 Welcome everyone. If you're just joining us, we'll give it a couple of minutes for everyone to get settled and then we'll get started. But do feel free to introduce yourselves in the chat. Tell us who you are, where you're from and why you've come along today, if you'd like. Hi everyone, we will get going properly shortly. Just giving it a couple of minutes for everyone to arrive. Do introduce yourselves in the chat in the meantime. I'll give it a tiny bit longer and then we'll get going, but do use the chat to say hello and introduce yourselves just before we start. Great, I might kick us off. I'm sure a few other people will arrive, but I'm sure they'll catch up. So hello everyone and a good afternoon from North London and a good morning afternoon or evening to you wherever you may be today. Welcome to Unlocking Civic Tech Impact Reflections on TicTac Labs, organised by my society and supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. I'm Gavin Freegard, a freelance consultant working with my society on the TicTac Labs programme. Among other things, I'm also an associate at the Institute for Government, interim head of public policy at the Open Data Institute and a policy associate at Connected by Data here in the UK. I will be your chair, facilitator and host for today's event. Do tell us who you are and why you're here in the chat if you'd like. It's wonderful to have so many of you with us today. Over the next couple of hours, we're going to look back at the TicTac Labs programme, which is sought to identify some of the common challenges facing Civic Tech organisations globally. Think about what could help solve some of those challenges and commission some solutions to them. We'll be showcasing the work of all six organisations that we awarded subgrants to as part of the programme and then reflecting on how everything went with some members of our steering group. Some quick housekeeping first. Today's event is on the record. It's being recorded and we will be publishing it online afterwards, along with a write-up of today's event. You should be able to access a live transcript here on Zoom. Do let us know in the chat if you can't. You're very welcome to share details of the event on social media. It's hashtag TicTac. And if you'd like to contribute to today's discussion at any point, you can use the chat here on Zoom and there might be some opportunity later to unmute your mic and tell us what you're thinking as well. Now, shortly, I'm going to give a quick overview of what we did with TicTac Labs and how today's event will run. But first, I'm delighted to hand over to my society's chief executive, Louise, for a few words. Louise. Thanks, Gavin. Hello. Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I am going to keep my introductory comments very brief as I, and I'm sure you all are keen to get onto the presentations and the discussion. But I thought anyone not familiar with TicTac might be wondering about the name TicTac Labs. So TicTac stands for the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference. A very brief history of the conference. It's a conference that my society has been running since 2015, aiming to convene an international mix of researchers, practitioners, policymakers, philanthropists, sometimes even tech giants, trying to understand how civic technology is shaping society and really asking the question, how do we learn from each other? How do we develop some kind of evidence based about what's working in the common goals that we have to help people participate, ensure transparency and accountability? That conference series went rapidly online in March 2020, as you all may remember. And in 2021, we ran a series of online show and tell events, really tailored to the shortened attention spans and online fatigue that everybody had during that time. But by 2022, we were really aware that the pandemic had weakened networks, particularly internationally, we were missing the more informal conversations you have in a corridor of conference. But we'd also learned how online events could open up opportunities for participation around the world. And that was really the origin of the idea for TicTac Labs, as Gavin says, aiming to bring people together, strengthen networks, help us exchange ideas and support the development of new initiatives. So it's absolutely brilliant to be able to see the fruits of that work. And I just want to thank everyone who's participated, hundreds of different people. And you've made it a hugely interesting, informative and enjoyable experience. And thank you also to National Endowment for Democracy for supporting this work. And having said that, I'm going to hand right back to Gavin to say on with the show. Thank you very much, Louise. That's a really helpful, quick introduction to TicTac Labs program. I say introduction, given quite a few of you will have interacted with the program already in various ways. I suppose it's a reminder as much as anything else. As Louise said, the aim of TicTac Labs was to discuss and tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the global civic tech and digital democracy sector. We wanted to grow the evidence-based address and the key issues and enhance the effectiveness and potential impact of civic tech projects. Louise talked about the history of TicTac, the impact of Civic Technology Conference. And you can see on, you've got a visual representation of that on the screen. And obviously, as you've heard, we went online for various reasons from 2020 onwards. So we've got on this slide some details of our steering group. You can see them on the right and you'll be hearing from a couple of them later. They helped identify six big challenges common to civic tech around the world. And you can see those challenges on the left. They were public-private collaborations, ensuring accessibility of civic tech, accessing quality information, storytelling and reach, learning from climate action. How can civic tech drive impactful societal change and civic tech in hostile environments? And as many of you will know, for each of those six topics, we organized a civic tech surgery which delved into some common challenges. After each surgery, we then convened an Action Lab, a small working group of around six people. They thought more about the possible solutions that people thought about at the civic tech surgery and then helped commission a piece of work to help solve some of the challenges raised. And that led to the award of a sub-grant. I think we now have a completed project in so far as anything is ever completed for each of those six topics. Now, today's event after this introduction will begin with us hearing from each of those sub-grant projects. We have people powered on public-private collaborations, Technoluxia on ensuring civic tech is accessible, Open North on accessing quality information, excuse me, Fundatio Multitudes on storytelling and reach, the Demography Project on driving impactful societal change and Policy Lab Africa on civic tech in hostile environments. Each of them will have 10 minutes to present. There is going to be a timer on screen to keep us all to time as well. And then once all of them are presented, we'll have up to 20 minutes to put questions to them as a group for some discussion. After that, we'll end with a panel discussion between Louise and two of our steering group members, Isabel and Matt, on what went well with tic-tac labs, how well we think it achieved its aims and what we can learn from it. So without further ado, we'll move to our first presentation. Remember, we'll be taking questions to all of our presenters at the very end, so feel free to discuss things in the chat and add questions as we go along. And any reflections that you might have. And our first presenter is going to be Pam from People Powered. So Pam, over to you. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I'm director of communications for People Powered. And I am going to talk about public-private collaborations, but I'm going to add a further focus. One of the challenges we have at People Powered, you know, we, People Powered focuses on all types of disparate democracy and using civic tech to enable that. The problem I noticed as soon as I started at People Powered, which is about a year and a half ago, is that we talk an awful lot about process and not enough about people. Because honestly, if people aren't benefiting in their daily lives in some way, then what's the point of what we're doing. So what I, when we got this small grant from tic-tac. We set out to actually figure out how could we tell story, let's see, hold on, this is not. Yeah. There. How could we, how could we tell a story about the work that we do? And I want to remind people, so when I say story, I'm going to sort of define what I mean by story because I think we use that word so generically and a lot of misunderstanding occurs. When I say story, I mean really answering the question of so what who cares. And the way to best do that is through stories and that means people putting people and the problems, the real everyday, everyday problems they face at the very center of what we do. And to me, the process, the civic tech is really a tool to get there. It's not the focus or it shouldn't be the focus. So, this is a reminder, we tend to spend most of our time on the process, not enough time on the people. People care about people and the challenges and what challenges that enables them. So, I'm just going to walk through. So when I, when we got the grant and we realized what we wanted to do is we really had to collaborate with, with other partners because people powered is an organization that doesn't actually do this work on the ground. People powered networks together trains funds supports organizations and people around the world who are trying to promote spring democracy in their kind of local context. So, if we want to tell the story of what differences so what who cares, we have to partner with number of other organizations because they're the ones on the ground actually seeing it happen. It's really necessary for us to partner. And so I set out when we got this small grant thinking that this is the I said, said the anatomy of a story. I want to be able to tell the story that had people characters and think think about a novel think about a movie has characters that there's a conflict or a challenge that they face. And there's a plot line, a narrative arc that tells the tale of how they tackled it. It actually come from a background of creative writing and storytelling so I sort of believe if we apply more of this framework to how we communicate will all be more interesting. So, I want to sort of break it down a little bit and show how would, how it applied to the stories that we developed with this grant. So when I said it's a people at the heart. One of the biggest points of pushback I often get when I start on this is it really needs we need to have find a person, not people not a huge audience but a person to put at the heart of the story. People often resist that because it's hard to find one person who obviously is representative everybody. And we're all concerned about diversity. And obviously to pick one person is well at the female that's a that person is this race and not that race, whatever, but we're looking at this is a collection of stories. And there's plenty of research that shows that people respond a different way when they're presented with the plight of a person one person that they can relate to and not. You know, a big audience. So we're basically using the story to tell the story of a larger group. Choose to tell the story through whose eyes you tell depends on what the story you want to tell what's the purpose of your story. What which audience are trying to reach it could be an employee of a society organization who now has a drive, you know, has a drive to see real participation in her city. And this process that you're talking about the civic tech tool, allow that to happen. It could be a local government staffer. And who has long wanted to see marginalized people couldn't decision making. And again, this enables him to do it. I put this picture here, because the story that I'm going to walk through is from Chile. And it's a good it's a good example because civic tech was really a tool as part of a larger mission. And in the case of Chile, it