 Right, welcome everyone. I hope you can all hear me. I'm not sure if you can see me. I think it depends how you've got your Zoom set up. I think we've got a really good turnout already. I think we've got over 60 people here, which is great. I can't believe that there are 66 people in the world that are not completely zoomed out after the last year. So well done, you're all absolute troopers for volunteering for yet another Zoom session. But yeah, it's fantastic to have you here. Welcome to our TicTac show and tells. This is the first of three. And yeah, as the welcome side says, you know, introduce yourself in the chat. Tell us who you are, why you're interested. And I feel free to use the text as questions as well. So I know some of you will be very familiar with TicTac and the conferences that we have run in the past. But I know also some of you are completely new. So very warm welcome to you. TicTac is it was an annual conference that we used to run focusing on bringing together a global community of civic technologists, policy individuals, tech companies, academics, to really learn from each other about not just what what new tools were out there, but really how effective those tools were, what the impacts of those tools were in the real world. Because I think we all know that when you build something, it doesn't necessarily work out quite like you imagined. So I think it's been wonderfully successful over the last kind of six years to build this community up. Obviously, we are terribly disappointed that we continue to have to do this online rather than in person. But we've tried to keep the kind of spirit of TicTac going over the last year by doing different kinds of sessions online. So we did a few seminars last year, I think, which was really interesting. But again, you know, a lot of people are a bit a bit bored of zoom, and it's really difficult sometimes sort of sitting here quietly and just listening to someone talk at you for, you know, 20 or 30 minutes. So we're doing this time a show and a session, which is supposed to be really short, really snappy. We want to showcase loads and loads of voices, loads of people that are doing really interesting things in the space. So we are doing seven minute, essentially lightning talks here, where people are just showing what kind of work they've been up to, what they're thinking about, again, with that kind of nod to bigger impact, the influence of these kinds of things on the wider world. So I'm super excited. We've got some amazing speakers today. Just a little bit of housekeeping, as you can see on the slide, the event is being recorded. Please ask any questions in the chat. Speakers will respond after the event in order to keep time, you know, in order to contain this within one hour, it's really not possible for us to be able to have the speakers answer questions in their seven minutes slot. So what we're going to do, we'll collect all the questions from the chat. We will get the speakers to address each of those questions and we will email them out within the next, I think, 24 hours, I think Gemma said. Share using the hashtag tic-tac, you know, on Twitter or whatever your social media game is, that's the hashtag we're using. Feel free to go into the collaborative notes document and add your notes or thoughts in there. And as ever, it's completely up to you. If you want to have your camera on and, you know, give this a cheeky wave, that's fine. If you want to have your camera off so that you can, you know, stay in your pajamas or whatever, no problem at all, either. That is pretty much it. We have, as I say, we have six speakers and so I will, without further ado, stop staring and pass over to them. So our first speaker is Camilla Salazar from the Open Contracting Partnership. And the title is How to Monitor Emergency Procurement with Open Data, Lessons from 12 Countries. So I'm really looking forward to this. So yeah, I will shut up on hand over to Camilla. So hi everyone. My name is Camilla. I'm from the Open Contracting Partnership. So it's great to be here with you. I'm going to just share my screen quickly before the timer starts. So let me know when you want the time to start, Camilla. Yeah, you can start now. Okay. So as I said, so I'm going to speak about today on how can you monitor emergency procurement with Open Data. And I bet you also in the news last year, news about how procurement was all over the news and there was a widespread use and abuse of emergency procedures. So at OCP we asked how can we improve the efficiency effectiveness and integrity of public contracting during the emergency. So we decided to support 12 different research teams. We partnered with Heavis to do this so that they could explore this questions and analyze emergency contracts in different countries. So we supported teams from Latin America, from Africa, from Europe and South Asia as well. And the result of this, it was a research report that if you see this presentation, you can click the link here and there's the full report where we collected all the different findings and recommendations from these teams who analyzed more than a million public contracts worldwide. So I want to share with you some of the things that we learned doing this research and some of the things that the teams found. So not surprisingly, when we spoke about emergency procurement and data, not enough data was available. So in the 12 countries that we worked in, in seven of those emergency contracts were not being disclosed in Open Data Formants or information was published only partially. So even in countries that had Open Data Initiatives and where there's close and procurement data in Open Formants since emergency procedures were a bit different, this information was not being disclosed. So researchers actually struggle a lot to collect all of these data, scraping websites through Freedom of Information Acts or just collecting the data manually through the procurement portals. Only two of the countries had a tag to identify accurately contracts related to the COVID emergency. And this is something that countries are still working on, how to actually tag those contracts so that we can track things like how much money is being spent on this procurement. At OCP, of course, we support the Open Contracting