 Thanks very much. Thanks very much for the honor of the invitation and the provocation to try to come up with that was something useful to all of you and I'm going to talk about our terms and I'm going to make the point that they're not this question is not merely academic we are I'm sorry about this okay this is classic the big I'm with the accountability research center at American University which is a startup and we're not quite here yet Becca or Gemma thank you and the accountability research center is an action research incubator that launched formally last September when our website went live and the basic point of departure is that the research that in the field needs to be more useful to the people who are pursuing change after two years of consultation and exploration we I came to the conclusion that when we're looking at the challenge of research uptake by practitioners the main challenge is often assumed by researchers to be well we have to do a better job with dissemination and I came to the conclusion that's actually not the main problem the main problem is really more upstream the problem is who gets to decide what research questions get asked and so the the the work that we're doing really is to try to broaden access to agenda setting in the field and so in the process we're questioning the thinker do or dichotomy which is actually a hierarchy and so we're really trying to work closely with change strategists to try to imagine what kinds of research questions would be useful to them and to try to collaborate on coming up with projects that that are really viable as well as fundable as well as useful so it's the obvious to all of us that democracy and accountability are on the defensive all around the world with the possible exception of Portugal and certainly Iceland and one of the things that I don't need to tell you is that we've all underestimated the power of disinformation and that raises the question of how do we broaden our reach by improving our ability to communicate to to more diverse and broader constituencies what it is we're trying to do and that's where the key words come in one of the points of departure is that accountability is a trans ideological term which essentially means that it is up for grabs that's what I mean by contested and one of our challenges then it says how do we engage in that debate by communicating the terms democratic potential more effectively and that then raises the issue of cross-cultural communication how do we take into account where different constituencies are coming from and I'm going to talk a bit about the issue of language and and translation and the distinction between conceptual and linguistic translation and one of the implications here is that the ambiguities in this communicative process can either enable or constrain our strategies just a couple of examples came to mind in our own field which is when I was looking the other day for a good definition of offline in the context of our common terminology of online and offline participation I realized that one of the things that all of the definitions I came across have in common is they refer to being disconnected so and here's a residual category that has the implication of being disconnected so how is it that such a term can evoke participation and so we think we need a better term than offline when we're thinking about non-online and the other comment I wanted to make about a term in the accountability field is that you often hear the term constructive engagement it's promoted very heavily by large institutions particularly the World Bank for example in its work on accountability and the implication of this term is that adversarial approaches which don't necessarily mean throwing rocks it could also mean contesting elections or filing lawsuits it assumes that those approaches are inherently not constructive which I think means essentially we'd be tying one on behind our back so the point of departure here is that keywords are contested that this is not simply an academic discussion and I want to get into the issue of the fact that we are losing those debates in many cases and I want to draw attention for those of you who are interested in the term causal stories it's a quite useful term that refers to narratives that allow the attribution of responsibility which is of course fundamental to understanding accountability it's a term that I think we could use more and one of the things about causal stories is that they are socially and politically constructed so here's a problem then the fact that several key terms in the field got hijacked we start off with perhaps one of the most obvious cases fake news which is clearly an attempt to name disinformation yet here we have a case where the this naming of disinformation has been successfully appropriated by the promoters of disinformation we have a term very influential in the United States called drain the swamp which is associated with the fact that Washington DC originally was a swamp and that gets to the question of who gets to decide what is corrupt and of course here's another term where the corrupt get to call others corrupt and deflect attention from their own corruption we have the the the construction and massification of fake digital civic engagement that you all know so well and we have a very interesting recent case that fortunately has not yet been successfully hijacked where policymakers in Trump's environmental protection agency have proposed a new law that would essentially apply open data principles to the science used to decide how to and whether to regulate pollution and the argument is that the only data that is fully open should be considered legitimate what does that mean all the research on health the health effects