 ..yangond i cyflaenu am swyddi Cyflaenol yn gyffredin am f план i fel Llywodraeth. Rwy'n fIMant yw ddweud amlinellu'r syniad llawd am gweithio felly mor bod yn bachodau awdurdol yn eu cyffredin. Dwi'n meddwl i Ffarras,�i Llywodraeth, ac yn ysgrifennu myfwyr. Ond fyddych yn ei rhan oedd hynny, dweud i ddigon i'r llwywiol. First of all, I'm very pleased to be joined by Pauline Viron, the Deputy Mayor of Paris, who's going to talk about participatory budgeting and the experience within the city. Then also Paula Fartesa, an MP, a member of the National Assembly of France before becoming an MP, was involved in Etelab, was a great champion of civic tech and obviously was instrumental in tricking us to come to this wonderful city to host this version of Tic-Tac. Also Tatiana Defodd, who's going to talk about the state of civic tech and GovTech in France. The combination of Tic-Tac has also been a number of Tic-Tacs over the past couple of years and is a great champion for the work generally and its uptake in evangelising about the benefits. So it's going to be really great to hear from them. I must mention that Pauline can only stay for a short time so she'll do her presentation. We'll be able to take some questions and then we'll need to depart unfortunately, but then we'll hand over to Paula and Tatiana to finish. So over to Pauline to take the stage. Thank you. Hello, thank you for your invitation. I'm very happy to be here to exchange with you about our experience of participatory budgeting in Paris. Please excuse my English, it's not very, very good, but I will try to be clear. So I'm Pauline Veyron, Deputy Mayor of Paris, like you just say it, Mayor of Paris San Hidalgo, since March 2014 and I'm in charge of local democracy, citizen participation, NGOs and youth. I'm in charge so I'm in charge of the participatory budget and I want to introduce PB, a programme that Paris has embraced for five years now and describe it rapidly and after I can answer to your questions. This is a sentence of San Hidalgo. I trust the Parisians. This town they know better than anyone. I want them to help us construct it and make it grow. This is when we start the PB in Paris. So this is reflecting how behind I think about this experience. Paris has a strong democratic tradition in late 2014, just a few months after her election. Paris Mayor San Hidalgo set out to deliver on her ambition to turn the city into a more collaborative one where residents play an active role in the ideas and decisions which shape its future. If we want to make citizen participation efficient, we have to radion all stages of the participation, taking a step towards the citizens, giving the citizens the power to act, build policies, decisions together, acting with citizens and letting citizens act themselves. This is a different step. One of the first steps for us was to introduce a participatory budgeting programme. The budget dedicated each year to PB reached 100 million euros. It means that 5% of the global budget is allocated to the PB. Global budget but only investment budget. This is a big part but this is a PB for investments. Citizens are involved all along the process and everyone including children, teenagers and foreigners can vote without condition. The only condition is to have an address in Paris so you can participate. It was very important for us to make an inclusive PB and to give the possibility of everyone to participate. In this slide I would like to show you that 100 million euros is decomposed as follows. 55 million for the 20 district PB and 30 million for the Paris PB. This is our administrative organisation with 20 districts. We have a PB for all of Paris for the big project and we have a PB for each district for more local projects of the citizens. We reserved 10 million for the PB dedicated to schools and high schools. This provision is reserved for spending on use and education projects with schools being encouraged to participate and children's votes determining how that money is spent. This means that children and teenagers can participate to the global PB to propose a project or to vote but they also can participate to a specially PB into the school, into the high school for projects for their schools so they can participate at the boss PB. We want to stimulate the children to participate at the life of their high school and to choose some projects like sports, cultural projects, maybe some projects for environment. Also computing for other schools more connected. They choose a lot of robotics and computers for schools. It's not a big surprise. For a more inclusive and redistributive PB, 30% of the PB go to the working class neighbourhoods for 16% of Paris residents, 30 million euro per year. The project of a PB is to try to include all the people so we try with this budget that reserved for these neighbourhoods to make sure that people who live in these neighbourhoods have a big part of the project. The city decided to reserve the 30 million euros exclusively for the most deprived areas of the city. We also work with local non-profit organisations in order to foster residents of working class neighbourhoods to build collective projects for their neighbourhoods. We know that if we don't have a proactive action, a proactive mean, it's difficult for these people to participate. So we try with Centresocio, a non-profit organisation to go to explain how PB and how to participate. In the next slide, I want to show you the participation of this PB. For the last edition, 211 Parisians voted in order to, in other words, it means that 10% of the global population in Paris vote for the PB. That's in cooperation with other PB, a good result. We work to increase every year the precipitation. So participation is constantly increasing since 2014. And PB answers representativeness. So 13% of voters live in working class neighbourhoods for 16% of the Parisian population. You can see on the slide increase of participation more and more each year participate. We try to make better communication for better participation. So it's constantly increasing since it has been lodged. We can see that in the neighbourhoods where the upper class, there is less participation. For the last edition, 2018, 211,000 inhabitants voted compared to 41,000 voters in 2014. It means that for the last edition, 10% of the inhabitants took part in the vote, like I said before. I want you to show you the campaign and the vote. Once the 21 projects list are known for PB comes to the campaign. We help people who have a project submit to the vote to make a campaign with some flyer, some posters to use social networks. We make a campaign kit that can adapt for their project. So you can see some examples on this slide. Some examples, some make posters, classical posters. Others use a bottle of wine or some dog to communicate. We give some help to these people to make a campaign. We organise a big citizens agorah in September to the participatory budget. We organise discussions under seven thematic agorahs to talk about different projects that submit to the vote. Culture, sports, digital, live together, public space, nature, circular economy. We organise debates and discussions with the municipal team, the services of the city and the associative actors of participation to communicate about the project. So, after the vote can begin for the Parisian PB and District PB, voting is both digital and physical. 