was, they wanted more. They had a situation where a lot of youth in the country were not engaged, and they were not seeing themselves as future leaders of the country. And there was a, actually, a youth initiative developed, in which case, which young people could participate, proposed projects that would help their communities just paint the leadership development project, and an online tool was chosen to enable the participation of a lot of youth from across the country who perhaps couldn't travel. So this this picture, the arrow is pointing to the gentleman in the, in the middle he is the person who we chose to feature in this story. He is the young person who felt sort of disengaged in the beginning because he was working in a very rural area of the country, and the youth project allowed him to submit ideas and to see it he ended up having his project chosen. He was very empowered he is now a future leader. I'm going to return to the weaknesses of this thought hope later on in the presentation but it gives the idea that we chose a person in the beginning. And we didn't choose no we didn't choose somebody in this case, who was working for the government youth agency. We chose the sort of an ultimate beneficiary. So what would be a problem or a conflict, what the problem that he faced in the rural he's a physician in a rural area of the country, and what he was seeing around him was these a very poor population who worked in very harsh conditions out in the fields extreme sun. And so as a physician he was treating a lot of sun related illnesses. So he was thinking how can I how can I help them I don't have the resources though I have some ideas of what needs to be done. So he submitted a project through this this youth initiative, about how to address this, this issue so when you get to know that these these people he's treating in his community. That sort of answers the so what you end up getting to know and this photo is I think it's wonderful you sort of see into his eyes you start to get a feel for the type of people he cares for. So you get into the solution, and there's a narrative arc in between it connects the solution to the problem. And that's where the civic tech comes in, because it's civic tech that a lot that connects it allows that problem to be connected to the solution. Now you actually see the solution in the photo. There was many other things he did but one one was very simple was providing them all hats. One of the other things he did in terms of skin cancer screening, etc. But again, it's each story has a beginning in the middle and an end you have to think about it that way. Now, one of the other big problems that the storytelling in our space is that wins are sometimes very long and coming policy changes sometimes they don't work. So the the end can really be maybe one step is going to be many more ends along the way, many more successes. It could just be somebody who was never engaged with government before and now feels like they can pick up the phone and call somebody. You know that can be a win right there so remember the successes can be defined in many different ways. So the path to solution this case it was, it was a citizen lab was the was the platform that was used, and this allowed all these youth from across the country to submit their idea, and have everybody to be able to evaluate it interact with it like it, you know, no matter where they were. And it was it was actually without that it probably wouldn't have happened. That was just one of the stories. We did three others. There was Kyrgyzstan and the platform in this case was your priorities. The person was that we chose in this case. So the problem I'm going to jump to the problem really quickly. This was the World Bank was the partner, and they were working across Europe to build this massive new power line that was going to go through a lot of communities. That was going to happen no matter what. And they knew it was going to be sort of disruptive. So they didn't want the rural villagers to feel like they were totally at the mercy of. They said how can we involve them in choosing their own projects that will help improve their communities as the power line goes in. And that's where the online platform came in. So we chose one young woman, 20 year old resident in one of those rural communities who as a youth and as a woman, she really had felt like she had no voice in this. She felt like this power line is going to go in no matter what. So what's the point, but through this whole process which by the way wasn't just civic tech. In all these cases, there was a lot of on the ground in person communication that was true for everybody but the online it was interesting in this case was that a lot of the women in rural conservative communities wouldn't feel comfortable going out of the house or wouldn't be allowed to go out of the house. So, but they all had a phone activity for their phones. So this was the really enabling part of the technology is civic tech in this case is women otherwise might not have been involved in the decision making process at all. And soon by she actually went in. She also she became so involved and so engaged that she would go into homes in the rural communities and train with other women, how to use the technology. And so as a result, yeah they all they chose like you know we need more wells we need more electricity to go to more communities. So what happened was is that the power line went in but along with it there was a lot of improvements that were there were enabled at the same time. Oops. Let me go back so yeah, the another one was China China was sort of different because they didn't use a sophisticated participatory democracy platform digital platform they used we chat, which is I think something important to remember sometimes it doesn't take some brand digital sophisticated platform they use something that was already in use we chat is extremely popular. Everybody's used to using we chat, and they decided to be better to create a mini applet that would operate within we chat. So they didn't have to get people used to going to a whole new platform. So, the person we chose in this case was a 65 year old. And he didn't want his first name used, who had moved back to his, his childhood neighborhood and was trying to reintegrate. And he felt like he was not really part of the of the local government anymore and had to try to find his own place and at the same time, they didn't have just for a budgeting going on in their province, but there was the public participation was really lagging. And he ended up getting involved, and they with the we chat he again, he was somebody who had been pretty sophisticated and he became a trainer. And we does this new we chat interface really boosted the, the degree of public participation to a great degree. And we told the story through his eyes. And at the end I'll give you a link so you can all read these stories yourself and see how it played out. I always, the way I started the stories I always sort of started with the problem I started with him that I went way back and I talked about all these different processes and then came back and ended with him about how it changed, how it's different now because of what we talked about. And then Pam, we've hit the 10 minutes. So just like to run through this very quickly. Yeah, I was, and with two things to remember that they're good stories but packaging really matters photography is important to bring it alive you can see the difference between a far away photo and the having having strong partners who are really willing to share your content and translate it into local languages made a huge difference in this case. So yeah, thank you I'll end it there. Right there if you want to go to that page, you'll find links to all these stories there. Brilliant. Thank you so much Pam we couldn't have asked for a better star brilliant overview. And there are some links to the case studies in the chat as well. And remind if you want to ask Pam a question, you can put that in the chat as well and we'll be speaking to all of our presenters once they've all presented. So that brings us on to our next 10 minute presentation that's sub grant to, and that's Yossi from Tehran loxia, which is all about a toolkit to help the global civic tech community fix common accessibility challenges. So over to you. Good afternoon. So, yes today I'll be presenting to you accessibility ABCs the toolkit we worked on to kind to demystify in a way accessibility for the community. So, the story started when we submitted the proposal to try to answer the question how can we lead and popularize best practices when it comes to accessibility and specifically for the civic community. When we thought of a guide or toolkit for practitioners that are in the civil society we thought of how can we make it simple, enjoyable, practical, community based and accessible. We wanted to be simple because we know that accessibility in itself could be a kind of challenging or a bit overwhelming for some people because it has so many technical details. And even for people it could be like different from people who work on the software and people who work on the design etc. So we wanted to make it simple enough, but with enough information to get started. We wanted it to be enjoyable. We wanted our community to enjoy looking into the guide and like find it in a way appealing. We wanted that everyone after reading the guide or listening to it would check and think of ways they could apply the tips they learned actually right after reading the guide and yet you have those thoughts on those like, like bubbles in your mind oh I couldn't do that. And then we wanted also to be based on the community knowledge. We learn more from each other but we also as people who work in the civil society we know more our, the challenges we face and maybe that also the gaps in our knowledge. And of course, guide on accessibility not accessible so of course we thought of accessibility and how to make it easy for everyone to check it. So to do that we consider three main points. So first of the content, what content would be appealing for the civic tech community in particular. And how can we make the format or the presentation of those that content actually interesting and how can we deliver it in what format we want to deliver it and make it like accessible for everyone. So first, it was all about the content how can you translate this concept of digital accessibility are we going to speak about one specific side of it are we going to speak about maybe technical points in particular how can we translate this concept without being overwhelming. And for that we actually went back to the community. We thought this guide must be community centered. So, we worked with focus group on actually a couple of sessions where we asked those people that come from the civil society maybe some of them actually trained on digital accessibility others were more actually people we know that had civic tech projects in in our community. And we asked the question, how can we help you make more your products more accessible. And what do you want to learn if you like if you could order a guide or like ask directly have someone consulting you directly on that what you want to learn. And that helped us actually have sort of three use cases. We want to be practical again so we went ahead and built those use cases. Some of them were quite from the imagination we tried to make them like try to find the story and to tell and how can we implement accessibility. And some of them were actually from the those projects, our participants work on one, we're working on. So one of the projects, one of the participants had was actually an online course for civic observers for the elections. So if you maybe you know, during the last year, many elections actually let's just look at the etc. So, many people from the civil society were working on the observation of the elections, the education of the observers etc. But little to know people thought about how to make this process in itself, not only the day of the elections but also even like participate in it, accessible for people with disabilities for instance. So we took that use case from that one side but we also wanted to translate to people working on online courses, for instance, how can you make your online courses