of pollution should be ruled out because that data involves personal information and therefore it's the raw data is not fully open it's quite perverse so the contested terrain here raises the issue of how do we learn from the experiences with the invention and circulation of keywords and in dealing with the partners of our research center in the Philippines and India and Guatemala Columbia and Mexico in particular we've found that that many of the terms that are very common in the global discourse can be seen as as specialist jargon or alienating and that raises the question of how do we figure out which terms have a better potential to actually resonate with diverse constituencies and so these are the terms I'm going to talk briefly about today some terms are well known others are in the process of being invented and so the first one accountability now why accountability it's well known that it's hard to translate into other languages and that has led some observers to fall into the trap of linguistic determination determinism and what do I mean by linguistic determinism it means that people tend to say well there isn't a word for accountability in fill in the blank language and therefore the implication is that the concept does not exist and there's a whole debate about this but what I want to say today is that the meaning of the term the political content of the term is also debated in English as well and this issue particularly has to do with who is supposed to be accountable to whom are we talking about upwards or downwards accountability particularly are we talking about the accountability of of NGOs to donors are we talking about the accountability of governments to the World Bank are we talking about the accountability of citizens to the state are we talking about the accountability of the powers that be to citizens a couple of examples from our field the sustainable development goals in the UN world are organized around national averages and there this is implies that the theory of change is that governments will be held accountable if they don't meet those goals but who will they be accountable to donors or perhaps to the United Nations in some way but national averages aren't exactly the most useful tools for national and subnational organizations and constituencies to hold their own governments accountable they need much more disaggregated and I'll get into targeted kinds of metrics we see a very prominent examples of partisan bias in the prosecution of corruption the implementation of corruption laws we see the most obvious case in Brazil most most recently where governments are are essentially thought putting into practice accountability laws in a way that that has extreme partisan bias the people in Congress the majority of the members of Congress in Brazil as well as the current president are involved in at least as much corruption as the worst possible scenario that could involve Lula and then Columbia has another case of a very powerful inspector general who the previous one or don't yes basically removed from power over 800 mayors including in a failed attempt to remove the mayor of the capital city without actually having proven any charters in court the the basis for that move was administrative flaws and so we have a tension between a sort of Spanish Inquisition style of accountability and democratic rule and another clear example in the United States involves the prison industrial complex which is based on the the the drug war which in in turn is based on hyper surveillance and racially biased both laws and implementation of laws leading to extremely dramatic imbalance in terms of whose in jail and then we have the Black Lives Matter movement that pushes for downwards accountability in the case of police violence and we've we've we can talk about the way in which civic tech can support accountability in both directions but today we're going to focus on downward accountability I think the term public accountability helps to clarify this distinction one a little back of the envelope exercise in terms of linguistic determinism of I published work in Spanish on social accountability and it raises the question how do we translate this and it I did a little exercise to see well what are the terms that are used in Spanish and they tend to not be the literal translations in in Mexico that classic term is contraria social in Colombia would be beadoria their whole series of terms and if you add them all up it turns out that those terms in Spanish are more widely used than that particular term for citizen oversight in English and if you include the most prominently used term in Spanish control social you would see the bar on the right would be three times as large but I chose to exclude that because in a minority of cases that term could be used to mean social control rather than citizen oversight so right to know is a term that begins to be popularized in the United States at least with the environmental classic Silent Spring it then informs a whole wave of legislation in the United States the term in the US has to do specifically with the right to know what chemicals one is being exposed to the community right to know act leads to and I'm really quite curious how many are familiar with this exercise of scorecard org in the US which in the early days of the internet tried to take a massive amount of open data that was unintelligible to citizens and converted into a platform that would be user-friendly just type in your zip code to find out which chemicals have been revealed to the government to have been admitted in your neighborhood and it's a pioneering case but one of the reasons why I'm particularly interested in the term right to know is it implies a broader sense of what kind of data