 is absolutely committed to these good reasons. We like to think we're contributing to a community. And as a community, overall, some of the stuff we do makes a real difference to people around the world where democratized publishing is a very, very positive difference. It moves things forward, it changes lives in a great way. So, what I'm anticipating is that Immanuel's story will bring some of that to life for us. He'll tell us about things that happen in a very, very beautiful part of the world. If you haven't been, I recommend it highly. It's utterly delightful. But also, very interesting things have happened there as well. So, no more for me. Immanuel, the floor is yours. So, it's really good to be here in London today. This is my first time here, but the first, the third time here, but the first time at the work in London. So, before I just begin with this presentation, I just want to mention work in London team, the organizers, the volunteers, because I believe they're doing an amazing job today organizing this event. I know we organized the work in Croatia last year, it isn't an easy task. But I believe it is an important one to this kind of event. So, if you could just applaud for the work in London. I won't just stand by for an important announcement, so I'm not an English native speaker, so if you don't understand everything, remember that it's better than if I would speak in Croatian. So, if you want, you can speak in Croatian, you don't need to understand anything. Okay, so, yeah, you might. So, things I love, first on top of my list is my son. This is Luca, and as you can see, I'm his father. So, I'm using Luca as my inspiration every day. A lot of things that I do, I basically just to take a look at a mirror one day, and I try to spend as much time with him. Sorry, just a little sip. So, as I said, he's my inspiration. I do a lot of stuff, I try to do community work as well, and I, at the end of the day, want to build a better world for him. I've been a designer for the past 14 years, and for the past 10 years, I was also working with WordPress. I do make a living out of WordPress, but I'm also specialized in designing touchscreen user interfaces. I run an agency with my brother, so this is my brother. We actually love each other, that's just a photo op. Our agency is called Black and Niche Brothers. He couldn't be here today because he's running a half-marathon, so, Lucian, go get it. I like to think of myself as an activist, so this picture is important to me, why? Because two days ago, this organization from Croatia celebrated their 10th anniversary. They're working with people with special disabilities, they're working with people, they're older, they have autism, so I helped them from the beginning, and we basically installed WordPress for them, they use that as a platform to promote things that they do. I also organize a meet-up in Zagreb. This is our capital in Croatia with my brother. We had just the last week our 11th meet-up, and I was really privileged and really happy that I could be a lead organiser for working in Croatia last year, and just to say that, if you're planning to visit Croatia, we plan to have a work camp in Split, that's on the Elimation Coast. It's in the first week of September, so come join us, you can still swim there. So Croatia, three pictures that I have taken just the last week, have you been to Croatia? Okay, a couple of you. Croatia has a lot of differences between Croatia and the United Kingdom. If you look at Croatia, it has a really cool coast, a lot of natural parks, it's a beautiful country, but with a comparison to the United Kingdom, it is 14 times less populated, it has three times more GDP than UK, so there are, because of that, a lot of differences when working with clients as well. We usually have way smaller budgets than you have here in United Kingdom, and our client basically are less educated than here in the UK, but nevertheless, they expect the same quality as they can have here in the United Kingdom. So this is a bit of a problem, because if you get less paid, you don't get the equal opportunities like you could have here in London. So for example, if you're living in London and you're living in Zagreb, I think that you have better educational possibilities living here. I started everything around 15 years ago, and back then we didn't have so much possibilities to learn stuff online, but nevertheless, we want to travel, we want to go to conferences in London, in Amsterdam, and that is all expensive, so we have to come up with an idea of how to work with clients and have all these privileges that you might have here. So we basically have to change our process. We had to adapt, for example, in our agency. We deliver only one to two main templates in Photoshop. We don't design everything in Photoshop before we even go to the second front end stage, and we designed that only as a desktop version. So this is basically the way that we changed and how we changed our process of designing websites. And basically we prepare other templates in HTML, and all of them are responsive and are responsive to various breakpoints. We don't define breakpoints in the beginning, but we define breakpoints along the way. And things we prepare like wireframes, we use only on our own process, so they don't have to be as precise as when we are showing them to clients. But this is not the creation biggest problem. We have a lot of problems like unemployment and economy and poverty. And the last one on this list is corruption, but I don't think that this is the lesser problem of these other three. I as an individual cannot battle unemployment. I cannot battle economy. I cannot battle poverty, but maybe somehow I could battle corruption, and especially the lack of vision because I think that politicians in Croatia don't have the vision because we are, remember, a young democracy. We didn't have a country 25 years ago, so we are still learning how to be a democratic country. We are on the right path, but we are not there yet. And because all of that, we are lacking in transparency. And this is one of my favorite quotes that Dalai Lama said, a lack of transparency results in distrust and a deep sense of insecurity. So why is transparency important? First of all, we as a citizens want to know how is our money spent. We want to ask questions and get answers to that questions, and we are not getting that if it lacks