204 ballot boxes and public servants to help people to vote. We can see that the majority of the votes are in ballot boxes. Support is provided to facilitate the vote of Parisians online, computer terminals and outlines to help for the vote. You can see on the map of Paris the different places of the ballot boxes in Paris. Some are not always on the same place. We put some ballot boxes in public equipment, library, swimming pool and the marketplace to facilitate the vote. Public servants are next to the ballot boxes and we have a sheet of paper to note all the people that vote to make sure of the sincerity of the vote. Each year we improve a number of ballot boxes and public servants to help people to vote because we can see that people want to vote in ballot boxes more than on computers. You can see on the photo a ballot box behind a school, parents and children can vote before to go to school. A very successful vote behind the high school and the teenagers want to vote. Sometimes they propose some projects to make sports for example in their neighbourhoods. After they vote all the teenagers of the high school for the project. Now we make two places for sport in the centre of Paris for teenagers. We tend to cover all the city and focus on the citizens away from participation. So you can see more ballot boxes in the north, in the east or the south east than in the west of Paris. So now what kind of projects are chosen by Parisians in this slide. Projects that are mainly proposed and followed by Parisian concern vegetalisation, solidarity, sport, hygiene and mobility. We can see some examples on these slides. Ijien equipment for homeless people, vehicles for food banks, electric vehicles, sporting equipment on some streets of Paris in the second district for this example. Another example, this mural fresco next to the Institut des Cultures d'Islam. We have one fresco by district now. We can see also this garden for children that all these gardens are made by the inhabitants themselves. Another example, vegetalisation and flowers into the schools. So after the children can have an activity of vegetalisation. And to finish, some lessons from implementing PB. Adopting PB asks high degree of commitment for politics and also for public administration because it's a lot of work to make sure that all the projects will be realised. Implementing PB was a great opportunity to strengthen transparency informing people about the process of the public decisions. It helps also citizens to understand the functioning of the city to participate to the realisation of the project. All informations are available on the website about the progress of the project. Consultation or engineering study or works realisation or complete project you can see on the website all the steps of the realisation. It's really important to go to work people and adapt to the needs of each public of citizens. That's why we choose to combine online and offline participation. It's a tool to ensure the participation to everyone. And to conclude, I'm truly convinced that co-construction of the public decision is a legitimate expectation for a citizen. The current context in France provides it more than ever with a grand debate. And the PB's success has seen the increasing participation. This success encouraged us to improve the programme to make it ever more participative. And I think about the realisation. I would like that people can participate more to the realisation of the project. Now it's majority of the city services that make the project. And we try now to include people to the realisation with engineers, with public servants, with the politicians to make together the project. And not only to propose it, to have the idea about it, but to try to realise it. So thank you for your listening. Thank you, Pauline. So I have two very quick questions. One is, how were the projects proposed? Were the citizens given a list of projects to choose from, or did they propose the projects themselves? And the second question is, the outcomes that were chosen, were they very different from what you expected? Or were they broadly in line with what you would have maybe wanted to invest in without a participatory budgeting process? Globally, in general, we are not very surprised about the project. It is often a project we make, but this PB permits to give to some projects a very more big impact. Because Parisian proposes some ideas about, for example, the digitalisation of cycles for solidarity. We have some decisions in this way to make a whole project for cycles. But the people through the PB say to us, go faster, go further, more and more than you want to do. So it's a kind of encouragement to our project. Some projects are very different from our projects. But this is a little project or maybe we don't have any project for places. We think this place is good. We don't think about to make it other way. So people want a lot, make different their streets, their place and propose some things different. We think about our project. To answer your first question, these people make their projects themselves on the digital platform. Some are the result of a collective idea. Concealers of the district propose a lot of ideas about 30%. And some association too. But the majority is the individual proposal on the digital platform. Do we have, do you have time for one or two questions? We have three questions, four questions. So we'll do one here, one at the back. We have microphones. Hi, I'm Hazel, I'm a journalist from the UK. My question is did you take inspiration from any other cities and tech systems? And another quick one, do you have any research on how it's impacted the way people feel about the government? The second one is if you have any research about how, if it's changed the way people feel about the government. When we build our PB, we think about Porto Alegre, of course, in the idea of to make inclusive PB. But we have an administrative organisation is very complex in Paris