in mind. So just quickly, I understand design is kind of a strange thing to be discussing at this point and design principles. But I just kind of wanted to kind of, I guess, quickly go through what design is to me and what it means. So when many people think about design, they think about this kind of graphical visual element. But actually, in the world of digital design, a UI designer, an interface designer, might kind of look at psychology and look at human perception in terms of bringing elements together on a screen and laying them out so that people can achieve their goals. User experience designer then might kind of figure out how those screens flow from one to another to help the user achieve their goal or their needs. Taking a step back, a product design person might be looking at kind of the tangible elements on screen but also the intangible things. So looking at data flows and looking at databases and how they interact and change the product to ensure that business goals are meant, not just user goals. And then the strategy design then involves the same processes in terms of understanding the user and understanding the problems and to understand kind of, I guess, what the business should do next or what the organization should do next. These roles, I should add, are not mutually exclusive. In my own field of work, I typically work on probably those last three more so, UX, product and strategy design. And at the core of each type of these design practices is the belief that if we can figure out people's problems then we can use that understanding to create solutions. So it's about understanding people. We conduct research, we ideate and then we iterate on those designs. And this philosophy has served products and services very, very well and so the linkages to policy, I think, are quite clear. And I believe the divisions in our politics are due to this lack of empathy and the understanding of one another. And misunderstanding leads to mistrust and mistrust can create bizarre outcomes. Who would have thought that less than 100 years after my home country of Ireland fought and won a dependence from the British that the British would fight for and win a dependence from us? It's a strange environment that we're currently operating in. And look, this is, in many ways, a case of trust. In that situation, a lack of trust in the European Union for voters in Britain. And this is, we talk a lot about that in general but if you look at this chart here, the government ministers and politicians generally are the lowest two on that rank of professions which is below bankers should I add. So that's not a great testament to politics in general. And this is caused by a lot of factors. People in the room probably know better than I do but I want to pull out two in particular. One is technological advances. And these advances have contributed massively. Millennials in particular are more familiar with the idea that you can tweet at a multinational corporation and expect to have an answer back within the hour. And that doesn't happen with government. You can, you know, sit on the toilet and order toilet paper with a push of a button. This is something that government is not prepared for and this is our new world now. And these technological advances do actually change our environment. They change our perception and they change our expectations and governments haven't really kept up even though they have moved slightly with the times. They are now actually probably the most disconnected institution in our society which is not good for what was purposed in all essence to be the most open institution in our society. So this is the disconnect that leaves people feeling disillusioned and I believe disenfranchised. So, you know, I guess you kind of have to look at, I guess, how people communicate with their public institutions and representatives. You know, people typically try and, I guess, you know, protest and petition and lobby loud enough to create disruption so that they can be heard which is, you know, a pretty ineffective and a negative form of communication. This is very combative as opposed to how we're told communication should occur. So that's the poor communication from citizen to other institutions. But equally, in the reversing that, governments don't have a direct means of communicating with their citizens. And the role of media is no longer, I guess, to kind of take information and distribute it. Right now, the role of government is, I'm sorry, the role of the media is becoming more of this infotainment and to highlight problems of governance. So this is a change of need and change of desire from media which creates new media landscapes and we're seeing that, you know, even beyond that, like sometimes they want to manipulate events to create a narrative. And so that leads to a very poor channel for communicating for government. The tide is turning. Technological advances, we just saw Facebook are there are looking at this and all these other kind of, I guess, tech tools and civic tech platforms. And these are being used to, I guess, circumvent the outdated forms that we've just talked about. And governments are beginning to embrace open government principles to a degree and looking beyond just public consultations in terms of how do we, how do citizens participate in the process. So at frontend.com, again, I mentioned that we're a design consultancy but what we do every year is we do this design fix program where we look at social needs and social problems and explore how design can have an impact on that or just see what happens when we bring design to a problem. And so we have a white paper which I have a few copies of here and we can download it afterwards if you're interested in finding out what kind of it is that we've kind of came to. But we also, from these principles we created a concept just to help explain what we kind of are, we're getting at. So if this video plays, I'm going to try and play that video now. Is there a sound on the? So every time you're going to play a video you can expect this is going to happen. Oh, okay. That's right. So I'll try that again. Okay, it's a four minute video. Design fix is a social needs program where we bring students together with professional designers to look at some of the world's biggest societal issues and I guess try and see how design thinking and human center design can solve them. Right now we're thinking a lot of better society and the obvious disillusionment with government. This year we asked ourselves the question how might we reduce the gap between the citizens and the government and bring a sense of ownership back to the people. So working with universities and policy think tanks from around the world. We've been looking at how governments and organizations might create a cultural shift away from lobbying and towards a more constructive and direct dialogue. The user experiences, the user experience of anything could be a service, could be an object is a relationship between you and something and I think that the relationship between governments and people can be improved by a better user experience. What we're doing is mainly focused on the idea of building trust again, using technology but not only technology, more the idea of social capital and how groups can spread and build. Currently there are a lot of really ineffective ways of communicating with governments such as protesting, creating online campaigns spamming representatives in boxes and generally these don't lead anywhere and they can create a lot of noise for representatives as well as increasing disillusionment among citizens. So we've been thinking about how to engage disaffected citizens but for any solution to work it needs to reach them on the channels they're familiar with. So we prototyped a conversational UI powered by machine learning which helps group and articulate the issues that users and citizens might be interested in. It can also be a vehicle to help citizens understand and contextualize what might be polarized views. The system reduces