 So the reason my society have decided to establish TIC-TEC as a conference, it's really our understanding of the civic tech world in general is very fragmented. Lots of different practitioners, lots of different sizes of organisations. Often a lot of the work that we see in different countries around the world is actually being delivered by small voluntary groups or people who've come together on projects. So there's no clearly defined set of metrics or understanding about impact itself but also often a lot of these organisations just simply don't have the resources to be able to measure what they do as they're doing it. If you have a two person organisation in a country in sub-Saharan Africa and you maybe have a little bit of development resource it's about all you can do maybe to build a tool or take a piece of code that someone else has used and deploy that. You're having the resources of finding the time and energy to actually work out if that actually makes a difference to people's lives on top of that is a huge undertaking in many cases. So I think if my society can make any difference to TIC-TEC it's given people a broader understanding of what's out there and what they can make use of. It's also providing directly tools and services and methodologies and frameworks that people can use to structure their efforts and maybe just make what they're doing a little bit more impactful understand why it works and maybe use that learning in future projects. At the end of the first day of TIC-TEC it's been a fantastic day so far I mean some really kind of wonderful contributions lots of kind of great ideas, lots of different approaches as well I think there's a lot of people trying to approach these problems from different perspectives and also from different projects and you know they've taken what they've learned and they're trying to understand what's the bigger picture and I think ultimately that's what TIC-TEC can do is give a bit more of a frame for what this all means collectively and how we can learn from each other and you apply that to our future work as well. The civic technology space is still, we describe it as being relatively new it's maybe built up over the past seven or eight years perhaps and I think there's a danger that it is encountering a lot of these issues afresh and not understanding that there's a bigger world out there that a lot of these problems that we're facing about measurement about definitions of impact, about how to kind of motivate citizens to get more engaged these are problems which have been solved in other situations other disciplines like your communications, marketing, academia more traditional NGOs a lot of these issues have been dealt with and solved but maybe there's not a full understanding of what is out there already that we can take advantage of so if TIC-TEC can help maybe expose people to some of those other ways of doing things and we can take that and bring it back to our own practice I think we'll really be helping the sector overall My society has been involved in research about 18 months now and our head of research, Rebecca Rumbles doing a great job really establishing what our research framework is what types of activities need to sit with under that framework and also being able to carry out a lot of really interesting research to really ask difficult questions of the work we've already done today and the work that's been done in the wider sector to really properly understand does this stuff really make a difference is it really changing people's lives, if it is changing people's lives whose lives are it changing and in what way so those difficult questions don't always bring back the kind of answers you necessarily want to hear sometimes the results are sort of unpalatable or maybe it hasn't worked in quite the way we thought it was but it's only by asking those difficult questions can we really kind of make progress and really ensure that civic technology has the impact that we all want it to have so over the next few years my society has really put in research front and centre of everything that we do every new project, every new service really has kind of research methodologies built into it but also we're looking at how we can take those methodologies and those learnings and share it with the wider community to encourage more people to apply the same methods to look at things in the same way so we can compare and contrast between different situations and then we really help the whole sector move forward