because we are a city but also a department. And we have 20 districts with mayors and so we have to build something very special for us. But we see what they made in New York and in Lisbon because they have PB before us. And also we think about some experiences we made in the precedent government. We began to make some participative dispositive. So we mixed all these things. But we also built it year after year to complete with different aspects we don't think about. And your second question is more difficult because it's feeling or return of about the people. We made a pool. And what do you think about the politics of the mayors, about big politics? And the first was about politics about transport, about mobility because it's very important decisions of the mayors. Other people said about vegetalisation and about housing. But the 14, just after it was about PB. And Parisian said we think PB is a good idea, it's a good thing. But we make another pool and the Parisian said I don't know any more. I don't know as well as I want about PB. I want to participate but I don't know. So we try to make better communication. So we probably only have time for one question now I think. The gentleman in the back, I'm not sure who you are. Hi, my name is Tom. I design funding programmes for a living so this is very exciting. This is very successful in many ways. What is the least successful thing about it? I think it's difficult to explain very well to the Parisian how we made ideas. Someone have an idea, very good. We take it, we propose it to the vote. A majority of Parisians said yes, it's good, I want it. And after we will realise it. But this is an idea to go to a real project, a real realisation. And to explain to people how to pass to an idea to project is not exactly what you want because we have technical, lower limits. And we have to make this project think about all these limits. It's not easy to explain. So I want to make better this part of the PB to explain very well to people. How we made this idea in project and why and how to include people more in the process of executing of the idea. I think it's not very easy. Excellent, thank you. I'm sorry, we'll need to move on to the next speaker so I know there's a couple of other questions but Pauline, thank you so much. Thank you, thank you. So I'll hand over to Paula next. And she's going to talk about digital democracy as a response to the Gilles Lesion. So where to start? When I was in Lisbon last year at TicTec and I was trying to convince Mark to come to Paris, I never thought it was be the perfect time, the perfect moment for the TicTec community to be in France in Paris. We are living a very special moment for participatory democracy nowadays in France. At the end of last year we had this huge crisis, this huge social mobilisation called the Yellow Vests movement that was like protesting against a tax, a carbon tax that was announced by the government and that was perceived as very unfair. And the weeks went by and the rev indications accumulated and changed in their nature and very quickly they started being related to a need of citizen participation and a need to have an impact on political decisions. And the Emmanuel Macron decided to launch this huge debate, this national debate. During two months we have all population in France debating one way or the other. So the two things I think are interesting for you, for this community in particular, are related to the fact that you can take out some lessons from what happened here because it was a real democratic laboratory during two months and I'm going to detail that. And the other thing is that we need you because we're trying now to put in place sustainable participatory mechanisms and I think the French population is mature enough around these topics now to hear what this community has to say and to teach. So I'm going to start with the first one, so what we can learn, what this community that is composed by civic tech and researchers and associations can learn from what happened during these two months. So I was saying this was a really an actual laboratory and I think if we had imagined as researchers a real scale experiment we wouldn't have imagined something better than this because we had so many different mechanisms that were put in place that we can compare them and we can take conclusions on them. So we had during these two months an online platform where we had around two million contributions just to compare. We had some consultations before around bills and national wide and we had like 10,000, 20,000 contributions and we were very happy about it. And now we have two million so it's really another scale completely. We also had presidential workshops or meetings where people discussed and face to face were discussing about the main political strategies of the country. We also had stands that were put in the main public spaces. We had this very French mechanism that's called Caillais de Dolion, that it's kind of a complaints book where people can go to the mayor and just write what they think doesn't go well or could go better in their local places at the local level. We had these conferences that are now ongoing where we chose between 17 and 100 randomly chosen citizens so that they could draw conclusions from these two months of debates. And we even had virtual meetings for people living abroad with different countries at the same time. So we really had a huge deal of different mechanisms so that was kind of what I call the on of the grande bar because it was the official mechanisms that were put in place by the government. But we also had the off grande bar which were more critical maybe initiatives from mayors that didn't follow that are in the opposition and that put in place their own platforms. We had what happened in the media, in the traditional media on TV. We had debates that were organized on the media on TV with actual conclusions that were drawn and proposals with intellectuals, with the gilet jaune that were very present on the media these last two months. And we had what happened on social media, so on traditional social media, Facebook, Twitter, but also for instance on Twitch this new social media for video players with very young people and ministers that were coming to discuss with young people on this new social media. We had associations like one that's called entendre la France that created a bot for a messenger so on Facebook that was asking the questions of the grande bar and collecting answers and touching a more also young population. So we really had several channels of participation of expression which can make us compare one and the other and draw almost very scientific conclusions. So not