transparency in the process of this two-way communication between the citizen and the local and national governments. And we want to be involved in the decision-making process, and because on top of all that, we want to build a better democracy. So if I told you that as a democracy, I can't remember when we protested the last time on streets to make things happen, you might be shocked. But that's true. We like Facebook protests. We got a lot of likes when we had to protest online, so we are really experts in that. And having this two-way communication helps understand the problems of running a seat in country. So this is a win-win situation for both sides, both the citizens and the national government and the citizens. So in 2014, Gong, that is our association that oversees the election process back from the 90s, where our election processes were much worse than they are today, they conducted three surveys. The first one was in 2009, then the second one in 2011, and the third one in 2014. And the average score for all the cities that were covered with that service, and that is around 130 cities in Croatia, this is how much cities we have, is 5.9, and that's not a really good score. If you see that there is a 5.9 average score out of 10. And even though 90% of local governments have their website, they just don't publish the information that are they required to do so by law. And there is no consequences. So obviously, this is the reason why they don't do that. And the good thing is that Rijeka was the most transparent city in Croatia in each survey. So in this seven years period, we had one city that was always the most transparent one and at the last transparency survey that they got the score of 9.6. So this is really good. So we said, let's change things with Rijeka. And Rijeka is an industrial city, Rijeka is the largest port in Croatia, but also it's the third largest city there with around 130,000 people, which is still 50 times smaller than London. But for Croatia, this is a good thing because we have only 4.3, 4.4 million people. So being a third largest city and being the most transparent one really helped us get this story going. And above all that, Rijeka is truly a multicultural city with so many nationalities living there side by side. And when we got this war of independence in the 90s, Rijeka was not part of this war territory. And definitely Rijeka is the most transparent city and that all came to place when a week ago, Rijeka was selected as Croatian city for European Capital of Culture in 2020. So this is really an amazing and important work they do there. And why Rijeka wanted Warpers? Why were they interested in doing the new website above Warpers as a platform? They know Warpers because they used it in a couple of smaller websites that just go to warpers.org, download it, and after that they install it. Easily they could change the text, they could change the content really easy. So this is their main decision on going to Warpers as a platform. And the other one was that basically the Croatian community from 2013 to this day grows every day, every month. And this is really important when you are trying to see what platform would you use in the future. And definitely one of the reasons is because it's open source and they wanted to open source everything when the work is done. So I really believe that Warpers revolutionized publishing. Coming from Croatia in 2003 when Warpers came out, it really helped a lot of people, published their content, published their ideas, and this especially is true when you have countries that are, I don't know, somehow lacking in democratic values. So Warpers really revolutionized publishing and we wanted to revolutionize something else as well. So we wanted to somehow help transparency issues that we are facing in Croatia in this two-way communication between cities and citizens. But at the end we wanted to build a platform. So Rijeka came to us and asked us to develop their new website. And at one point we saw the opportunity to do something even more, even better, because by building a platform we didn't want to build a website just for one city, we wanted to build a platform for all the cities in Croatia because all the cities have the same problems. And the big thing, the big problem, was that we didn't have political ties. And by saying that we didn't have any political ties means that we didn't work with any political parties, government, institutions and so on. And people usually Croatia see that as a problem, but personally I don't see it as a problem. I see it as being able to be as much transparent as I could for this entire process. And by saying that we had no political ties means that back two or three years ago I was very critical of our national government that just wanted to create a new website. They asked for open source technologies, but they finished up with a proprietary solution. And they used a copy of your own gov.uk as a platform to build their own website. And it was awful and it still is. I think that they should do better work than they did three years ago. And the problem there, these past four years, the same party was on our national government, the leading party, and in Rijeka. So could we work with Rijeka while we are criticizing the national government? But Rijeka said, we don't want that. We want to work with you because we believe in you. We believe that you could get us the thing that we need. So our approach was, we definitely wanted to make a better city website. We wanted to open source everything. This was one of our main reasons for deciding to work with Rijeka. We wanted to design it in the open. So never before anyone in Croatia working with the institution of the government had done a blog that will basically document all this process. And this blog is important for a couple of reasons. And one of the reasons is that by doing an educational blog, basically this helps the community and this helps the whole web design community, not only the workers community. So this is one of our reasons that we wanted to work on with this project. And when we conducted interviews with the citizens of Rijeka, we asked them, so do you want this site to be accessible to everyone? And around 25% of them said yes, which is a really low number. And this is one of things that we just didn't listen to the citizens because we thought that accessibility really matters because this in some