more accessible. So I'll leave you to check what tips we actually recommended for people working on such projects. The second use case was on harassment reporting platform so it was kind of platform where people could just send sort of incidents or alerts on when they get harassed etc in certain places and that's kind of projects we saw a lot in many countries in for instance in Egypt in Jordan etc we saw those kind of projects. But one of the challenges was actually how can those reporting platforms be accessible for people with disabilities whether it comes to how they could report or speak about their incidents. So again, we had a lot of recommendations they are in no way 100 things that would make your platform 100% accessible, but those are sort of stepping stones and things you can rely on at the beginning to make in the future better progress we sort of believe in the compound effect when it comes to digital accessibility. And the last use case was about the fact checking platform and the idea was if you want to make a local fact checking platform collaborative for everyone. How could you translate that that content actually you make is also accessible for for everyone using your platform. And this also translates not only for this particular use case but again we thought about it as a way maybe to to learn about even our civil social media posts how are they being really accessible for everyone on the internet or not are we taking the extra time maybe to put the alt packs when we post images etc so those were kind of entry points for us to discuss those tips. And then we worked on the format of course so we worked with an illustrator who actually went and tried to put those use cases and the whole guide in appealing way and translated in different in different illustrations. It was even interesting as well to to try to make it yes appealing interactive but at the same time make sure that it's accessible that we are taken into consideration the contrasts etc. And as we did that we have our accessibility guide so the accessibility ABCs.com is where you can find it you can find it in BTF format, but also in audio format and also on the my society website you can find it as web pages as well. So I advise you and would love for you to go ahead and visit accessibility ABCs.com we believe that we want to make it a larger project in the future as maybe why not make it an online course in itself and try to reach more civic debt practitioners and try to make it again. Again, this guide and every guide is only useful if we share it and if we use those tips. So again we made it in, you can listen to it, why maybe on your own or and maybe have a glimpse on how on what to expect through the audio guide accessibility ABCs. And today we also continue actually to use it even on our trainings at the end of the guide you may find a list of resources from previous projects actually of other organizations from around the world, and we hope that this guide is will also be an entry point for many people that hopefully also in other languages in the future, where it intrigues people to start their process in digital accessibility. Thank you again for your attention and please reach out to us if you won't have any feedback or extra information. This work wouldn't have been possible without the collaboration and the feedback. Thank you so much. Thank you, Yossi that was terrific and you can see the links to that guide in the chat as well and if you've got any questions or any reflections do feel free to add them in the chat as well. We now go to sub grant three for a 10 minute presentation, and that's open north on access to information and specifically data quality so Christian over to you. Hi everyone, let me just share my slides. Okay, and everyone can hear me see me. Yes, okay I see Gavin. Cool. So let's begin. So hi everyone, my name is Christian Medina. I work for an organization called open north that is based in Montreal in Canada, but I am currently located in Bogota, Colombia. So we came across the action lab for a while now and we had participated with tech tech events in Lisbon and we're going to Reykjavik, but pandemic happened. So we've been following the program for a little bit and then when we saw the opportunity to participate with the small grants we thought was a great idea because what we had been thinking for a while to we we best support capacity in government in civil society in front like organizations, especially regarding data. So, our area of expertise is on research and solution design for technology capacity building and network collaboration and work a lot of data governance, open and shared data smart cities public transportation open government. So to us it align very well to be able to to find a solution on how to access data and data that's good quality, in particular in the service of the different activities that civil society and civic tech organizations undertake. But that's, we've put together an application we put together a project team, and, and we were successful in our mini grant with my society. And that those are my coworkers so Tom and Lucas shout out to them because they, I was just a princess told them what to do they did most of the work that's that's how it works up in right. As we started thinking about this course we wanted to really emphasize several aspects that we bring to a lot of our capacity building activities elsewhere so we wanted to emphasize when creating the course that we wanted to raise digital competency so literacy would entail a one way intake of information so just people telling me what to do well competencies more focused on building those skills necessary for you to engage in digital device and technology and access to data in all these challenges are present. Currently, and in order to do that we really emphasize the co creative process with the action labs we had a couple of of workshops with with with members of our of our particular challenge of the third action lab I think was the number. And really try to hone down on what were the needs on the ground, what were kind of the, if the course and the thematics we were building were resonating with with activists with civic tech practitioners in the field, all over the place and I see Richard is in the crowd to and he I think we've muted a few inputs as well. So that was the process and the methodology that was behind it. And as an organization based in the north we're really really aware of our dynamics so we, we wanted to make sure that this wasn't just a course that was built in the north and that people in the global south would just absorb those needs based. And that that goes to the point of the global case studies we really tried to leverage the action lab to find those case studies to to be able to frame them in in the processes that of what good data quality details and then how to access that. And then the value that for us was that we were able to easily integrated to our existing course platform so we have courses that that what we've worked with communities and with government and civil society. And a lot of other thematics from data management to smart cities to an introduction to artificial intelligence. So we wanted to make sure that this fit within that larger curriculum that we have available. And that's that's kind of what it looks like the we call the on track the open north training center and those are courses freely available to everyone and since we're based in Quebec, Montreal that's French speaking part of Canada. A lot of our courses are bilingual English and French. And then I'm trying really hard to get them in Spanish, but that's another battle. So when it came down to the course we quickly realized that you needed three components so originally our mission wasn't accessing good quality data but we quickly came to realize that there also needs to be a capacity building effort to assess data that exists already. So how do you know if a data set that a government post out or a private or organization puts out or an international organization puts out. How do you know the data is reliable that you can use it for your purposes whatever those may be. And that also led us to really coming down to everyone being able to speak in the same terms so there's a lot of of jargon that gets thrown around. So what's in mind is data governance that's one that we come across very often that that is becoming very popular so what is entailed to be data governance and there are some misconceptions on is data governance data management is it more related to democratic governance of data sets, or is it about power relations so being able to showcase and agree with a global community that this is what we mean by their quality this is what we mean by data assessment. Yeah, and as I mentioned previously we quickly realized through our work with the action lab members that there needed to be a capacity building effort to understand what entails good quality data. Yeah, and then so we built a course through, how long did it take about three months I think it took us to make the course and the course is fully accessible to anyone who wants to see it we define what the quality is we have users in areas. Key terms we aim the course at civic tech practitioners. And what was most interesting about undertaking this very collaborative kind of co creative process is is that it really left a lot of lessons for us. When we think about developing our other courses when we think about what are the needs in the global community, especially if we're thinking again. On the impact we can have a global scale so. There are some reflections that we have about after developing the course and, you know, an ideal world with a lot more time and funding. We thought there definitely needs to be further efforts on capacity building, especially on the data front There is a lot of want to use data for good to use data to advocate to use data to inform stories to inform decision making. But there's not enough capacity and or a lot of the capacities concentrate are very few individuals that have to work really hard to make this happen and they're strained and and and don't have a lot of resources so We know that that farther capacity building that's tailor made for different needs that can entail synchronous and asynchronous learning. So synchronous being at the same time with a facilitator and asynchronous being an online course that you can take at your own time. The same as as even though there's wonderful ways to learn online. I think that in person elements also missing particularly when it's more hands on practical experience and challenges that you're facing and the same, both a very short course like the one we did wouldn't take you more than an hour to take it and same more long term processes where There's other elements such as a community of practice like the one that is or peer to peer exchanges and mentoring that can be done. I think there's room for both something that was quite interesting for me and then from like a very personal perspective I mentioned I live in Columbia so Which is focused on activism that that really came forward from some of the members of the action lab where sometimes you might be operating in a confrontational context where government or others don't want to release their data set or purposefully obscure data. And same with authoritarian and non democratic context it's easy to work for there's an open data platform but what if the data doesn't exist or the government doesn't want to release the data so We touched a little bit on this with the courts but given the limitations of the modality we couldn't really dive into how do you access data and how do you share data in that context. And finally, as I mentioned before some of the data and tech skills how you govern data, how you structure data so it's easy to use so you're not spending five hours in front of an Excel sheet trying to figure out X or Y how you make it standardized and how do you build data partnerships are you collaborate with other organizations working in your field or in your area that also need and want data. Um, yeah so that's that's that's kind of some of the reflections and the course we developed I encourage everyone to to access the course to take it and to explore our different courses, if you think it would be helpful for your needs and I know questions will