unnecessary noise for the public representative by answering questions where it can and where human response is more appropriate. Messages can be aggregated or grouped with others that convey the same intent. These messages are then served up to the representative to give an overview of what the constituents are saying and they can actually reply to those groups or individuals to host meaningful conversations on the platform. A public view is also available so citizens can see what the representatives are hearing and be assured of full transparency. The key to this system is the feedback loop which allows citizens to see if there's been any development on the issue or whether it's been mentioned in Parliament or in legislation. So we conducted a pilot study with the Cork County Council which is in the south of Ireland to test the concept and what we found when they rolled out a clear communication channel they had a huge increase in the number of citizens engaging with them and those citizens who did engage and received a feedback were far more positive of their view on the council and felt they had more of an impact in society in general. So what we proposed here doesn't solve populism nor does it improve trust or services and it doesn't make our societies more equal. However making it easy to communicate and demonstrating the impact of that communication essentially the foundation blocks to something much greater. We hope that this collaboration inspires governments and organizations to rise to the challenge of being more transparent and more responsive to the citizens they serve. That's a quick overview of the concept that came from the paper and I'm just going to quickly in the last few minutes I don't have time to do the six design principles and I don't have time to go through all six but I will I guess look at the overarching themes that they fit into and it is three instinctive, constructive and reassuring. Instinctive is this idea and we've talked a bit already today in terms of making sure that people citizens want to communicate and want to engage and so making it as easy as possible for citizens to actually go and pick up their phones and share an issue with a representative or an institution. Constructive is the ability here so it's making sure that public representatives on the flip side we already saw the Facebook example there's so much material coming into them but how can we make it easier for them to hear so you can have constructive and meaningful engagements going back and then reassuring which means making sure that this communication basically is meaningful but then also that this transparent update so citizens can see what the result of that was. So instinctive which is the principle of immediacy, inclusion and representative the first thing is basically just to go where citizens are you know we now have digital town halls such as facebook.com and evidence proves that building standalone websites is not good for engaging especially those who are not likely to engage. So the question really that we kept asking ourselves is how can we encourage people to share their thoughts with officials and not their Facebook friends and that really kind of boils a lot of the paper down you know so this is not just about creating a digital platform or digital service transformation which is kind of the work of a lot of civic tech but it's actually saying well beyond that how do we create an environment all where people share and we really looked at the environmental campaign reduce reuse recycle for guidance here because in that situation they weren't just looking to well one it was global but two they weren't just looking at providing information it was how do you create behavior change around that and anyway in work in our workplace you know on occasion if someone throws paper into a waste bin you know you'll have someone else say oh you know you put the paper in the wrong bin you should put and that's kind of gets this idea of being a good citizen if you recycle you become a good citizen and by the same logic if you don't recycle you're kind of this bad citizen but how do we flip minds in the same way that we did with the environmental thing to actually have that with the idea that you know if you don't share this opinion if you hold it to yourself or to your friends and don't share with the relevant authorities or this concern maybe maybe does that make you a bad citizen of course the differences are that the incentives are much easier for the environmental debate because in typically creating things more to be more efficient usually made them cheaper so I think it's really important to think about what would the incentives be if we're trying to encourage people to debate and become civically more engaged. In the paper we also talked about constructive and this is the principles of representative and meaningful together and again this is kind of policy makers are being able to hear what constituents are saying citizens it's very important that they must both feel heard and actually be heard and just being heard is not enough and just feeling heard is not enough both are critical in terms of promoting civic trust so we had a almost 650% increase in mail to US senators between 2002 and 2008 which is before smartphones were prevalent so you can only imagine that's now skyrocketed up and the staff numbers are the same in these offices so people just aren't being heard it's not that there's there's more debate it's that actually if you do join the debate you're kind of being more likely to be ignored than you were before and then also we kind of look at this idea of a citizen deliberation and particularly budgeting and actually how it does work in many situations in the paper we talked about the Democratic Republic of Congo's Saikinbu where people were not paying taxes and once they started participatory budgeting people were more likely to actually pay tax once they saw the rows that they voted for and the schools and the health centers that they voted for being built and there's a 16 fold increase in tax collection which is absolutely massive and how would that work in the West and then reassuring which is the principles of meaningful informative and transparent Franz Timmerzmann has a quote in one of his papers saying obscurity is the best friend of conspiracy which I absolutely adore so it's about how do we use this opportunity these civic tech platforms to realize an educational opportunity you know oftentimes we say civic literacy is the issue well how can we address that in maybe a not straightforward way and provide factual insights as we do that today again it's near impossible for a citizen to raise an issue and then know if their input was considered or to know what degree it was considered or to know what effect it had on legislation or why or when it was eventually was excluded from a policy you know so in the video you just saw we had this kind of evidence not just an evidence trail but actually sorry not just an evidence based decision making but actually creating evidence trails where you know you could see your input in a very personal way and how it moved through the legislative agenda yeah so finally I guess I just want to point out if you are interested in these design principles they are designed for civic tech people we have the idea of Facebook platforms in mind we had you know governments it's really both owner and channel agnostic so they're quite broad they're really just designed as I guess a talking point or starting point to really spark some ideas or decisions they're not really too instructive and so as a commercial design consultancy we really just want to acknowledge obviously this is not our field of expertise but we are so inspired and motivated by the work you guys are doing it's been absolutely beautiful to kind of be part of this the past year or so and to see that the good work that is happening often times you don't see it too often in general discourse so that's something we want to acknowledge so thank you very much thank you