only we had that but we also have the data. So I was very keen to have open data on the contributions on the platform so that we could have the analysis made by everyone. And we are organizing this weekend a hackathon at the National Assembly inviting a lot of different initiatives, researchers, associations to analyze this data. What kind of things do we expect coming from this hackathon? We would like to have for instance maps where we can see what kind of revindications or contributions or topics were touched upon in the different territories. We're expecting to be able to trace if there was some action of lobbies on this participation online. We would like to have some kind of sentimental analysis or text analysis on the contributions. There's already some researchers that because we don't have sorry the profile of the participants online. We only have information about the postal code so we can make cards pretty easily but we can't draw conclusions on who were the participants online. So some researchers are starting to do semantic analysis through the vocabulary that was used, understand if people were older or younger if it was a woman or a man, what is its socio-economic background. So we would like to have all this kind of analysis this weekend so this Saturday if you're still in Paris don't hesitate to come because it's going to be pretty interesting. So all this to tell you that during these two months it was a really laboratory and that it's going to be very interesting for researchers from now on. And we will be able to draw conclusions pretty interesting conclusions from what happens. So the second thing that the second message that I was wanting to convey was that we also need you to try to inspire us and to give us some feedback about what kind of participatory mechanisms are useful and can be more sustainable. So what happened also during these two months is that everybody was starting to talk about civic technology, about participation. I've been working in these topics for several years and I was never very much heard or followed and we had trouble making it a priority topic for the government. But now we had civic tech being interviewed on the most important national media. We had people talking about referendum, about petitions on TV, on the newspapers. So really the society is asking for this and is mature enough to take a step further. And what I think interesting also is that we're trying to invent something new. We're not trying to put in place the same participatory mechanism that we've known or that are well known. We're trying to develop this idea of a deliberative democracy. So inspired in Jurgen Arbenmas for instance and what he could write about how to put in place a dialogue ethics and ethics of dialogue. Because what we've seen with the Gilesian is that the political debate became very violent, very aggressive, very polarized. And we saw this on social media with hate speech diffusing more and more. And what I experienced personally and a lot of my colleagues during these meetings, local meetings, is that at the beginning of the meeting everyone was yelling at each other and saying, we don't trust you, no matter what you say, we won't believe what you say. And at the end of the meeting, after two, three hours of discussion, there was consensus emerging or at least respect. Or at least, okay, we're not, we think differently, but I see that you're a person the same as me, I see that you have trouble in your daily life, I see that life is not easy for all of us. So there was this kind of mutual understanding of this wanting to know each other, this kind of therapy going on. And this kind of, some people were changing their minds from the start of the meeting to the end, realising that they didn't have the good data, that maybe there were victims of fake news without even knowing it. And so it's very special what happens when you go through this deliberative process. And I think that we also tried to draw conclusions from what happened from the Brexit and from we had these feedbacks from other places where direct referendums were held, for instance, in Taiwan. They put in place a citizen initiative referendum and their feedback was, we didn't have enough time of deliberation before the decision. And so the decision that emerged are very emotional and very drastic and maybe a couple of weeks after you realise you shouldn't have voted that way. And for instance, in Taiwan, the results of some of the referendum were against LGBT. So we really think that what we've experienced during these two months, we are creating something new. And we want to try to give it like an institutional form. So there's a lot of different mechanisms that have been studied this last month. So what the yellow vests are asking is this citizen initiative referendum. There's a referendum in France that already exists, which is the shared initiative referendum where we have MPs. We need a number of MP signatures and a number of citizen signatures in order to trigger the referendum. We are thinking about a petition right. There's already a petition right at the National Assembly, but without any mandatory results. So it doesn't give any conclusions. So now we would like to oblige the parliament to have a debate when we reach a certain amount of signatures. We are talking about participatory budget at the national level because we see it's very successful at the local level. But we also want people to have a say on national taxes and national expenditures. So all this debate is ongoing and I think the TicTec community has a lot to offer. So we would be very glad to have your input on that and to try to imagine these new forms of participation that take into account this need of deliberation. Just to close maybe my intervention, I remember also that last year in Lisbon I was talking about tools, about a project that I contributed to that was called the OGP Toolbox. I was talking about how we used open source tools at the National Assembly and all my speech was turning around technical platforms and functionalities. What I think is that in the civic tech movement we need to take a step further and to stop talking to each other and to we're very self-centered and maybe too techy, too geeky. We don't realise that even if we have the perfect platform, if we don't intersect these tools with institutional mechanisms, if we don't reach real people, if we don't solve society problems with these tools, we will turn around the issue and we'll still see each other every year and it will be a nice party and we'll be happy to see each other, but we won't go further. I think that we have the potential to do a lot with what we were discussing in these