Data Standard, which some of you might be familiar with. And we have guidance on how can you actually tag easily contracts using OCDS as well. And we also saw that there were delays in the publication of contracts. So even if there was a mandate to disclose this information, there was a delay in publication which made monitoring a bit more complicated. So based on this finding, some of the recommendations aimed at making sure that procurement entities are tagging contracts, making that publication mandatory, and improving data quality that this might involve as well training public officials on how to input this data correctly into the systems. We also found that countries face similar risks. So some of the research we're addressing more of integrity issues related to emergency contracts. So researchers found in countries that, of course, there were higher prices and uncertain prices for key items during the emergency, a high use of multipurpose suppliers or companies that had no previous experience in public procurement, and also different types of inefficiencies in the process. So for instance, countries like in the Philippines where there were funds to conduct procurement, but then the implementation was really slow in signing those contracts and actually implementing those findings. So some of the recommendations related to integrity issues had to do a lot on publishing key information. It's not only disclosing the documents or the contracts, but actually publishing granular data so that this integrity checks can be performed. So this has to do with publishing unit prices and also publishing and collecting information about suppliers so that you can do background checks, see who are the beneficial ownerships of these companies, their economic purpose, and some other background checks in order to avoid integrity issues and potential corruption. Also, some of the great things that we saw doing this research is that in countries where open data was available using OCDS or researchers were able to collect this data, there were amazing data-driven solutions to monitor procurement. So I added the links there so that you can check all the individual reports and the methodologies. But we found, for instance, in the Philippines, a researcher actually created an index in systems using machine learning to match suppliers with local governments, local procuring entities. So based on the historical data on suppliers, this indexed system allowed procuring entities if implemented in practice to easily identify which were the most suitable suppliers. In Paraguay, where all the information is published using the open contracting data standard, the researchers created an interactive platform to explore all the emergency contracts, explore prices, and also analyze information about the awarded suppliers. The team from Mirabai also using OCDS data implemented an experiment where they wanted to measure the effect of civic monitoring in public procurement. So they run this experiment with procuring entities. And this is quite interesting because this could be something that could be replicated in other countries as well. And finally, in Colombia, the interruption institute developed a methodology to calculate the multi-purpose supplier index to identify higher risk suppliers. The good thing about all of these methodologies is that they used open data, they used OCDS, except for the case of the Philippines. So if you want to replicate this in other countries where OCDS data is available, feel free to read the reports and replicate the analysis. And finally, advocacy is key. So teams, it's not only about doing the analysis, but how can you action those recommendations in practice? So teams presented fighting to key stakeholders. Some of these research was in local media in the different countries. They run also capacity building sessions with public officials. And some of the teams are actually doing follow-up research on this topic. So we're actually running a second round of action research but now focused on the recovery stage. So hopefully by the end of this year, we'll have more findings on how to improve procurement with open data in the recovery stage. And since I only have 10 seconds, here's my email, our website, as I said, the report is there. And you can also subscribe to our newsletter. And if you have any questions, you can write to us. So thank you. Fabulous. Thank you so much, Camila. Bang on time. Down to the second. I'm incredibly impressed. So yeah, thank you very much for keeping the time. I love the QR code that you showed on the last slide there with the dinosaur in the middle. I enjoy a bit of novelty. So yeah, that was really, really interesting. But I think there's some great questions for you in the chat. So as I said, we'll package those up and send those off to you so that you can give them some attention following this. So on to number two, we now have Aaron Leonard from Integrity Action on Civic Tech for Smartphone Beginners is the future binary. So Aaron, over to you. You are on mute if you're trying to speak. Apologies. For that, the little thing changed side. All right, brilliant. So my name is Aaron Leonard. I'm the technology manager here at Integrity Action. And today, I'll just be quickly taking you through Dev Check, our application, some of the iterations that it's seen over the years, and some of the insights and the data that we've gathered from it. As an organization, you can actually go to integrityaction.org and you can see maybe some of the real time data from our application that might stream in in real time. So just go to integrityaction.org and there's a little button on the top right hand side called development check. And if you click that, you should be able to see the data coming through. As an organization, we operate mainly in Central and Eastern Africa. And we are actually a component of a partnership model that works along funding partners and implementing partners. And we provide the methodology and technology to allow local communities to monitor projects on the ground. In practice, what this looks like is that a promise is made to a community. And that promise can be from a local branch of government, an individual, or anybody that has the ability and authority to deliver that project