way will help all those people with special needs that don't have the same vision as we do that have other sort of disability problems and so on. And the most important thing maybe is that we wanted everything disclosed. So we didn't want to go some day and to be asked by people that you did this job, it was overrated, overpriced and so on. And Rijeka said, hey, we want that too. So a couple of questions raised. How to even start working with Rijeka without this public bid? So in Croatia, there is a price range. So everything about 20,000 pounds should be put on public bid. And this is okay, but we don't have the resources and we don't have the, I don't know, ways of telling which offer is the best one because we are always having the smallest price as the best offer available. And this is not something that they wanted in this situation because a couple of times it really happened like that, that there were a couple of normal bids and there is, I don't know, a company that wanted just to dump the price and it had a price 20% of the entire usual price. So this is a real issue. The second thing, the second question that we were afraid of was how will the public react? So our final price for this project was 90,000 pounds. And this is a huge amount of money when creating websites in Croatia and we couldn't use the statement that for this kind of work, we usually would get paid 2.5 times higher price than we did for the city of Rijeka. So basically we were being underpaid and the public will react like they are really angry at us because we did, and we got that job. We were also afraid of the professional community reaction because of disclosing this entire process, going with the open design blog, open sourcing everything and we got one question asking what will happen to the companies that are currently developing and designing websites for local governments, for institutions, when you do that, that is basically free and anyone can use it in their own web. But the general professional community reaction was extremely positive and we were really happy about it. And of course the final question is this enough of a budget? So our process for this project was put in four stages, the analysis stage, design stage, HTML stage, and four-price stage. And what we tried to do was some sort of agile design approach, which means that if you put aside the first stage, the analysis stage, in every stage after that, we could make changes wherever and whenever we wanted if this changes helps our users. So everything was open for change. And it was definitely important to always communicate and innovate in the later stages as well. So our first process was analysis. We started with analyzing current content so we spent practically around three weeks analyzing current content and doing all other sort of stuff. And my idea, so when Ant said a couple of words before I came to stage, he said that I was from Rijeka, I'm not from Rijeka, I'm from Pula, living in Zagreb and working for Rijeka. And I practically moved to Rijeka for two months to be able to work with them on site every day. So we basically, through all the meetings every day, so we could really analyze content, so we could build better information architecture and so on. And we basically structured this content in a couple of groups, like news information, like addresses, telephone numbers, the things that people usually search on a website. And the special part was topics for citizens. And these topics were structured into sections like family, culture, sports, education, economy and so on. And these topics for the citizens was our key content because usually when you are developing a website for a political party or a local institution or a local government, they want to have news on top of everything. They're not building the website to promote their ideas, they're building a website to have news so the people could know what did they do yesterday and what are they doing today. So this is all the website for all the wrong reasons. And this content that we were developing basically was written from scratch, they didn't have this content written before. So this was a really giant step in all that. And we did a lot of interviews, not only with citizens but with other cities as well. So remember, we said that we are building a platform so we asked association of Croatian cities to help us set up a workshop and to see what in the meantime we created personas and tested user flow. So this is maybe not the standard process that you are usually using when creating a website but we just wanted to see how our contents behaves in these sort of situations. So one of my favorite personas was a young dad that is trying to inscribe his kid into kindergarten. So I'm not, I don't know how is things with that going here in UK but in Croatia you have only one month in which you can inscribe or register, I don't know what to use. Your kid to kindergarten, only one month per year and this information were not disclosed on the website at all. And at the end we built some wireframes and tested some more and these wireframes which is something that I'm really proud of was showed to people at a special workshop. So around three, around, I don't know, 30 or 40 people said they are interested in going to that workshop and we basically grouped them and showed them wireframe explain them how are we going to show them the content on the future website. And the second process was design. So in the design phase we focus on key templates only and we built it in only one resolution. This was a desktop resolution. So sometimes this is a problem because you don't, you want to show clients how will their website look on the mobile devices on a tablet device and so on. But we got some sort of trust between us and Rijeka so they said, hey, okay, you are the bosses. We just want to create a good website for our citizens. So we could design only in one resolution and this way we could lower expenses at the end. So we could work within this budget to create a good website that would work for their citizens and although we did get underpaid, we did a job and we did something that Rijeka really appreciated. And we were open for iterations if it helps our users. So this is the current website for the city of Rijeka. You can see a lot of information in this part. So this is basically news, these are banners. If you want to search something and remember that