happen later so Let's slide and then you're free feel free to reach out and thanks again to the funder to any D to take back to my side to Rachel for putting all this together. And Gavin of course. Thank you you did all the hard work, but that was fantastic Christian thank you very much and again, you can find the link to all of that in the chat. And if you've got any reflections or questions do put them in there as well. And we go now to a presentation on sub grant for and that's from Dathion multitude s on storytelling and reach and I think we're going to Stephanie. Yes, hi, how are you so I'm going to make the presentation I'm so sorry for the background noise, but I'm currently of you know work work co workspace. But I'm very happy to be here with all of you one of my colleagues is here to Victoria, we led this project called training and storytelling and reach for civil society organizations. We are an organization based in Chile, and we seek to close the gap between citizens and decision making our three pillars are education, monitoring and also advocacy so this project together with my society was very important to us because it was a way to give tools to civil society organizations so they could get their stories to a broader audience. So the objective of this project was to provide civic tech organizations with effective tools to get a studies about their projects and successes into mainstream channels. One thing that was very important to us was to have organizations for different parts of the world, we had 10 participants from Indonesia, Macedonia and the Philippines, as you can see in the map. And Foundation multitudes is based in Chile yes but we have representation in different countries of Latin America for example right now I'm currently based in Lima. Victoria is based in Buenos Aires and our team is in Santiago so that's why the world map has all these dots and it was really interesting to see how we could connect each other. The three trainers we had where Pauline Ibarra our executive director Evelyn Perez founder of We Are Mass and Katya Petrikevich that is the International Director of Participation Factory. And these three trainers were in charge of giving sessions on four main topics, there were the media mapping and media tracking with Paulina, PressKit and media management with Evelyn. How do we elaborate with this course editorial line and expressions on contingency with Evelyn too and the sign of a maker action plan for a specific program or campaign with Katya. As you can see there's a flow between these sessions and the idea was that at the end the organizations will have all the necessary tools to develop their own communication plans. According to their own needs as an organization and also according to their audiences, because as we know the global north and the global south Latin America and Asia have very different needs. And what we wanted to do was to give them what they need so they can develop their own strategies. We also had this, after giving the sessions we had like one on one interviews with the participants, and also Google firms to collect their feedback from the program. And what we got was that they joined the program because they wanted to develop an attractive campaign for their organizations meet and share experiences with other organizations and learn about storytelling tools and strategies. What was very important for them was to connect with other organizations that were really interested in getting to know the work of organizations in other parts of the world, particularly about organizations that were facing similar situations, but in other regions. For example, our participants from Indonesia were very eager to learn more about Latin America. So that's why the hands on part of these sessions was was really interesting the most some difficulties that that we had with the program. And I think it is very important to share this is that the time of the year was really challenging. We were at the end of the year so we were working with December and January with the holidays. So sometimes people were late to some sessions, but still because of the interest, the interest they had, they were really engaged during the sessions. And also what was most relevant to them as I already mentioned is sharing experiences and best practices with others. So they were really interested in learning more about cases studies and some modification for future trainings are to have into consideration the time of the year, and also to put more focus on the practice of how to put these tools into practice with some workshops for and also they were really interested about knowing more about about artificial intelligence and how they could use it in their own projects, for example. And regarding practice and ability from foundation with the tool is we are making sure that we keep the connection with this organizations, all the tools we use the presentations from the trainers, the recordings of the sessions are available for them. And also we will launch a by month before a newsletter with relevant information on storytelling and reach, runs opportunities for them and stories of successful experiences, and also through mainly these participants will be connected in it so they can exchange information about the project, and also to share how are they doing with the communication plan that they were able to, to have some insight on how to do it with the last training with Katya Petrikevich. So that's in a nutshell, the project. Thank you very much to my society for the opportunity. And also we are very happy to answer any questions you may have. Thank you very much indeed Stephanie and keep an eye on the tick tech website where there will be links appearing to some of those resources in the near future and again if you've got any questions for Stephanie or any of our other presenters to pop them in the chat. We're going to go next to a 10 minute presentation on sub grant five. That's over to the demography project on driving impactful societal change. And I think we're going to Richard. Good evening everyone from Kenya. My name is Richard from a community based organization in Kenya called the demography project. I'll quickly take you through our project that we went through the tick tech labs five sub grant, which can see is just a small collage of the activities that we're able to undertake under the thematic area of climate action and my presentation will pretty much be an overview of what we achieved. So, so during the so a bit on the demography project again like I mentioned your community based organization and we leverage a lot on citizen science, civic technology and data journalism to empower communities. So on our project, our project was primarily on water conservation that is having community stick charge of water resources within their areas and having communities actually put steps or take actions towards not just conserving fresh water but also the water the general water resources including rivers, wetlands and other sources of water. So we had five key objectives and these were all aligned towards civic action and community engagement. And all of this was just mainly towards having communities again take charge of how they can conserve water resources and having them build resilience on climate action. And I'll be able to elaborate further on why can it actually in a very bad situation right now. So the scope of the project is that I wanted to use a civic technology and integrated with citizen science and having communities use this as a basis for how they can go about our water conservation. So amongst these are was to have a water calculator. We have each one water service providers in the country and unfortunately, Kenyans do not generally do not have awareness of how water is built and what both what financial resources go into establishing water infrastructure and this is a similar situation across many sub-Saharan countries and other areas around the world. We also wanted to look at regulations on water as well as rights surrounding water resources and we wanted to integrate this with community engagement that is having vulnerable communities be empowered with information and awareness on how they can go about water conservation. Water distribution is a serious issue in Kenya. Again, I'll be able to elaborate further on that as we go forward. And we also wanted to see how we can integrate it with the Internet of Things and using universities as change agents that is universities and university students as change agents towards climate action. So that is the team that I had myself Caroline Lillian and Ronald who should be on the call from another room. So again, how bad is the freshwater situation in Kenya? The photos that you can see of one river and this river flows through just 200 meters from our office right in Kyomo village. On the left, the water there comes from our wetland, the second deepest in Africa. And where the water is fresh, it's clean, it can be used for various uses of agriculture, domestic use, etc. But on the right, this is just 20 kilometers from here, just past Nairobi city. It's passing through an informal urban settlement and the water is practically unusable. It's black water essentially. And it's so bad that the communities there cannot use it for any other purpose other than using it as a sewer. Kenya is famous for quote, unquote, flying toilets. And this is something that is the reality of how water resources are being used in the country because communities do not know how and why they need to conserve freshwater resources. Now, Kenya is undergoing the worst drought in 40 years. We have over 11 million Kenyans facing severe drought, lack of water and food. And this has been affecting the country for the past one year. And unfortunately, drought situation is not because the sun is too hot, it's because water resources are not managed effectively. So what we wanted to do is having not just the end water users but also the government agencies take charge with regards to how freshwater can be conserved within the country. And this is among the challenges that we've been facing, of course, rapid population growth within the past 50 years we've grown almost 13 times population size, but again, water resources are consistent. Again, looking at the freshwater withdrawal, Kenya is notable, you can see it right here, it's one of the few brown countries on the map. Kenya is going to be water stressed within the next two years and it's something that you're facing right now. And this is all because the water resources that we have are not being prudently conserved or utilized effectively by communities. So again, our work was centering amongst the from our individual level, domestic level, then to the community level, how can we best utilize our water resources. Again, we wanted to show how water consumption has been over the past few years. So again, we just want to see how perhaps domestic, from a domestic level, can we conserve freshwater resources. So on to the milestones. We recruited eight climate champions who are now called and they were practically, we recruited them from various universities and colleges across the country, that they can be able to help us conduct research from the various 81 water service providers or utility companies across the country, have them conduct that research and share with and help us share the message on water conservation, both at their own community level and within the university landscape that they attend. We had a very big response to our applications, you had about 794 applications, and you had to select the best eight from this, it was quite a challenge, since all of them demonstrated a lot of insight towards climate action. Number two, we engaged a lot of water regulatory bodies, due to various reforms within the industry, we have multiple layers of actors within the water sector, and we had to engage each one of those levels so that you can have authorization and also having access to open data so that we can be able to interact not just the data but also transmitted to the end water users so that they can take action towards our water conservation. We also supported the mapping of various water resources within the country, it was quite a task but to utilize the support from our climate champions to do this and also within the resources open