for the community. Monitors can then use our application to report on the progress of the project itself and any problems that they're seeing in the field. So that would be any derivation basically of what's been promised and what they're seeing. From there, basically, we report that in real time on our website, which is obviously available to the duty bearers. But we also help set up joint working groups, or basically groups formed at the volunteers themselves, local community members, and the duty bearers that help address and fix some of the problems that we're seeing. Through that problems, so fixes to the problems can also be reported and are obviously available on our website as well. And all of this is geared towards completing the project on time and as specified, which obviously delivers a benefit for the community there, and also for the implementation partners and the duty bearers. So it's a very collaborative process. So we've had quite a few iterations over the years of our application and we're currently on our fourth. Our first really go at this really wanted to emphasize empowering users. So allowing monitors to describe problems that they were seeing in their own words and define what they considered to be an issue with the project itself. So it was really an attempt to trap for as much power as we could to individuals for who the project was important. And this provided really great insight in terms of a holistic understanding of the monitoring process, what was seen as an issue or something that needed fixing to the monitors and the implementation partners. But what it didn't provide was an easy way to conduct comparative analysis of the progress between visits. Different monitors would visit at different times and choose different things to report on. Most of this was also done through free text, which added a level of complexity, but obviously in terms of the qualitative information was very useful. The second version of the application sought to resolve the issues that we'd had in the lack of correlation by making everything mandatory. But I'm sure as you can appreciate having to fill a big, big list of questions out with only text can be a bit tiresome. So we weren't being really cognizant or really taking the monitor's time into account and valuing that as the precious resource that it is. The third version of the application really focused on streamlining the monitor experience itself. And the best way to do that was through the application. We removed fields and had a big shift towards yes, no questions. And it did provide better data simply because there was more data. The monitoring experienced encouraged more of it to be done and provided us with more metrics. But we did find that occasionally we needed to go back towards the monitors and ask for clarifications or more details or just to understand the metrics that were being reported. So the kind of lessons that we learned from those first three versions of the applications were that restricted metrics make for simple analytics. And reading off your slides isn't ever a popular move, but it's worth repeating. It's also worth taking into account that free text introduces some interesting complications occasionally. It can be an accessibility barrier in your attempt to be inclusive, to reach out, to try and really allow the users to explain things in their own words. You can exclude some of them that aren't able to articulate what they're seeing properly. Also worth taking into account is that multilingual environments or especially in the case of multiple alphabets being used can introduce some real complexities in terms of your systems, but also just how you report those metrics. So our objective was to get data visible fast and really work with our partners more to have what we call an open process and a closed questions. So working with our implementing partners, we tailored the question sets that we developed to what they wanted to do with them. So we defined the use cases more clearly and showed what options were available to our partners in terms of sharing that information. So the last version of the application changed everything to yes, no or multiple select. And what that basically meant is that we could report on everything real time. But to supplement that, we put in free text options and the option to include media. So if you don't want to type into our application, you can instead just include an image or something like that, which is obviously something that increases the accessibility and also provides just better and more content for those looking at what's being reported. All of this obviously makes for a very easy reporting and what is actionable is always what's relevant. And that's really the key to making change happen in real time is just having that there. If you've got any other questions for us, don't hesitate to ask questions and we'll try best to get back to you. Thank you so much, Aaron. That was really great, really, really fascinating. And I for one, and I'm sure there are many other people here that will thoroughly agree on things like free text and multi alphabet environments or just differences in characters. I can remember having a bit of a nightmare trying to work in Myanmar last year with the alphabet there. Very, very interesting. So yeah, thank you very much, Aaron. Yep, I think there are questions there, as I say, we'll package them up. Really great. We're 85 people here now. It's just really, really super. I'm so excited that we've got so many people from all over the world here. But weirdly, I'm mostly excited because I think there's someone here from Cardiff, which is where I am. So hello, whoever that was. Right, moving quick on. Number three on our speaker's list is David Kane from 360 Giving. And the presentation is Find That Charity, a tool to help find charities and improve charity data. So David, I can't actually see you on my screen, but I'm hoping you're there. Yes. Brilliant. Off you go. Okay. So yes, I'll be talking about Find That Charity. So I am from 360 Giving. So we are a charity based in the UK and we help publishers, sorry, we help funders, grant makers publish data about who and what they fund. And we then give people the kind of the tools and the ability to use that data to improve