Rijeka was the most transparent city three times in a row but even on their own website they realized that the citizens cannot get information. If you're an investigative journalist you could get the information because the information was on that website but if you were a citizen searching how to inscribe your kit into kindergarten, you wouldn't find that information really easy. So we proposed a new design. This is the homepage. Everything is done within WordPress with a lot of information architecture built just inside it. So for example, the things that we did is the giant navigation at the top of every page which basically will stick to the top of the website when you are going to the website, going to sub pages. And one of the things is this part here. So these are the quick link section that can be changed depending on what do you want to promote in some parts of the year. So if you are promoting the registration for children for the kindergarten, you could have that in that section. And on the bottom part also a quick link section to the most important key content of the website. And on the right side of the web there was information that is usually hidden somewhere below and this is the address and this is the telephone numbers that the people use to call and contact their city. And I just want to show you a quick template for the topic section. So these are topics based on the things that are interesting to citizens. And when you go in some topics, you get the information that is rewritten from scratch all over again with some key points on that. In HTML, we said everything should be responsive. We didn't define any breakpoints because we believe that every content acts differently on every resolution. So if we see that the content should break at 400 pixels then we are going to put a break point there. If we see a content that is breaking at 500 pixels we are putting a break point there. And again, we are always focusing on users. So if we see that the design change could make something better for them, we are changing it. Nevertheless, we didn't define that in the first stage, sorry, the second stage when we did design. And for the WordPress, our main idea was to use WordPress administration because they are used to it. But for that people, that employees of the city of Rijeka that maybe are not that good in computers, we want to optimize the administration to remove the elements that don't help them. And we want to make everything easy to use and error proof. So there were no errors by using that administration. The important thing is that content should be interconnected. So above all that, we have a dozen custom post types, for example, photo addresses, four telephone numbers for employees. So we can basically change that in the process. If the employees change the position, we just say he's not on that position anymore. And a special focus was put on transparency information like budget, like taxes, like way of contacting your representatives. And for example, one of the custom post type was the whole part for the representative. So you could see how representative acted during the years. So if someone is representative for two mandates, so this is around eight years, you could see what questions did he ask and how he represented you. But there were of course problems. As I said, we got less than we usually get paid. We got unexpected setbacks. So for example, we decided to go with analysis stage for only a week, but at the end we worked on that for three weeks, so we didn't get paid for two weeks. Also, there was more work than expected. We couldn't get into budget to write blog posts and some strategic documents. And after the process is over, we will have two strategic documents that were never published in Croatia before. So one is content strategy guidelines for the public service and the other are accessibility guidelines. We wanted to create those nevertheless. And the benefits are a lot because work is not more recognized than it was before. And everything will eventually be open sourced and other cities can come to that and use it free of charge. They can lower costs. And this especially goes with smaller cities and the smaller cities in Croatia have around 10,000 citizens. So this is a truly remarkable thing that we could do. Citizens were involved and listened. So we asked them a lot of questions. We listened to their answers. We even added value for the communities and government this way. One of the things was educational conferences and educational conference. This wasn't planned, but in the process we just pick up the phone and talk to professionals for compi writing, SEO industry from social media industries and the accessibility. So we got these people on the same stage and they were talking to the employees of Rijeka and helping them understand what changed in the web since the 90s. And one of the greatest benefit for us and for the communities, getting work in Croatia to Rijeka the last year. And we got a tremendous support from the city because we got the venue for free. We got a lot of support. For example, the last week we lost the contributor day venue. So city of Rijeka said, hey, why don't you host that in a city hall? So we did it. In the end, I think that politicians should leave their comfort zones as we all should do as well because this is what the leaders do if they want to make a better future for their nation and their citizens. Why are we doing this? We should lead and not expect someone else to lead. And that way we are setting the standard and this sort of a project is really sometimes that come a couple of times in your lifetime and you should just stick to it and work on it because it helps you to build a character. And at the end, we are, as a designer, we want to make the world a better place. And one last thing. I want to look myself into mirror one day and I want to say this little kid that I did everything I could to make him a better future. So thank you. I was really very beautiful and inspiring. Thank you very much, Manuel. Do we have questions from the floor at this stage? I had a few I could start off with, but oh, we do have questions from the floor. Good, I don't know. Mine was a silly question anyway, so. Hi, thank you for a very inspiring talk. Thanks. You talked about personas and user flows and I thought it was a great idea. But I was wondering, do you also open source those? No, this is