one needs that a broader sense in the term transparency transparency is often used to focus on data that actually exists but much of the data that citizens need to exercise their right to know may not exist because for example in the case of toxics the government has decided or not decided to investigate exactly which chemicals are dangerous there tens of thousands of chemicals whose toxicity has never been studied and so transparency wouldn't do the trick and in India we also have another case of the political construction of the right to know where the the right information campaign popularized the slogan in Hindi that was the right to know the right to live that was reflective of their capacity to embed the right to know struggle in social justice and anti-poverty programs that involved grassroots citizens movements to expose corruption and the diversion of funds that were supposed to reach people and they actually managed to through both elite coalitions and grassroots pressures develop the basis for a national law that is still in place in spite of the the other setbacks that that grassroots movements are facing in India. In Mexico is involved with a grassroots organization that adapted the discourse to popular culture and they in the early days of the of the of the internet they developed there a term to describe transparency but in their grassroots organizing but they were very concerned that in Mexico at the grassroots level the term transparency sounds very close to grassroots slang a word that means fraud trans or the verb transar and so they played with this term to basically say we need to go behind the appearances trust las aparensias this brings me to another particular transparency word targeted transparency which refers to the use of publicly required disclosure of very specific information in a standardized and comparable format this was first promoted by fun graham and wiles book full disclosure and this term captured a whole series of of policy reforms over the previous 15 years or so that integrated disclosure and action ability perceived action ability is really a pioneer in the user-centered approach to data and this the toxic release inventory that came out of the community right to know act is the paradigm case but even sort of consumer friendly terms or rather tools like nutrition labels or or safety information when vehicles started rolling over they the new law basically required a car manufacturers to put the the safety rating on the on the car in the car lot so that you could a buyer of a new car couldn't avoid finding out the safety rating and and this is a very a pink powerful term and a brilliant book but one of the puzzles of this book is that while it got a lot of scholarly uptake and for for us scholars more than 800 Google scholar hits is pretty good but not too much uptake among practitioners and so the puzzle here is that here is a concept that is all about uptake all about usability all about action ability but it hasn't really been taken up by practitioners I've been looking for cases for 10 years since the book came out and it's really remarkably hard to find uptake among practitioners and in the case of the Mexican government's transparency policy they require government agencies to pursue what they call transparency a focalized find literal translation but they use this term to mean just useful information like where to find the lost and found office at the airport so this is hardly an accountability tool and then the term whistleblowers now whistleblowers is interesting it's another case of a difficult to translate term especially because of its very negative of valence or connotations in Spanish and in German at least possibly in other languages but I think here it's useful to remember that this term was invented politically in English as well in the early 1970s for many years beforehand since the 19th century it referred to a sports referee who had run up and down the side of the field or a kind of night watch person or who would be a cop on the beat who would whose only tool may be a whistle and one of the first usages with a political connotation that has been discovered was in 1969 referring to the citizen soldier who wrote to Congress exposing in great detail the infamous Milai massacre and today he is remembered with the ride in our truth teller prizes and these prizes are actually being awarded today in Washington that the right to know community is gathering to honor a series of whistleblowers and truth tellers of various kinds that one of the winners today is the mayor of San Juan who pushed back and revealed the failure of federal support and the bias in the way in which the federal government deals with disasters Houston gets all the possible support in the world after their hurricane Puerto Rico still has hundreds of thousands of people without power and this accountability lab describes this strategy of lifting up truth tellers and positive examples of public servants as as naming and faming and Blair is here today we can talk to him more about that and this actually with the show whistleblowing raises questions about the the the issue the role of evidence and what kind of data are we talking about and I think it's important to acknowledge that there are a whole range of ways of communicating causal stories about accountability issues telling stories with data is just one and that scientific criteria are not the only criteria to use there's this whole other world of truth telling that can reveal what would be otherwise invisible patterns and so I think what we could call the Sherlock Holmes approach the fit they're trying to figure out how the story fits together with means method and opportunity the the role of discovering the smoking gun the