the way that charitable giving works. And we want grant making in the UK to be more, to be better informed, more effective, and kind of based on evidence and data. So as I say, we're a charity and we also maintain a, as part of that, we maintain a data standard, which helps kind of the format for what that grants data should be in. Funders publish their own files on their own website. So it's very much about empowering them to publish, rather than it being a sort of pipeline that they have to go through. And we kind of help them do that and help them work through licensing and stuff like that. And one really important part of the data that's relevant for today is organization identifiers. So how do we uniquely and unambiguously identify the organizations that are receiving funding that are showing in the data? So that's where I find that charity comes in. So this is a website that is supported by 360 Giving. And the problem that it's helping to try and solve is how do we find those identifiers for the organizations? And then how do we make connections between those different organizations? So it's a database and a website and it aims to have a record for every non-profit sort of entity in the UK. It takes data from about 30 different data sources, so scraping that data, putting it into a common format. And then we've got about 650,000 different organizations in there. And then there's tools to search those organizations, to reconcile with if you've got a larger list of organization names, and add additional data into existing spreadsheets of organizations. And we do things like enhance the data with geographic information. So it's aiming to provide a bit of data infrastructure for the UK voluntary sector that isn't really there with existing sources. So some of the tricky problems that it's trying to fix, you can get ambiguous names. So Comic Relief is a fairly large UK grant maker. Its official name is the wonderfully ambiguous charity projects. But it's also, it's much more commonly known as Comic Relief or Sport Relief, and that's what it might be written down as. So being able to get that kind of canonical record for that organization is important. And the other thing it allows you to do is to find the same organization across different lists. So in this case, we've got the university on from three different sources, and you can make those connections between those identifiers. So what impact does find that charity have? Well, what we think it has is we think it helps produce better grant making data in the 360 giving standard. So publishers can get good identifiers, they can enhance the existing data that they've got a free in data from from regulators, and they can also check the information that they've got against the original sources so they can make sure they've got the right the right result. The impact of that better 360 giving data is that we can then do things like we can compare who who's funding the same organizations. So that was something we did right at the start of COVID was trying to help funders understand who else they were funding, and who they shared common recipients with, and that helped them reduce coordinate the emergency funding they were doing and reduce the overlap. We think it also helps reduce the time and effort it takes to prepare data when you're when you're doing it, it can be a lot of effort to go through and find identifiers for organizations. And we also know that the others are using it. So it's being used in government and by sector data initiatives to help unambiguously kind of define different organizations. So that's the tool and the impact it's having. But we're not standing still. There's there's lots still to be done. We've definitely learned that we need organizations to keep publishing consistent and high quality data. So in some areas this is getting better so the UK the England Wales Charity Commission is updating their API and making more data available in better ways. But in other areas it's getting worse. So the UK government recently shut down its official register of of different organizations within government, which now makes it a lot more difficult to to identify those and with 30 different scrapers is obviously work in terms of maintaining those those sources. Some of them go out of date. Some of them are need they change and they need updating so there's work there. I think it needs to be much easier to find the links between different data sets. In some cases some of these some organizations are spread across five or six different lists and it's not always easy to see that they are the same organization. So regulators talking to each other and including those links within their data would would definitely be helpful for us and I think yeah in in in general we want more people to use the data. Talk to us about how you're using it and yeah we hope it's a useful tool. So I think I've not quite used it for a long time but that's it from me. Do get in touch if you've got any questions. Thank you so much David it's really really interesting and I guess it would be interesting to see how much of those how many of those suggestions might be embedded in the UK's next OGP action plan for instance. I know you're already trying to work on the current one. I know the UK government is not not terribly interested in being completely open about some of this stuff. So now really really great work. Thank you very much. I've just realized halfway through that I was so excited about getting going on this that I actually forgot to introduce myself to those of you who don't actually know me as a community. I think I'm just so used to seeing all of you. Yeah so sorry about that. I'm Rebecca Rumble. I'm head of research for my society and tic-tac for me and Gemma. It's kind of our baby. So sorry about that. I was just over excited. Anyway on onwards so next up we have Ibrahim Salim who is from Code for Pakistan and that presentation is on civic tech versus illicit pharmacies. So hi Ibrahim thank you for joining us. Hello. Thank you. So I'll just share my screen. So yeah can you guys see my screen? Yeah perfect. Okay so hello thank you all for being here today virtually at the tic-tac 2021 conference. The title of my presentation is fighting the sale of counterfeit medicines through civic tech and digitization. I'm Ibrahim Salim and I'm the program manager at the KP government innovation fellowship program. Illegal pharmacies are a big problem in Pakistan. If we talk about KP which is the third largest province in Pakistan there are only 50 drug inspectors who are required to regulate and oversee more than 12,000 registered chemistrops. From 2014 to 18 approximately 66,000 inspections were conducted where over 1400 drugs were declared substandard and around 2000 pharmacies were sealed. 