part of the process that we just basically did at the site with them. We didn't document those very well because we were thinking of what benefit could we gain from that or from other things. So we focus on, I don't know, open sourcing the content strategy and accessibility guidelines and not the personas because this is something that agencies in Croatia do for larger scale projects anyway. So we didn't want to, yeah. Okay, do we have another question from the floor? Oh, yes, we do. Talks about that. Hi, thank you for your talk. You mentioned you're instructing content managers how to do accessibility, how to implement that. What are the three main things you tell them? Can you be a little bit... What were the three main accessibility pieces of advice? You give the content managers. Okay. Well, the idea of bringing accessibility, so if you were talking about that educational conference that we did, so somehow we got connected with a blind association in Croatia by chance and we asked them, hey, we are doing this project and we want to help you get the better web experience and the problem in Croatia is that people are not involved in that. People that create content like people from employees from Rijeka didn't realize what are the problems that blind person is having by just using their website. So we asked one blind gentleman to come over and to explain and to show them what are their problems. So this was our main goal for that educational conference. And regarding accessibility, we are basically trying to build this whole web platform, web platform experience to be as much as accessible as generally WordPress is. Further questions from floor? Oh, we do have more. Yes, just that gentleman there. So with the city website, do you have people who are not very technical, who have to maintain that website? Yeah. And how do you make it easy for them to continually maintain it? Because if they're not very technical, how do they understand what's happening? So we're creating a one day educational workshop after everything is done. We expect them to have a couple of people that are more technical who can then help them within the city. And the main goal is to create, I don't know, a user profile for that sort of people that will basically move everything that is not necessary for them to use the administration. So this is our general idea to do that. So this is still a work in progress. We are around months away from delivering it and publishing it. Okay, so I'll just bring this over. Thank you for that talk. You talked right early on about the transparency measurements. Has you seen those increase and get better since you've produced this website? So as I said, this is not finished yet. It will be in a month. But the idea is that people got a lot of questions. For example, how can they open a company in Rijeka? What are the steps that they should do? And this sort of information on the old website was something that you couldn't find easily. And when talking about transparency, I think that Rijeka is maybe the only city in Croatia that publishes their budget in a way that could be easily, I don't know how to say, but let's say that you want to create some sort of business intelligence of a budget. Rijeka is one of the few cities that do that in a way that you could do that. And this goes, for example, on this part that when I talked about two-way communication. So now two-way communication works that you basically pick up your phone and call someone. And this someone is usually the main operator that basically after that just sends you in a right direction. We want to change that. So when you have a problem, for example, with traffic, you just go to that part of the website and you got the information just for you. So this is sort of a thing that we are trying to build to build a better transparency for the website. I'm not sure if you mentioned this already, but how many people have been working on this? How many in your team and how long has it taken? So our team is, my brother and I are working as an agency. We have a friend that is working with us. He's a really kick-ass workplace developer. So basically two of us built everything and my brother was just a consultant on a couple of things like accessibility and response to mobile-first approach and so on. And when did you start on it? We started that somewhere in the July, I think, last year. I'm not 100% sure. Okay, thanks. You should keep in mind that we didn't work on that project all the time because of other issues. So for example, we couldn't live with that sort of money and the problem was that we didn't get paid still because this is something that we'll get when the work is over. So we got to work on other projects as well in this period. At the back there, I think this will have to be the last question, because we're getting close to lunchtime and we don't want to be torn apart. I'll be quick. Thank you. I'm from Bulgaria and we have probably the same problems with transparency and corruption and with technology and to governmental agencies. I wanted to ask you, have you been approached by or did you approach some other town to integrate this platform in the future and do you expect it to be some kind of business? Because it sounds like something which can be developed. I personally don't think that this should be something that we will sell to other cities. If I get approached with other cities and asked to implement it, I would probably say no because this is not something that will cover my bills at the end of the month. We worked hard on that, but we are aiming to help local agencies build above all that. So we are just open sourcing everything and I'm really happy to help. I was asked by a couple of other cities and I said that no problem, just give me a call. I'll call you when this is all over and I will come over and explain why is this a benefit for you. Thank you. I think we'll have to wrap up the questions there. I kind of wanted a little question. So when you say you're open sourcing it all, this is a custom theme and the custom theme. We're open sourcing everything. So from the Photoshop files, Photoshop files are already on the GitHub. Okay, great. I guess we should all come to Split in September. See the whole thing launched, you can get told how to implement it and all that. And you were in Split, so it will be a good thing for you. Okay. Okay, well thank you very much, Emmanuel.