conferences, but we really need to look a bit further. Thank you so much Paula. So we'll take one or two very brief questions because I want to make sure Tatiana has enough time to speak as well. So any brief questions just now or we can wait to the end if you prefer. Everyone's happy, content, consensus has been found. So I'll hand straight over to Tatiana and then if we have any more questions we can ask at the end. So Tatiana, over to you. Hello and thank you so much for having me here. It's an honour and a pleasure to be speaking next to Paula and Pauline also. I'm going to try to talk to you about the state of civic tech and gov tech in France and you might see why I separated the two. What I'm presenting today is based on, how do I switch slides? So what I'm presenting today is based on two different types of research, one that is my PhD research and the other one that is more professional, more underground research that I'm doing for a think tank called Decider Ensemble. For my PhD I'm focusing on civic tech actors in France as participation professionals because, as I'll tell you a bit later, the specificity of the market in France is that it is a market. So you have a lot of companies that are defining themselves as civic tech and they may not have the same logic as the NGOs that we're used to seeing over the rest of the world. And how they're also organised as moral entrepreneurs, so actors that are building coalitions to have an impact on policy, to have an impact on policy makers both at local and national level. And then the second source that I'm going to be using is research conducted on gov tech initiatives, meaning initiatives using civic tech tools but led by government, either at national or at local level. And this is what I'm doing at the observatory of civic tech and digital democracy as you can see, like a very short title, very easy to remember. And the material that I'm going to be using today is both an exploratory discourse analysis that I conducted on press articles and on blogs that I conducted last year so I don't have the national debate results yet but I'll update it. And field observation of the civic tech ecosystem in France since around 2016. And I also conducted 70 exploratory interviews like 30 minutes to an hour with local either professionals in local governments or startups or experts on local digital democracy. So I can tell you more about all the material later but one of the specific sources I'll be using at the end is a barometer. I'm not sure that's the right term for it but that we did at the city ensemble every year since 2016 where we ask city governments what they think about civic tech, do they know civic tech, have they heard about it, how do they use it, what do they expect from it. And that's about, they answer about 80 questions on both their perceptions and specifically what they have implemented. And we got about 200 respondents in 2016, 100 in 2017 and 80 in 2018 so we think people are getting a bit tired of the issue but over the years it's been, well we got a lot of information so we're happy. Why the presentation and why conduct research on civic tech in France? The first thing that you notice when you look at civic tech in France is that there's a lack of independent research for the moment and it's very difficult to find information that is not produced by the actors themselves. I mean I know my society does a lot of great research on civic tech itself but we haven't had yet the reports that my society did on who participates and what do they do. But we have a buzzword that captured a lot of attention and that also created a lot of expectations with the discourse that is again mainly produced by the actors themselves. So it's not exactly the same meaning when we talk about civic tech in France than when we talk about civic tech internationally and I hope if it's unclear don't hesitate to tell me. I want to go through a brief history of civic tech. It's very very brief and I try to fit it all in one slide so I'm sorry if some of the actors are not represented every time I get grief from what I'm presenting but the first thing we can see is that it's been a steady development since the beginning of the decade. And it started with NGOs like Regards citoyens which some of you may know that focused on parliamentary control. What they did is platforms that allow citizens to track the activities of MPs of senators and also to track how a law is developed. But more and more companies were created and I think the Knight Foundation report played a role because it identified civic tech as a market and it had a lot of repercussion in France namely in the press. The second thing we can notice in this history is that in parallel with the civil society development we had very fast institutions positioning themselves on civic tech as a part of a political capital. It's a shame that Pauline Veron left but the city of Paris is one good example that very soon Annie Del Gau the mayor used civic tech and digital democracy as a tool and as something that allowed her to distinguish herself from other mayors. So at national level it was also accompanied very soon by institutions to regulate digital democracy. It's at dates from 2011 and that mission was first focused on open data and Pauline can tell you more about it. But and then carried on to take care of open gov issues so at national and at local level institutions played a role very fast in sort of framing and encouraging civic tech. And then the third thing we can say about the ecosystem in France is that there's a certain degree of conflict. It was very apparent in 2016 when the OJP summit was held in Paris where a group of players a group of actors both from the civic tech world but also from human and digital rights activists got together and called to boycott the summit saying both that the French state was being hypocritical because they were passing laws that were going against public freedom and then holding like an open government summit. And also stating that the tool that was mainly used for public consultations was not open source so you cannot track and be transparent and promote open government while still just using the same tool. And these questions are still active. There's still re-emerging to there with the big debate because the tool that was used is not open source. So if we sort of do a first round about the civic tech in France first of all it's a market. So the term civic tech has been kind of trusted by companies. Maybe we should be talking about something else in France than the civic tech that you guys know from other countries. The second one is that it's very institutional. It's very it's really developed