72 FIRs and 544 cases were registered against culprits with offenders also receiving jail sentences. In an independent report published in 2019 more than 600 drug licenses issued in Peshawar were found to be faked upon verification. These are just some of the examples of malpractices in the pharmaceutical sector and where regulation was critical in this sector. Due to lack of digitization there were issues and challenges at the health department as well. With no online system being in place businesses had to apply in person which took more time in processing and no mechanism was in place to track the status of their applications. In addition to this the health department also faced issues in tracking duplicate and fake licenses. Therefore the department needed an online platform where users can easily apply for a license. The management can check for duplicate and fake licenses and users can easily track the progress of their application. In May of 2020 the KP fellowship team received a request from the Department of Health KP to digitize the pharma license registration process. The fellowship team selected the problem statement under the sixth cycle of the fellowship program which was executed from June to November of 2020. A team of three fellows was assigned to the department to develop a digital system for pharma license registration and to address the challenges faced by the department as well as drug store owners across KP. It's important to share a bit of a background of the fellowship program. The KP fellowship program is a six month program supported by Koford Pakistan, the KP IT board and the World Bank. The program was launched in 2014 and so far we have completed six cycles of the program. The program brings together technologists, government agencies and the public to adopt user centric, lean and agile development methodologies to solve civic problems and increase civic engagement. A team of fellows that worked on this project include Mohammad Awais Khan who is a who was a full stack developer, Aswant Yar who was also a full stack developer and Abbas Khan who worked as a UX UI designer. The team of fellows conducted a user research survey from 50 pharmacy owners. From the survey it was highlighted that the manual process was slow and inefficient and it took anywhere from three weeks to one month to obtain a license which also required multiple visits to the department. In addition to this public perception of the manual system wasn't great due to delays and challenges of the manual system. An online system was desperately needed to expedite the process of registration for pharma licenses. Based on the initial user research requirements gathering and consultation the fellows team decided to develop a fully centralized online platform that can digitize the entire process of obtaining a license. The online system comprised of four main modules which included the pharmacy console module, the application module, the dg drugs module and the inspector module. All these modules contribute to different users of the online system. So how does a user apply for a license on the online system? This user journey map illustrates the entire process in simplified terms. The first step is user registration where the user selects the license category and submits the application. This application is received on the dg drugs department where the initial processing of the application is done and the request is forwarded to drug inspectors. The drug inspectors are required to conduct a field visit to the pharmacy and conduct a detailed assessment of the pharmacy and its facilities. Things like having a cold storage, proper cleanliness and hygiene etc. If the evaluation is successful the drug inspector approves the application. The applicant receives the license upon completing all the standard requirements. In this online system users can also track the status of the application easily without requiring to visit the department physically. In order to make the system secure each application is given a unique tracking ID which can't be duplicated. In addition to this numeric capture codes are added in the login screen to inhibit bots from accessing the system. Data encryption is used to keep the passwords and database entry safe against system attacks. With the online system a pharmacy inspection app has also been developed which is used by drug inspectors while conducting their field visits. Through the app the inspection the inspectors perform a checklist of facilities offered by the pharmacy. Moreover geo coordinates are taken by taking a photograph of the pharmacy's location. This ensures that the field visits are actually taking place and also validating the existence of the pharmacy thereby inhibiting fake pharmacies. The updated pharmacy license is sample proof and digital. It contains a QR code which is digitally generated. The license number is generated using the unique tracking ID which is randomized to inhibit prediction. The license is signed digitally containing a photo of the applicant. Moreover the license validity date is also system generated to inhibit tampering. The online system has been developed using open source technologies and has been licensed under the MIT license. The code is available on the corporate Pakistan GitHub and is free to use and distribute under the MIT license. So what has been the impact so far? Since the system went live in December of 2020 the biggest impact so far has been the digitization of over 50,000 records of qualified persons into the system. Some records dated back to the 1970s and this exercise of digitization also helped with the re-verification of these old records. With the new license form consumers are now empowered to check the authenticity of license by scanning the QR code