data from our various partners to compile a holistic water atlas on our Kenya and this is one of the outputs that we had in our project. We also created linkages and memberships within with various organizations and this is of course to amplify the voices from a local level to a global level on water because this is a global issue, without water there is no civilization so we wanted to use the project as a platform for us to engage with multiple actors, both locally and abroad. Now practically we also installed using the Internet of Things, we installed water level monitor on our water tank, this is ubiquitous in Kenya, practically every household has a water tank because again access to water is a bit limited so we need to save water from a domestic level. So we wanted to see how the Internet of Things can be able to show us, provide us with insight on how perhaps you can be able to conserve water and practical measures on how we can reduce our consumption. Now we had various events or we participated in planning of various events and this was all towards raising community awareness on water conservation, we had the World Wetlands Day on the 2nd of February and ahead of it we had a conservation run for Oderi wetland against the second deepest in Africa and we gladly hosted it in our community. So we had a conservation run that had about 850 participants, Kenyans run, so we used this as a tool for us to enable communities to understand the role they can have within our water conservation, not just from the domestic level but now going up to the community level. On our World Wetlands Day we were able to hold an event at one of our informal lab and settlements and this is called a Korongoshov Slam, unfortunately it's home to over 200,000 Kenyans and the highest risk of waterborne diseases and lack of access to water amongst other opportunities. So we worked with a community based organization there to hold the World Wetlands Day event and following this we were able to host the President of Kenya, His Excellency Dr William Ruto who was able to see how the youth themselves can be able to spearhead or catalyze change with regards to how we perceive our resources and our general environment. So this is something that you are very proud of. We had an innovations challenge that I just concluded last week. This was just to have an engagement with universities and university organizations, have youth propose ideas on how we can go about solving challenges facing the three SDGs on hunger, water and health. This is still ongoing, we are supposed to have the award ceremony over the next week. Also we worked again with stakeholders within the water sector so that we can have communities participate in not just the licensing but also approval of various elements of public participation surrounding water and this includes water tariffs, the cost of water and also the availability of water. This we have been doing over the past three months with various water service providers and we are hoping that we will be able to sustain this not just from a journalistic perspective but also having communities participate in these processes. Also we installation of meteorological stations. This is to support communities within not just universities but also vulnerable communities perhaps take action or gain data with regards to climate action. So in the process of installing three meteorological stations, small compact ones, affordable ones that communities can be able to use to broadcast perhaps the weather quality and most importantly the air quality because air and water are linked. We wanted communities to take that action so that we can have them use this data and show how perhaps practical action can be taken to mitigate excessive pollution of the environment and its negative effects. Lastly we have an open data portal and now this is a culmination of everything that we've done, all the photos, the events, everything. So here we launched last week during the open data week, we shared insights on how Kenyans can take practical steps towards conserving freshwater and we are looking at all elements including signing petitions with regards to legislation and policy action towards water conservation as well as linking end water users with various levels of government agencies dealing with water. So it's a whole complex issue, water is such a complex issue, it's something that we learned through and it's one of the challenges that we face. It's such a complex sector and yet we are able to achieve a bit through this project. So those are few photos of what we did. We are engaging directly with communities and we are happy to engage directly with informal urban settlements and rural communities, sharing with them messages or engaging with them to understand just how the small steps that you can take and be able to conserve the freshwater resources that you have, not just the rivers, not just the water within our taps and within our households, but also having communities understand the general effects of water upon civilization. So it's quite a complex topic but you are able to do quite a bit over the past three months. We really thank you so much for this opportunity in my society and with support from NED, we are really truly grateful for this. Those are our contacts for the team. Thank you so much. And thank you so much, Richard. A huge amount of work and so much to pack into 10 minutes as well. Thank you very much for sharing it with us. And again, there are links in the chat if you'd like to learn more. We now go to our final Terminite Subgrant presentation. That's Subgrant 6. That's Policy Lab Africa on Civic Tech in Hostile Environments and I think it's Charles over to you. Yes. Thank you very much, Gavin. Pleased to meet all of you here. Let me share my screen quickly. Okay. Yeah, thank you very much. Yeah, I wanted to say thank you to my society for these grand six that we had. My name is Charles. I represent Policy Lab Africa, based in Lagos, Nigeria, and I wanted to share a little bit about our project, which is the election violence tracker. It's an open source reporting tool that we built. Okay. Sorry. Can you hear me? I think my sister. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. Yeah, so my system froze out a little bit. So, so the challenge was to be able to, according to the grant, we had the opportunity to apply, you know, for this call for proposal and the challenge was to be able to build an, you know, an open source platform, you know, that kind of advances, you know, save with courses. It will be digital, of course. And so we kind of, you know, took up the challenge. So one of the problems we identified, you know, going to into the Nigeria elections was that the independent, you know, National Electoral Commission of Nigeria have about 170,000, 974 polling units. And we have about registered voters of about 97 million. And, you know, we looked at the data and we found out that the polling units are like addresses, you know, you can imagine like in rural areas. These polling units have just, you know, names, you know, you can look at them on a map anywhere. So it becomes a challenge for election observers, you know, civil societies law enforcement or anybody, you know, like we have, you know, diaspora voters this time around. So the election in Nigeria facility this year has a lot at stake and, you know, we needed to find a way to kind of, you know, help out, you know, in some way. So, that's by the way, and another thing we kind of thought about was that Nigeria recorded, you know, violence, heavy violence in the elections in 2011, 2011, 2015 and 2019. And the issue is that if it happens in the remotest parts of the country, it means it is under-reported and nobody kind of knows about them, we don't know the scale of those, you know, violence, you know, from people losing their lives to, you know, burning properties and stuff like that. So we, so this is majorly the problem. And how do we come about it? So we kind of conceptualized an open source reporting tool that will enable citizens to document and report, you know, violence incidents in the elections. That was what it came about. So how does the election violence tracker, you know, works? So what we thought about was, we wanted to create, you know, a platform that if you are in your polling station or your polling unit, your local government or your ward, and you experience any violence, you go onto this platform, and you report it, you upload an evidence such as a picture or an image, and you upload it. Once you upload it to the platform, we have a bot that kind of shares this on Twitter. So other people on social media can kind of, you know, engage, you know, with the content and discuss the issue. So, but the major issue was how do we kind of know where you are coming from, how do we, the polling unit data from the electoral body has no addresses. So first of all, we have to use open street map to revadulate the polling units, you know, we did that automatically, we also did it, you know, manually. So we're able to get the longitude and latitude and kind of put them on a map. So when you send, when you now send a report, and you take a picture or a video, it kind of attacks, attaches a geotag on it. So we know exactly where you are sending this from. So we don't need to kind of ask you, but we know where you're sending it from. So that confirms with the original data that you inputted. So it is IP locked and your fence so you can upload or send anything as an idea. So that was what we did. And then we also use them in a leaflet to kind of visualize the data for the report. So when you send us a report. It is processed and kind of put on a map. So we have categories, you know, for different kind of, you know, incidences from, from gun violence to to as in, and you know, you name it. So that is how the election violence tracker works. So to report a violence. I mean, this is how the UI for platform looks like you're able to kind of fill out information. They are not can sensitive, but you can give us as much information as possible you describe the incidents you upload your evidence and then you submit as simple as that. This goes to our, our backend. So this is how it looks once you put in the report looks like this you could provide video. You can also we also have options to kind of record from, from, from inside the app. So this is how it looks when you report an incident. Then after reporting the incident, we need to be able to see how the data look like, you know, so to assess the data, all you need to do is to come here and search for the state, local government, the police unit or the region. And you click it to be able to see the map of Nigeria and see the various, you know, violent hospital spots. So you can be able to click on each one to be able to expand and see the number of cases, and the different types of cases, and the, and the cases that it looks like you can have a report, you know, dashboard, you know, that you can download on the spot. So, so this is how it looks like. So you have different kinds of cases, you can download this data, you can share them, you also have a narrative here about the incidences and how it happens, you know, because people put in a narrative, you know, you know, behind their, their descriptions of the violence. So what we achieved, you know, within two months, we were able to build a tool to independently create, confirm and track, you know, violence, you know, incidents. We also think that this is a good data resource, you know, for journalists, election observers, activists and civil society, you know, they can be able to use these to be able to. We think that there is very low accountability, you know, during our elections, and this has become a tool where people can kind of look at and see where the hotspot and you can look at it and see that the commercial capital of Nigeria, where is the, during the presidential elections that happened a few weeks ago was the battleground and that was where most of the violence about 70% of them happened on that platform. It was enabled online and offline, you know, reporting, you know, making it to a progressive web app and having service workers implemented. That means, even if you're in the remote part of the country, you can still upload the data once your internet connection comes in, it now comes on to a database. All our codes are open source, which means it is reusable, you can remix it, you can reuse it, any, how you want. I think we already deployed it for the first phase, which is the presidential elections on the 25th of February and it was successful. 