because it's cool and innovative by institutions and it's very close to the public innovation sphere and that may be a point that is in common with other ecosystems which is that the idea is to modernize institutions and sort of go towards more efficient institutions that will respond to the citizens which is good and at the same time can be seen as a neoliberal project and can have some negative impacts or connotations namely in France. And finally one of the questions we can ask is whether it's all wind. You know in French we say like it's just wind. It's just like no impact whatsoever. A report last year stated that we have about 160 local governments that have used civic tech including citizen reporting and crowdfunding apps. So it's not a lot compared to all the buzz we've been hearing about it. And the numbers that we're reaching before the grand debate because of course you know it's going to change everything. We're relatively low. It was so higher than in person but it's still relatively low. And the big big question is that we don't have any information on civic tech. We don't know who participates. There's sort of a fear of asking people who they are when they're online. And so we don't have any evaluation and in one way you can wonder if it's not because it's practical for local and national governments to not know because it don't have to ask the question is it representative or not. So through the press analysis it was interesting to see what civic tech representatives talk about when they're talking about themselves and they're describing their work that they want to achieve. And the first thing you can notice is that they're building a crisis. It may be very evident in other countries but in France it's very specific that the problem that they're identifying is not with the institution and it's not with the citizen. It's really with the intermediation like who is between the citizen and the institution. And I'm thinking some of you have also built this problem in your discourse in other countries saying you know that the citizens are good. They're there. They want to participate and the governments are there. They want to listen to the citizen but they're lacking the tools. I don't know if it's right or not but at least it's really interesting to see that the focus is not on criticizing the institutions or the citizens and this may be linked to the fact that they're working with governments and have to sell services and tools to the government so you don't want to be too mean to them. And the other criticism that they have is that everything is old. You all know Piam Mancini's quote where she says you know we're 21st century citizens working with 18th or 16th century institutions. And this quote has been in the media in France in almost every article. There's very little variety in terms of key actors that French actors are citing. So there's really this idea that institutions are old and should be reformed. A second thing is that the good citizen that is built through these discourses is responsible and informed and constructive. And there's a bit of a fear of conflict or at least an idea that there should not be conflict when you're doing democracy, when you're doing participation. And you know again not saying it's good or bad but at least that's something to note. A third sort of conclusion from press analysis is that digital tools are associated with different beliefs. The first one is that there are mainly tools for expression and information. We would think that civic tech in France, civic tech actors would promote deliberation as Paula was saying. But actually in the expressions used, in the words used, they're mainly focusing on information and on expression of oneself. And it's more of a building an opinion and more of a survey logic than really a deliberation and debate logic. And the second thing that is sort of attributed to digital tools is the ability to modify the nature of contributions. When they're selling a tool or when they're talking about a tool, the idea behind it is that this is going to pacify your participation. It's going to shift how citizens express themselves. They're going to really first of all be more constructive and then since it's linked to their everyday life and to a routine sort of way of participation, they're going to be nice and they're going to be involved and sort of magically everyone's going to participate. And it's been changing a little bit but most of the discourse still focuses on like a magical power of tools. And finally, and well this is no surprise, there is a strong lobbying activity of civic tech actors in France for new intermediaries. And very interestingly they're positioning themselves as these new intermediaries. They should be the ones or you should be the ones because I'm talking to a lot of civic tech actors here that are neutral and non-political and able to both talk to the government and represent the citizen. So there's this construction of civic tech as an alternative and a viable credible alternative. There are very different views in discourse in the press but this is really the mainstream view and of course some actors are more visible than others but I'm going to try to talk about different things so if you have questions tell me after. Based on this analysis and a few other instances of research what I did is sort of try to map the influences of civic tech in France. And some of them are the same as what you have abroad and very traditional or at least you would expect it like citizen participation. You know there are influences with community organizing and consultation and public debate in general. It's also relatively logical that there are shared influences with the contributive web, with groups that work on Wikipedia, OpenStreetMaps, everything that is a bit of construction of commons especially in knowledge. And finally there are some links that are also relatively logical with the tech for good ecosystem which in France is a bit separated from the civic tech which is sort of the collaborative economy and also all these startups and NGOs that believe you can change the world with technology. But there are a very different ecosystem from the civic tech one in France. And finally there are two other ecosystems that sort of share influences and it wasn't evident at first. I didn't think I would find that and one of them is the opinion builders. So the petition aspect of it is logical but the more political communications survey polling and then gathering a lot of data to analyze what citizens are saying and to really construct the public opinion is something that I wasn't expecting. And also this link to public innovation, to this idea to