of the license displayed in the pharmacy. The fellowship team has helped train over 20 government officials on the new online system. For applicants the time to acquire the license has also been reduced from one month to 10 days thanks to the digitization. Since the fellowship team developed the system using open source tools and technologies the maintenance cost of this system is significantly less for the department and it is sustainable for the department to keep the system running. With this I conclude my presentation. If you guys have any questions I would be happy to answer them. Thank you. Fantastic thank you so much that was really really interesting and yeah just fascinating to hear about how these things work in in different countries. So yeah again I know there are questions and I will forward those to you for him thank you very much. And gosh everyone is so bang on time today as well you know me and Gemma had a conversation earlier about how you know she was going to have to be very brutal at cutting people off after the seven minutes and yeah so we haven't had to do it once yet. Yet we still have two more speakers. So yeah moving swiftly on we now have David Zamora from Open Data Barometer and Silvana Fumiga on keeping track of open data in times of political change. So over to you guys. Thank you hopefully we are not the ones screwing the timing of everybody and every presentation. We are going to try to do the best but we are not promising anything. So I'm here with David Zamora. I'm Silvana Fumiga I'm the research and policy director of ILTA. David is the coordinator of this particular project the Latin America and the Caribbean Open Data Barometer 2020 and we wanted to share with you some of the lessons regarding the content but also the process itself that is currently being used I mean some of the lessons that we learned last year to develop the new global data barometer but now we are going to focus about the project that we did last year about the Latin American and the Caribbean Open Data Barometer. I mean to give you some of the background ILTA in 2020 made a commitment to implement a regional edition of the Open Data Barometer a research that was initially developed by the Web Foundation with the support of Omedia Network and IDRC back a few years ago and the research itself aims to assess different Open Data initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean in order to have a clear picture of how the region is doing in the field. We did that taking in consideration that the last global assessment was done back in 2016 and then there was a special edition only for leading countries in 2018. This regional edition in 2020 that ILTA implemented is always of vital importance to understand the current situation of the region. This is just briefly kind of the structure that we have and we have 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. There were two subregions with different languages and processes and a peer review system just to give you an idea about the number of researchers for each of the country in both subregions. This is briefly the timeline I mean we started to work in January 2020. There was a gathering process during the next three or four months then we have I'm going to let David to go further on these things. We have a peer review process and in December finally we launched the website and the report. I'm going to give you the details of those websites in the chat so you can check everything later and ask questions about the details of it. So briefly some of the findings in terms of content the leading countries in the region have stand in the growths or even fallen in the rankings while only a few countries have made significant leaps in the score of the index of open data of data openness. The open data barometer measures three dimensions readiness implementation and impact of the open data in the region. In terms of readiness most governments have have explicitly committed to release data and to develop national open portal sorry but in spite of that the best scores in the region are in the area of implementation although countries differ in the speed at which implementation has occurred. With the with regard of the impact dimension the region still does not seem to have achieved respective results. Also some specific things that we found was that the least open data and the lowest quality data sets in the region are related to land ownership company registration and public transport routes and schedules and these are all areas that have significant economic and social impact. Some of the recommendations that are very broad and you can go into more detail in the report is that we think government must invest in a constant and sustained manner in teams that guide the implementation of these open data policies at all levels that they should think about holistic approaches to different aspects of the production and use of data for the public and private sectors including regulatory aspects, privacy, use of data, emergency technologies and also in particular we make a note about that government should improve the quality of that data but thinking or taking in special consideration gender dimensions and all other relevant variables to include other people in the society in the data that they provide. So briefly I'm going to move to David to let us know about the process itself. Thank you Silvana. So can you please move to the next slide and the next one. So I will briefly very briefly tell you about some of the learned lessons we got during the data collection process and the data processing but basically before that I just wanted to quickly recap on the main methodology approach of the open data barometer. So here researchers need to answer questions that are part of an expert survey following specific rules that are required for consistency, objectivity and quality. After that those answers are reviewed through a peer review process to make sure that those questions those answers do meet the requirements of quality. Okay that being said Silvana can we please move to the next one. So I want to share with you very quick seven lessons. Okay the first one make a solid team selection so these are some of the things we consider during this very initial stage. The coordination