25th, 26th or 7th, there was elections for the presidential elections. We collected 59 reports in online mode, while six reports were saved offline at some point, you know, during the reporting. We are now finalizing their minor front-end changes, you know, that we discovered, you know, during our first round of, you know, live testing and we are now working on them to be able to, and we are looked at to be able to deploy again this Saturday on the 18th and 19th of March for the state and assembly elections. What is next for us? We have, we mapped 176,000 polling units. I mean, that's a huge amount of data. I mean, that can be used to do anything from census to doing any project related to the environment, anything related to GIS, you know, because we have this now mapped, it's on our GitHub repo and, you know, this can be remixed and used. So we are kind of calling on our partners, you know, within Nigeria that can make use of this data in any other way to solve some problem which we welcome. We are looking to in 2023 African countries will be conducting elections and across Africa, and we are also looking to somehow, you know, get involved, you know, with our code, we can easily kind of deploy any mapping solution to the end. So we look at, you know, countries within the West African region. We have Congo DRC, we also have Liberia and Sierra Leone having elections in the next couple of months and we are looking to, you know, get involved and be able to build some kind of solution and maybe we could begin to see an African wide, you know, kind of violence map. We're not just looking to just map, you know, this violence, but this kind of goes back to the conversation about, you know, our, our moral, you know, responsibility, and how our democracy, what democracy is all about, and also kind of not just reporting this incident but trying to also find a way that we can try to stop them, you know, before, before they happen. So that is how what we are looking into within the next phase of deployment when we want to go to these African countries. We must find a solution to making sure that we kind of limit these things before they happen, and also kind of minimize misinformation and fake content, you know, that is happening on the platform. These are the things we want to solve, but we are looking forward to working with partners across Africa that want to use our data to be able to build something interesting related to election violence. So yeah, we are Polisilab Africa based in Indigo, Nigeria, and we are Polisian advocacy think tank. We work with technology, you know, to do this as an ability now for all, try and check us out and check the electoral violence track out. Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to hanging out again with with all of you. Thank you to TicTac for the opportunity, and every one of you that supported us during the feedback and the demo. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you very much indeed, Charles. And again, you can see the link at more information about the project in the chat. We've got just under 15 minutes now to put some questions to our fantastic presenters, Pam, Yossi, Christie and Stephanie, Richard, and Charles. Did I mention everybody? I think that was all six. I'm going to kick off with the question. I can see a few have already been asked and answered in the chat. And I think one question I had for everyone obviously one of the aims of TicTac Labs was to try and build the Civic Tech evidence base. I wonder what are the sort of biggest lessons that you've taken away from all the work that you've done and maybe something that you would do differently next time or something that you'd wished you'd known at the start of the project. And would you like other people to take away what lessons have you learned? I don't know which one of you would like to go first in answering that. Maybe nobody like to answer that. Christian, go for it. Yeah, I guess. As for us, it's a little bit kind of balancing the expectations of we want to do a lot of great work, but it's very, the format is limiting because, you know, we're not profit so we can't invest as much as we would like. And then like we did end up investing a lot more than, you know, the parameter syndicated at first. So it's something that, well, I don't know how to negotiate it because we're very happy with the end result. But internally it's like, oh, well, like maybe it took too much of Tom's time. So that's for us. I will, I will say something going back to my focus at writing stories like this takes a lot of time because what I found is that we don't really think that way in this field. I mean, we don't think about the ultimate beneficiary. I mean, you know, if we really do have to remind ourselves that ultimately, I mean, that's what actually I go back to the name of organization people powered, you know, I mean, we think of the people more like it who's all doing the work in the process. But to think it's almost like following a chain of breadcrumbs, you know, all the way to why we're doing the work. We're doing this because why. I mean, it is to some ultimately approve something for what we call like the ordinary person, but we don't often we're not we often aren't aware of who that is. We're so some of us in our organizations are pretty far removed from it. You know, so as I worked with each of the partners who are doing the work. I found that sometimes it's actually really hard so I take the Chile example for instance. I didn't identify the young man who participated in the project who but to actually get down to the person he helped. You know, that was like really hard to do they hadn't thought about it that way and it takes a lot of time to try to try to do that so you have to allow. We definitely didn't allow enough time, you know, especially when you have when you're trying to talk to all the different players that play a role because you want to recognize the fact that a lot of different people are involved. Sometimes left out of the story. It takes time. So yeah, I mean, the number one thing for me was like wow we did not. Didn't leave didn't leave enough time for it, but also it's really important to do it. Like I said is let's not let the process over overwhelm the end benefit. Brilliant thanks Pam, and I'll let other presenters come in on that question but again if you've got any questions for our presenters do pop them in the chat. Over to you next. Yeah, so for us as well. The challenge was at the beginning that we wanted to put it all in the guide like to put all the information we have to to respond to all questions or maybe get different people from different backgrounds in even folks group it was quite different to quite actually choose who to include and if we have enough representation, etc. So, but then after taking a moment back or let's say a step back without like, okay if it's this big wall, we have to look at it one break at the time and try to respond or way. Even if we can't have or the responses maybe just guide people to those who may have the responses. And at the same time, another thought we had is that at the end of the day it's also as much as it's important to provide direct resources etc. So it's also about making sure that the message in itself is not lost. So, one of the messages we had is actually at the end of the day is to make the extra effort and make sure that you are putting put an accessibility in mind and thinking about it in the steps of your any of your project. So, yes, definitely with the resources constraints with the time constraints it's very important to not forget that the message after all is the most important. Excellent. Thank you. Who'd like to come next. Richard. Thanks Gavin. Among the various challenges that we had, of course, for us was engaging directly with our communities, be it the university communities and by the response that we had we had a very large outpour of interest and support in this and our filtering of what you would want to work with has been quite a because like I mentioned that the water sector is quite broad and it's similar across all countries. And if you focus on just one element you'll find that it's a bit cross cutting the various themes in climate action are all interlinked. And for us to settle on water, it's because of the prevailing circumstances, Kenya is in a drought. Yes. But after the rains come, we are glad that it's currently raining. We are hoping that we are able now to link this up with various initiatives on climate action. And it's something that various actors that we were working with are able to reflect the same that you may not be able to model to focus precisely on what the solution needs to be. So we really just had to spread ourselves team just learn as much as possible and see where we can intervene for the first three months or possibly as we scale it up we can be able to address more issues in order. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you, and Stephanie or Charles and I'm not sure if you've got any yeah anything like to say on that question as well. Yeah, thank you. I'll go ahead. I think we mentioned it briefly on our presentation, but one big challenge we had was the time of the year also as you saw we were going to patients from different parts of the world so the time zone was very difficult to do fine. But after talking with the organizations, they were okay with the time zone because it was early in the morning or at night so they had time to participate not in their work office hours. But having these workshops on December the last week is maybe when organizations, civic organizations and civil society are working on their final reports for the planification for next year so it was really difficult for them to maybe engage fully in the session so that one thing we should keep in mind when planning other types of training like the time of the year and also to put more focus on case studies, not case studies but just showing them, but also to probably maybe I invite some speakers that have like in-ground experience, on-ground experience about putting in practice these kinds of tools. They were really eager to know more about how to implement them more than just theory. They were more interested in practice. So I think those two observations are one of our most important learning for us. Fantastic. Thank you. And Charles. Yeah, thank you very much. I think reflecting back on what we've done, I think that we operated like a startup, you know, looking at the amount of time that we had. So it was purely kind of technical stuff. It was scary at the beginning because we looked at it and we had 170,000 polling units to de-allocate. I mean, you know, that was a lot of work. And so we had very little time for consultations, for co-creation, you know, with the wider civil society and that is very understandable. We did, you know, what we did, we got the results, you know, that we wanted. We built a very useful solution. And when we put out our work and had, you know, meeting with partners that will help us to, you know, disseminate this, you know, we had lots of feedback. We built, we had an MVP, you know, like a couple of weeks, even before the deployment, you know, time, you know, but we didn't do consultations, you know, at that point. It was after our deployment, our life testing that we started to get feedbacks on what to fix. And they find out that fixing a bug might take quite longer time, you know, than what's already kind of, you know, built. So a lot of things here and there that we are supposed to kind of, you know, consider, for example, we did, we kind of made an illustration and an infographic for sexual-related violence is, and we made a mess of it, right? And when we sent it out, someone pointed out to us that this is not, you know, proper, you know, as techies, you know, working, you know, that was something we didn't really kind of put a lot of consideration into. So, I mean, we find out that at that initial stage, a lot of consultation could have, you know, solved many of these issues out. But, but yeah, I think it's good to also kind