modernize and to make government more efficient with ideas imported from the startup ecosystem like agile methods and design thinking, all this transformation of public action. So these sort of ecologies circulate through people but also through ideas, the terms that are used and networks that involve different people. Then I tried to, this was a request from actors on the field to have a mapping of civic tech in France. And every time I show this to a civic tech actor as a producer of a tool, he's unhappy because he says either he's classified in the counter power so people that do not sell services to the government and he says well this makes us look like really dangerous or he's classified in the collaboration and well this may not be the best term in France but this idea to sell a service to the government and to collaborate with the government is also something that they don't want to be associated with because you need to have a part of an activist, you need to be identified a little bit as an activist to be credible as a civic tech. You cannot be just selling a product. So I'm sorry if people are unhappy but the idea is that if you're a local government and if you're looking for a tool you're often sort of lost with everyone and everything at civic tech and so the idea was to show this is what you can do with the tools, this is the main purpose that is attributed to different tools and some of them you can't work with but you can look at the ones that are counter powers and some of them you can collaborate with and they can probably provide services. And the three sort of categories are very simplified but one of them, the first one is that information is the main use of technology and this is the main objective that you have whether it is raising awareness or providing more qualitative information to the citizen or whether it is using information to control and to act on the government and to put pressure on the government. The second one, mobilisation is all about numbers. You can give your technology the main goal to make a lot of people do something or to really gather a community whether it is small or big but the idea is really that this is what technology is useful for and the third one is co-production. This is where the key market is in France is really using technology to have people work together and all the sort of gov tech is focused on this but our sort of surprise was that we don't have anything in co-production that is not for sale. We put open street map over there because that would be sort of the idea that we would see but it's not directly linked to policy making so that's why we didn't really include it yet. And so why look at the local and national governments that are also working on civic tech in France? The thing is that what we notice is a lot of NGOs that were created as NGOs are slowly becoming companies and they're trying to find a business model to survive and to do that they're sort of moving from service NGOs to service startups and to understand that we need to look at clients. You can look at the whole ecosystem around civic tech which public actors involved in supporting them, sponsors and philanthropic organisations that are less important in France but still play a role, networks that are sort of trying to organise the civic tech community incubators and the research organisations that are also being involved. But we chose to really look at clients to see what they were asking for it. And so the findings from the barometers and the different interviews that we made in sort of quick manner was first of all that there's a very strong interest in civic tech tools are sort of here to stay or becoming mainstream. There's sort of a must have for the bigger cities in France for instance it's like innovative it's cool to have your platform so you make it whether you know what you're going to do with it is another question. And a lot of local governments still state that they want to develop new tools so it's a trend that's still going on. And an interesting thing is that for the officials that are using them they're looking to citizens more and more like information contributors that are going to bring data to the table which is a bit different than people you want to passify because you know you're using participation to keep people quiet. So they kind of put them to work for projects and ideas. The second one is that although there's still a magical belief in technologies there have been lessons learned regarding face to face and the need for face to face meetings and also this kind of need to have communication do other things for your platform to work. A third thing we can say is that the main objective is still communication and you see that also because the teams that are leading that are developing the tools inside the local governments are usually the communication teams. Another one is that resources are still limited although there are more and more tools as in participation in general it's often to do it yourself and kind of inventing things. And finally the one we found this year is that transparency is seen as a good thing. It wasn't evident in the two previous years so this was sort of a victory for us to say okay we want tools to help us be transparent and it's a good thing. However it's not such a good thing when they're used for evaluation of public policies it's not something that we want and it's not something that sort of they can do so let's not. So my question today and my question to you is sort of how transformative can Civic Tech be when it relies on the needs of the clients and you know could we or should we push for a different model, a different business model? What are your experiences that maybe France could build on? Thank you Tachiana. So I have lots of questions as an organisation trying to both do charitable grant funded work and also commercial funded work but I think you've definitely covered that. So I think we could get a couple of brief questions and then we do need to get to the bus so we've got one here, one down the front because you never got your questionnaire let's we'll do those if you get those two first and then I know there's one at the back and one in the middle. Hi I was wondering Paula what is your recommendation to foster adoption of the ideas and standards upheld by the Civic Tech movement in institutional infrastructure? Okay and then maybe if we ask this question as well we'll take to it at a time. Thank you. My question is for Tatiana. I was wondering if in your research you've also addressed the question with governments, local and national on using Civic Tech companies or working rather with open source tools because yesterday I get the