had a strong experience with other indexes all researchers had good understanding and previous experience with open data researchers represented both civil society organizations and academia. The team was highly motivated we had specific questions while we were recruiting the team about motivation and about time availability. So we got good information on that and we made sure we got good people on that. We had good care of administrative issues that's lesson number two. Administrative process was extremely agile for team members contract conditions were very clear. Then number three is we made a big effort in digesting the methodology as the very first activity at the very beginning. We had the contribution from web from nation we have researchers do their individual understanding first then we followed that by a very deep training session putting a lot of attention on the most complex issues of the methodology. And then when when researchers answered the very first question we had a deep review of that question to help them again meet conditions in terms of quality and consistency. We had very close relation during the whole process and the other important recommendation was lesson sorry was the the relevance of having a good match. You are mute David. Oh sorry you will have just a few when we share the slides you will have some time there to see that. And finally well in terms of the process then there is a good need there's a need of a deep coordination a deep moderation between from the coordination while the preview is taking care with that relation between researchers and reviewers and again you will have some some time there to see our to our comments and see the the the details there. Sorry we took a few minutes longer. We're going to forgive you that's okay and yeah I was really impressed how quickly you managed to get through that actually. Really really fascinating thank you both Silvana and David for that presentation. Yep fantastic okay so we have one presentation left in a change to scheduled programming. This was supposed to be Will Perrin however unfortunately he had to pull out but we are delighted that Amy Sinclair and Paul Lenz Amy from African Lea and Paul Lenz from the Indigo Trust were able to step in and they've got really really interesting presentation on how African Lea saves its users 100 million dollars a year. So Paul and Amy over to you. Hi there everyone thanks for all the fantastic presentation so far I wish we were all going out for a drink after this but here we all are so let's get going. So we can all see my presents you can see my slides. Yes good to go. Awesome great so I'm Amy Sinclair and I take care of M&E at the African Legal Information Institute, African Lea based out of the University of Cape Town. With me today I'm also very pleased to have Paul Lenz the executive of Indigo Trust a UK based grant making foundation that is part of the Sainsbury Family Charitable Trust provides essential support for African Lea as our major funder. Throughout Africa access to primary sources of law such as legislation court judgments are often functionally restricted to elite law firms who can afford to pay subscription fees to commercial republishers of what is otherwise public information often even these collections are out of date and incomplete. So what we do at African Lea is capacitate and support local initiatives forging partnerships with government and judiciaries to create a digital publication pipeline for primary legal materials bypassing commercial publishers and making them freely available online for everyone. So in this publication the presentation I should say we'll show you how just one of these initiatives Uganda Lea is a critical resource for over 400,000 annual users in Uganda on a shoestring budget that is millions of dollars cheaper than its only commercial competitor. Paul? Thank you oh is my can you hear me? Yeah okay cool I've also got my data assistant here as well on my lap so you might think okay law that's incredibly dry and that's going to be very niche case law isn't going to be a hugely important thing but if you just take a quick look at the numbers from five of the Leas you'll see there are hundreds of thousands of users and those are growing significantly year on year if you look at the green line at the bottom you'll see tens nearly went from a standing start to over 120,000 users in the span of a couple of years and just one little niche thing at the bottom you'll see the year on year 2020 versus 2017 for Uganda Lea the main one we're talking about which is gone up 85% and that's despite the fact if you look at the chart you'll see a massive drop in March when COVID-19 hit back to you Amy. So our research tells a story of two major impacts that the Leas are having on the national stage the first is that access to timely and accurate legal information leads to more efficient and effective access to justice now this is primarily but not exclusively relating to the provision of legal services all along the pipeline so we're hearing from lawyers in Kampala law firms who are telling us that the time they're saved from running to the library to look up a case has meant they've been able to charge cheaper fees quicker appointments which means that more clients can afford advice or their day in court we're hearing from judges at the highest courts the courts of appeal telling us that digitization of the law has made writing decisions much quicker and they're making fewer mistakes because they have access to court of appeal judgments more quickly we've got young lawyers who are telling us that they came to rely on you Lea during their law school education and now that they've graduated into practice they tell us that they don't know how to do legal research without Uganda Lea they rely on and their learned seniors are buying in as well we're also seeing information from the Leas being used by activists and journalists on Twitter to hold government actors and human rights violators to account they're informing citizens of the content of the law and highlighting important court decisions in Uganda there is one commercial competitor to the Lea a service provider whose subscription rates of $300 per person are not considered affordable at all to most of the people