of be in that sort of, you know, learning mode. We are kind of happy to kind of learn and collaborate, you know, with others to kind of improve how we use technology to kind of solve, you know, civic issues. And I'm glad it all worked out. We kind of learning, collected a lot of feedback, you know, last time we did demo, and many of them were kind of fixing, you know, one by one and seeing how everything goes. So I mean, if we do it again, I think that, you know, proper planning and consultation, even if with a small group of people is kind of, you know, very, very important. But also, the tech and the data involved might be scary sometimes to people in civic society because I mean, at that time, many people were not building tech solutions for the elections. Many of them have built it a couple of bones back, right. So, but we kind of took on the challenge and knew that this will be out in time. Nobody built anything from January on to, on to February, but we started officially kind of start, you know, making a route around January and that was, you know, record time. So thank you guys. Yeah. Thank you for that Charles and thank you all of our presenters as excellent presentations and those really interesting and insightful answers as well because I think Charles you talk about learning mode brings us on perfectly to the next and final session of the event today, where we're going to get some reflections from our steering group members, and from Louise as well so we're now going to be joined by Louise you've already heard very briefly from the chief executive of my society, and two members of our steering group, Isabel who from the open culture foundation and gov zero in Taiwan, and Matt Stempeck who's technologist in residence at Cornell University and founder and director of the civic tech field guide so thank you all for joining us today as well. And I'll kick off with the first question to the three of you which is what you think went well about the tech labs program and what were the highlights for you. Louise, do you want to go first. Happy to. Yeah, thanks Kevin. Of course, having come from a series of such stellar presentations, I have to say that the quality of the work that has been done is phenomenal. I think there was a comment in the sidebar about the amount of work that has been done and that that has been really impressive to. And I think listening to the presentations. It's interesting to hear how that idea of trying to come together as a community and identify common challenges has worked because the problems don't stay in their own lane. So as the presentations really illustrated well, there are communication challenges and storytelling challenges across problems data across projects, data access challenges across projects, questions of hostile environments so I think that that choice of problems. collaboratively feels like it's worked really well. Brilliant. Thank you and of course some of those problems were chosen by our steering group. Isabel do you want to come in next with what you thought went well and your highlights of the program. Yes. Oh, thank you for having me here I learned a lot from all of your projects and is 1130 in the evening in Taiwan now, but I'm, I'm very awake, because I'm overwhelmed by all of your results, you don't, you have done wonderful inspiring projects. And I believe this project will have much more impact in the future, because I think all of the civic society can learn very very much from from all of these projects and as for the, the tech labs, I would say I see the company companion through the whole process is very went well and also the collaboration between my society and the project participation, participants, and also I see the commitment for all of you who joined in the project. So, I think this is a wonderful process and get the best result that we can help. Well, we can expect. Thank you very much and Matt. Thanks, Gavin. Hi everyone, Matt Stempeck. It's great to see so many civic tech super friends on this call. Congratulations to all the grantees on the excellent work. My name is Matt. I'm based in Lisbon and actually first came here for tick tech. So if you ever need an evaluation point for the program, there's one. So, I think my favorite things about this program, first of all, the fact that it exists that my society was able to quickly shift its flagship event budget towards the sub grants program and not only do that but create an open methodology that my society is already refining that people are giving feedback on throughout the process. I find that really admirable. And then I was also just highlight for me was that the funding went to driving very concrete work in this space with very clear outputs that sometimes even much larger grants don't achieve because, you know, for various reasons. And then lastly, just that we saw really global much wider participation than in person events can usually allow because of travel costs and visas and stuff. So even the program, the projects that weren't selected it was really great seeing just a global reach of civic tech in different places. Thank you. I have a few more questions for our panelists but if all of the rest of you on this call have any questions as well please do drop them in the chat. And the same goes for any reflections that you might have of your experience of the program as well we'd love to hear all of that. So I suppose my next question and I might go in reverse order this time is one of the aims we had for tick tech labs was strengthening civic tech networks and the exchange of ideas. And a few of you have already mentioned sort of importance of collaboration as part of as part of the project. So how well do you think the project the program contributed to that aim of strengthening networks and sharing ideas. I think the surgeries are particularly good for this seeing who's doing what and exploring the theme together before getting into all the other part of the process. And then just I mentioned you know seeing where the rubber hits the road in terms of, you know, real life projects out the world. And the example I thought it was like, we spent 15 years talking about the potential effects of AI, and those are important conversations but this year it's like happening. There's a much different conversation with an actuality that you can point to versus theoretical conversations and these projects are very much, you know, real things in the world and we can see how people respond to them. Great, thank you. And Isabelle, let's go to you next. And I think first to the theme of the sixth theme of the surgery is so well selected. I remember I just checked the meeting minutes of our first kick off, kick off meeting of the steering committee. There are, I think, a nine different nine different subjects, but I think my society staff just merged into very well smartly into six different things. So, and all of these things that I think it's the civic tech communities care about globally, because although there are a few, I find that a few people from East Asia to join the this, the lab event, but actually, when I communicate and collaborate with community in East Asia like in South Korea or Japan, all of these issues are what we care most, especially like storytelling, and also the data quality this of this are very important. And so I think based on the same, the subjects we have, they actually learn a lot from people from different corner of the in the earth. And for me, I have, I don't have a lot of opportunity to know better about the people from South America or Africa, but during the past two years, I just know, I just know, oh, there are so many people working very hard in those parts of the world. Yeah, so I think this contributed to broaden my eyes. Yeah. Thank you. Fantastic. Very glad to hear it. Louise. Yeah, I think one of the things I would throw into the mix on strengthening networks is thinking about how the structured approach with common themes worked, because I think it's brilliant to see civic tech grow and become very diverse and lots of different projects develop. One of the challenges that brings is finding the people who have common concerns with you, or interested in the same problem that you're thinking about now so it's the problem of kind of finding the right people to answer the questions you have at any given point. And I think the surgery lab piece of work actually worked pretty well in allowing discussion of problems that actually led to a concrete result as Matt said but also making sure that the end piece of work was as informed as possible by other people's perspectives and I think if we want to get the most of the projects we're building, you have to think about that tricky question of context and how might you reapply the ideas if not some of the approaches or code. So that probably brings us very nicely on to the next question. I'll come to Isabel first for this one. Another aim that we had was the development of new initiatives and collaborations that expands the civic tech evidence base address issues and challenges facing the sector and enhance the effectiveness and potential impact of civic tech projects. How well do you think the program met that a nice short question. Yes, I think this will be a very impactful, because first of all, the process is well curated. And I think that could be reused in the other projects. Like we have this in Taiwan in the community, we just started projects for education for the younger generations about civic tech or project based learning. So I think the whole the project the process of the third surgery action lab and then maybe some demo will be a good process for for this kind of education projects. So we can learn from this and that that would be impactful. And also, I think the documentation of all the civic tech labs is very important thing, because we can always revisit it what happened and what what ideas were shared was shared during the process. I think this all of this documentation will be will make the projects will be more impactful than before because we can see through how these things is achieved, not only the only the results but also the process. And I hope that you will help the staff to do these jobs easier in the future and because I think that you must spend a lot Rachel and Jake game on must spend a lot of time to do this. Yeah, for the documentation. Thanks. And as you say as well, all of that documentation is on the tick tick apps website. So to take a look through all of those minutes, lots of ideas, lots of other resources that we shared as part of those meetings as well. And Louise, I might come to you next on this one. Yeah, on collaboration. I think it's a really good question and I think somebody commented it feels like we're sort of halfway through the story here because a lot of these pieces of work feel like they have been designed by the lab participants and by the people who picked up the grants to enable the sector in various different ways, either there's an opportunity to learn from stories of other pieces of work or actual resources concrete pieces of tech that can be reused in some cases in quite broad contexts. I think the story of collaboration is interesting. It's the collaboration that comes down to the piece of work and then the story that happens afterwards once the piece of work goes into the wild. And as as well says I hope that the that's where the kind of the resource curation element comes in so that in the future people can find the things that they need to maybe contact people. And I know Matt has a lot of history in trying to do this work. So perhaps I'm tearing you up for your answer to that question there. I appreciate the pass to the net and sports sports analogies. Thank you. Just first on the evidence base. I was really impressed with how much action and results we see per dollar or pound invested here. And I think that's in large part thanks to the hard work of the grantees and the strong theme selection. So just that catalyzing effect of these micro grants to get projects off of wish lists, whether those are new projects or deepening existing ones. It's a pretty great evidence base expansion effect. And then yeah interconnecting the field is like the whole reason that I do the civic tech field guide and help people find projects like this. So I was when we talked about this earlier I was excited