chance to talk to one municipality that made a political choice not to rely on these companies but to use more collaborative tools. Did you get any feeling from what the trend is and why one might be preferred over the other? Thank you. Okay. Yes so I always tried to hack from within. I mean there's a way of mobilizing civil society to put pressure on the government and try to open up data, try to push the government to be more collaborative but I always thought it was you could have more impact working from within. Even if sometimes you have to compromise and so what I tried to do at the National Assembly was trying to show some proof of concepts of what could be done with the Civic Tech and how you could articulate Civic Tech with existing institutional rules. For instance in the French Assembly we MPs have the possibility to ask questions to the government and the government is forced to respond so you can ask them orally or by written questions. What we tried to do was to use an open source tool called My Priorities that was developed in Iceland and we used it to crowdsource these questions and MPs would choose from these questions and ask them to the government. And what is interesting is that the government is obliged to respond. So what we haven't seen yet in these Civic Tech or these consultations mechanisms is clear rules of engagement since the start. We don't know when we participate as citizens what will be the impact of my contribution, how much or under what circumstances will it impact the decision, how much will it be binding for the decision maker. Even in this Grande Barre experience, as much as I think it is a good experience and a positive initiative, we still don't know, we still don't have the rules of what will come out of it. And we are kind of expecting that things will turn out well or kind of depending of what the politicians will decide from what comes from the discussion. So I think that to go one step further we need to articulate Civic Tech and consultation and participation mechanisms with binding results. And that's something I haven't seen yet in France at least. Tachiana, a brief answer I think and then we will be very quick on the questions. Yeah, on open source I think indeed in France it's sort of the exception more than the rule. And as you mentioned I think the local governments that are using it are making it a political decision because usually they go for provider software. I can't explain all of it. I think part of it is that it's been developed more in terms of services and it's been sold a lot. There's a lot of marketing done towards local governments where they go there and pitch their tool. And when you're looking for one, you go for the one you know especially for communication purposes. And the other thing is that there's been a lot of sort of bashing of open source by saying that the software is bad and doesn't work and fails. And since you know the main actors and media are the ones that have the more market power as well. Well they have priority software and sort of had a full campaign for one full year. It was very interesting to see where they said you know open sources, it doesn't work. I mean it's nice, it's a good ideology but it doesn't work. And this has had a lot of impact on local governments. Okay, so we've got one very quick question in the middle, one at the back and then there will need to be very brief answers. I will miss the bus to the National Assembly. Thank you. So my question is kind of to both of the panel and builds on Paula's point a bit. So if you have and what Tatiana said earlier as well about civic tech as an intermediary between citizens and the executive, traditionally that role was for MPs. So if civic tech has binding results, would it eventually replace members of the legislature in that respect? So the kind of mechanisms we're thinking about is more mechanisms that make that representatives work together with citizens. And not that they're bypassed or that they have a direct link with the president because I think that could be tricky and a bit dangerous. We really want to reconcile politicians and citizens. So for instance that's why I think it's more interesting to have a shared initiative referendum but with stress holes that are lower than nowadays and that allow it to be triggered much easily. But I think that it's interesting that MPs are forced to work with MPs to put a cause further. The other one that we're thinking about is the petition rights where it's a petition right to the National Assembly. And it's kind of a way for MPs to feel what comes from the society and to target a little bit more their discussions and their work with what real people want for their society. So I think these are the kinds of mechanisms we need to work on and we need to put civic tech on it and all the platforms that we know and like to build. So we have one very quick question from Tiago and then I'm sorry. Very quick question to Paula. I mean the on the ground about one of the innovations even though it's like 1000 years old it's it's the random selection right. But it's normally very difficult to communicate to people. The notion is counterintuitive why you're just selecting people in lottery. Could you just tell like a brief story and how did you how did the government frame the message so that it became more acceptable. A 10 second brief story. Well personally I'm not very fan of the randomly selected mechanisms because I think you can't force people to participate and that it's better when it comes with with a real like impulse and that you really want to be there and you really want to contribute. And there was at first some difficulties for the government to reach their targets of participants. They wanted a hundred by regional conference and in some they had like 70 60 70 participants because a lot of them didn't want to be there. But yeah the positive thing is that you have a more representative assembly and that you can believe that the results of this discussion will be more consensual at the national level. The way they did it was by randomly selecting phone numbers because they thought it was more broad than people that were inscribed in the electoral lists. And so they they're ongoing this weekend. So I think next week we will have more results about how they went along. But what I hear is that there's both people that are happy to participate and and people that are very critic of the whole process. So I don't know. I think we will have more results from all this experience next week. Excellent. Thank you so much. Fantastic. I feel this conversation could go on for some time. Fortunately we're now going to the drinks reception where hopefully.