that we've interviewed indeed only five percent of the Leas users have ever used a paid service like this the switch of just this five percent alone saved users six million u.s. dollars last year across 13 Leas many of which with higher traffic rates and costlier commercial competitors as we see in uh places like South Africa and Kenya we've saved users across the board over a hundred million dollars a year of course for the vast majority of our users if the Lea wasn't free they wouldn't be able to pay to access it they wouldn't have access to the information that they say is critical to performing their work Uganda Lee has directly enabled less well resourced individuals outside the traditional law firm mold to become lawyers to contribute to providing access to justice for ordinary citizens and to provide the advice that allow local businesses to thrive Paul the funder's perspective so as a funder you're often trying to think about what's the economic impact of the money that you spend what's the return on the dollar and you'll often see numbers like well we get two dollars of economic value for every dollar we spend or three or five when the Leas are providing for tens of cents a year services that would cost commercially hundreds of dollars you're looking at a thousand times multiplier far and away beyond anything that you would ever see from other forms of intervention and even if that figure wrapped by two orders of magnitude which it isn't that would still be an incredible return and it's not just simply the kind of interest areas that you might think are standard it's not just simply supporting law having the foundation of accessible law is fundamentally essential for supporting anti-corruption work environmental protection human rights and a whole host of other things that funders are interested in and yet hardly anyone funds this stuff it's running on a tiny budget a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year and I'll be back to you to break that down great so where to from here so of course with the critical support of funders like indigo will continue to sustain the ongoing collection publication of legal information that has become so critical to the workflows of judges lawyers activists as we have for the last 10 years but of course that's not the limit of our ambitions as you can see here we've got big plans most critically where we intend to implement digital digital standards such as xml to make the process far more efficient we're implementing plain language explanations to help people working in multilingual contexts and for non lawyers we're using semantic tagging to enable deeper research and of course we're hoping to launch leads in new and especially non-english speaking contexts francophone africa is very much on our list so all of this 13 leads uh africanly coordinating it all from Cape Town is run as I said on a shoe string as paul has said less than a quarter of a million dollars us annually is our budget similar programs for a single country have cost millions of dollars and are simply nowhere near as entrenched or credible within the local justice sector as the leads so we're on a mission now to call on interested partners all over the world with an interest in using technology to support the rule of law in africa facilitating cross-border trade promoting human rights using legal content in other relevant programming to engage with us grow africanly into the future paul would you like to conclude sure and just to to really add to that we have a tiny fund in the scheme of things our total budget's about 1.5 million dollars a year and it seems crazy that we are providing the core funding to this essential institution that's supporting millions of users and has the opportunity to support many millions more so the big ask from me at the end is please if there are any funders out there listening if you're interested in human rights environmental law justice anti-corruption please think about supporting africanly and the leads themselves because the work they do is so vital thanks very much thank you both very much and yeah i would wholeheartedly support that i think i'm a massive fan of the leads i think they do amazing work and you know the heroic efforts of the africanly team compared you're considering how small your budget is um it's really really nice to to see those figures and and kind of promote it amongst a wider audience uh so thank you very much for that really interesting presentation okay um we have made it to the end it's uh 357 in the UK which means we uh we made it with three minutes to spare i'm terribly impressed with everyone's timekeeping thank you very much for for doing that um thank you to all of the speakers just for your wonderful interesting presentations um and thank you to everyone that's joined us to listen in and to interact on the chat and ask questions um as i said we're gonna we will take all of those questions from the chat we will send them out to the speakers and we will hopefully be able to to email out all of the responses to everyone uh within 24 hours that is the plan anyway um it would be great to know if any of you had any thoughts on this format it would be great if you wanted to share those with us um you know we we've obviously been experimenting like everyone else in the world um with different formats um so it'd be great to know if you felt that this kind of format you know with with the very very short multiple presentations was useful if there's anything else that you'd prefer we always want uh to to get better at these things uh but yep thank you very much for for coming uh we have another second version of this in a few weeks time Gemma I'm sure you can tell people exactly what the date is because on the 20th of April 20th of April okay 20th of April um right back here Gemma will be promoting all of the details and the speakers for that um but yes thank you very very much I've really really enjoyed this um it's been great to to see some of you um I can't wait to see you all in person um Gemma I'll hand over to you if there's anything else um no I don't think so but just thank you so much to speakers and everyone joining us yeah I feel personally very inspired by what I've just heard so thank you brilliant thanks everyone have a great day