to see the collaboration that took place even outside of the formal program. You know and I think my society is survey results about this but thinking how we can better interconnect the field. And as recovering American, I always appreciate the chance to look beyond immediate national borders to who's doing very, very similar work in other contexts, whether that's you know geographic or you know topical silos. So just on that note, all of these projects are in the civic tech field guide and I've updated them with today's call that will be live tomorrow and pointers. So the tic-tac labs blog posts are really great for background on the projects and those will all be there in an evergreen way. So so they're findable forever on brilliant thank you and there will be an opportunity for anyone else who wants to share their reflections on all things tic-tac labs program projects process in a moment that I will ask our panelists one final question. Before I let everyone else put their hands up. You've already heard the question I sort of put a version of it to up to version of it to our presenters as well. And what do you think we could learn from the program and how should we take that learning forwards. I might go straight back to Matt, then Isabel and then give you ease the difficult job of summarizing all of it. I have a lot of thoughts in this but I'll try to keep it in size at the risk of sounding totally corny. I think the value of the unexpected community that was built in this process was important. So the direct formal partnerships but also just seeing who's doing what and we talked on our private caller there about just knowing you're not alone in doing this work. So at the local level where you work you might actually be the only one who cares about this, just knowing that others are working on the same theme, including in hostile context. So seeing the diverse approaches to similar challenges, while at the same time, finding that community. I think that's just huge. And so, this is the fellow travelers thing. Then just also mentioned before the methodology so, you know, people really liked the ability to have repeat engagement on the theme and ability to you know keep working on things over time, rather than one off events I think that's a great area for exploration. So combining that with the ability to have those hallway conversations that we talked about with, you know, more focused thematic areas would be pretty cool. Yeah, I think keeping track and whether it's in person or published for the brave like knowing what didn't work to is such an important area that we try to follow and sometimes it's easier shared in the hallway conversation than on a blog that your funder might see but in one way or another just you know, we're trying to see what's working what's not in this space so we can, you know, all have better results for our work. Those were all the highlights for me. Thanks Matt Isabel. Yes, I think for all the six projects just presented. I learned from all of this and because I think most of them are open source to and or CC license. I think they could be reused by other civic tech communities in other countries, like we have this we offer this online courses for the broader general general public during the summer we have this online summer camp so maybe we can translate some of the courses in my open or open notes. Yeah, about the quality of data. Maybe we can do this so they could be reused and I think all of the projects. Owners could be could be mentor to others to other projects. And I think we should keep this community to be together, like maybe through slack or other mechanism or maybe meet in person in physical in in person. Yeah, so I think we should try to make the best use of all of the all of your work and amplify the impact of this project. Brilliant. Thank you and Louise. Yeah, I too have learned a lot just reading and hearing about the work that's been done in the projects as a as an organization I think we also try to think and have tried to think as the program has gone on about how we lay the ground work for collaboration and my reflection is that people can't engineer collaboration so as you mentioned it have some of it happens outside of the formal structures and that's great, but how we can use a structured online format to maybe lay the ground work and allow people to identify areas of common progress and then go off and hopefully collaborations flourish and people learn from each other's work, but also that question and I think it came up in one of the presentations of how you mix in person stuff back in with online approaches and use them together. I think that that's a really interesting question to think about as we we go forward into the hybrid world that we're living in. Thank you all very much and we do have some time left so does anyone else on the call whether you were involved in any of the projects whether you come to civic tech surgery whether you've been on action labs to your group or whether does anyone else have any reflections. They'd like to share or indeed any questions that they'd like to put to our panel or anyone else. You can use the raise hand tool which should be under reactions down on your zoom toolbar or you can put something in chat if you prefer anyone have anything they'd like to share. What happens next, that is an excellent question, Christian and Louise, shall I throw over to you for that. Yeah, Christian good question. So, I think one of the questions we're thinking about immediately is how do we get the most value out of the work that's already been done. So, I mentioned before feels like we're halfway through the story of some of these pieces of work. So, I think actually making sure that we share as much as possible and enable the sharing of what's been done is an immediate concern over the next few months. In the slightly longer term from my society's point of view I think we are really interested in developing this work bringing together people who have common interests in structured online way. But perhaps, you know, as I, as I just mentioned, mixing in getting together in person in some form, and having those kind of serendipitous interactions that happen when you just start chatting to people about work which I think can be a little challenging in online formats, and also thinking about that question of how we share the difficulties as well as the successes as a community and kind of really learn from those as well, and whether whether we can kind of help people do that. Definitely interested in hearing your thoughts though if you have a perspective on what you would like to see happen. Thank you so much. Yeah, I'm a very putting this guy kind of think you're not this guy but this guy kind of think her but definitely I think for us it's a interesting modality and I used to be I used to work for a funder for the Canadian government so I know some of the funding exists but I think it's a very innovative modality for organizations that don't have a lot of resources and money to be able to kind of say like oh it would be nice if I could do this but no big funders going to give you money for just one course or no big funders going to be money for just one line or like a series of lines of code to develop a tool. So I really enjoyed that aspect of I think it does spark a lot of innovation something like with the data quality we have been thinking for a while we just we just couldn't fit it into any of our other programs so when we saw it we could do that for 5,000 Canadian but that's reasonable. It really helped spark sort of that innovation. We're really glad to hear that. Thank you and we've got a really good question that's coming in the chat from David Newman which picks up a lot these things as well which is where would people go to set up communities of practice and who would facilitate it's something we've been asking ourselves as well I don't know if any of our panel would like to put forward an answer to that or any reflections on it. In the interest of reuse, there's lots of great groups that are currently sort of jump starting to get back up and running after COVID, you know killed a lot of our meetups and community spaces, but they are getting back in action various brigades and groups and, you know, as usual we track those here. So if you just check out, we have a whole section called meet the others, and that includes we separate in person meetings and online forums and slacks and kind of all the places you might talk with people in this space. So that's if you want to reuse that's a place you can start with, but I also understand that you know we want to keep this tic-tac conversation going and in that community of practice they might be a new thing. That's okay. Matt, anyone else wants to come in on that one. I guess I could just comment that I think there's two ways of doing communities practice kind of discipline based, which maybe you could view this program as fitting into that so thinking about sort of cross cutting concerns. I think there's another interesting approach which is thinking about civic tech projects. So what you're trying to do at a higher level is this about access to information? Is it about water access climate? What's the kind of overall goal and therefore aiming to get together with a community in that respect? And then I think the cross cutting concerns fall out of all of those as well. It's not a very practical answer, but it's just something we've been thinking about in terms of different ways of helping people gather together. Right. Anyone else on that or any other just final reflections on the whole thing? Yeah. About the community, I would like to welcome all of you to join the GovDero Slack. So there are many people who is interested in civic tech from all over the world. And we have an English channel and I think we will host a GovDero Summit next year. So I will try to find some funding that maybe invites some of you to come to Taiwan to share your projects with us. So I think that's one of the things we can try, the GovDero community can try to do. And also I would like to maybe contact some of you about how to collaborate with your project, about your projects, because there are many similar projects in the GovDero community and also the East Asia civic tech communities. So we can share more information about that. Brilliant. Thank you. We're nearly at the end, but final chance if anyone has anything they want to say or anything they want to ask before we leave. And again, you can see some links going in the chat, including about how to join the GovDero Slack. Nothing else. And I think all that remains for me to say a few very, very big thank yous. First of all, to our fantastic presenters today. It was really fascinating to hear about all the incredible work that you've been doing on what is quite a small budget. It really is remarkable just how much you've got done. And as Louise was saying, and we know there's still a lot more that could come from from those brilliant foundations. Thank you for today, but also for all of the hard work that you've done through the project. And a huge thank you to our panel as well, really insightful conversation and obviously to our steering group members. And thank you for supporting us all the way through and helping choose those topics and everything else that you've done as well. A big thank you to the National Diamond for Democracy for funding a lot of this work. A big thank you from me as well to the brilliant team that my society you've heard from Louise today, to Rachel and Gemma without whom none of this would have been possible. I know so many of you will have interacted with them during the course of the project and they've done a fantastic job, but also to the entire team at my society, me of Asher, Angela and others who've given us support all the way through. And a final thank you to all of you for coming along today and for all of your support throughout the TicTac Labs program as well. So a huge thank you. Do keep an eye on the TicTac website, there'll be more details of all the projects coming up. And maybe we'll answer that question as well about what happens next and how we can all come together again. So a huge thank you for coming along today, a huge thank you for everything and enjoy the rest of your days. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye bye.