role of finding those insiders who already know how the data is connected is something that needs to be valued and more widely in our field and then open wash open washing is a term that has been promoted by some of us relatively recently through experience with the open government partnership and together with Rosie McGee we had a very interesting conversation at one of the early global summits of the O.G.P. in London when we served on the founding technical committee for the independent reporting mechanism and we what we were seeing seeing led us to the conclusion that this really needs to be named this phenomenon needs to be named and there turns out there are a variety of definitions in one community talks about spinning openness even though it's not there but another term another definition rather involves actual openness open government policies there might actually be some transparency but that transparency serves to cover up a lack of accountability or persistent impunity one interesting case that was revealed recently is the term test align which is a combination of testifying and lying this term refers to police testimony regarding charges of police abuse police violence and this term has been around for 25 years but there's a recent there's been a recent new twist on it in the case of the use of a technical solution to the problem of police violence the solution of police cameras I wonder whether or not the use of police cameras is in the category of of civic tech or not particularly when they can be turned off at strategic moments but the what one of the things that came out recently was the systematic pattern at least in New York where the police lies would be fully revealed by the video testimony but nevertheless they would get away with it partly because of the pressure to resolve cases before they come to trial so they don't actually have to testify but basically we find a case where an attempt to use openness to use transparency the the documentation and revelation of police behavior has not managed to end impunity so if we just flip back to the open government partnership we have examples from Guatemala, Romania and Azerbaijan and the Guatemala case is particularly notable because the the senior government official in charge of the open government partnership and the construction sector transparency and initiative and the extractive industries transparency initiative was led away in handcuffs because she was discovered to be part of a government corruption plot that also reached the president so if the if the senior most official in charge of these governance multi stakeholder initiatives is herself guilty of corruption I think it would safe to say that openness was being used to cover up corruption now this raises a definitional challenge though because the the use of open washing as a term is kind of handy as an epithet just as greenwashing is a handy epithet but it turns out that it's much harder to define and practice than one might think and I've been working on this with with a colleague Brandon Brockmeyer and the question is does it refer to essentially the mere appearance of transparency or fake transparency that coexist with accountability failures or does it refer to more proactive intentional deliberate attempts to cover up impunity with transparency and they're not the same thing one reason why they're not the same thing is you can imagine a government composed of diverse political forces where one faction within the government is able to pursue transparency reforms perhaps with international allies while other factions of the government protect perhaps the dominant faction of the government continues to act with with impunity and that is a matter of the balance of power within the state but in that context it's it's hard to say that the transparency reforms were promoted with the intent to cover up but rather it reflects contested balance of power within the state so really that one of the challenges is does should the definition include the intent to deceive which is very hard to demonstrate or is it enough for that concept to refer to the combination of some transparency with persistent lack of accountability and the Mexican case is really prominent here because Mexico ranks number one by the most reliable rating of public information access systems it's really quite a remarkable law there's still a fairly robust and somewhat autonomous agency that that applies the law but at the same time Mexico ranks quite low on transparency international corruption perception index and has actually dropped five or six points just in the last few years and if anyone follows the Mexican press you know that there there's almost 20 governors who are either in jail on the run who who've been widely documented to be corrupt the government accountability agency finds massive corruption and nothing happens their charges get filed away by the the system of justice and one of the most recent changes in Mexico is that they had the one of the most advanced let's say from the point of view of civil society government power sharing one of the most advanced multi-stakeholder bodies called the tripartite secretariat to carry out the open government partnership but it was discovered that the government had bought a spyware from from an Israeli company and had used that spyware on a whole range of civil society activists and not just activists who are challenging the government directly but activists who are working on causes like anti-obesity campaigns apparently pursuing the taxation of soft drinks is considered quite threatening to the government and they looked after these about quite pro-business civil society activists as well and this led the civil society coalition very politically diverse to leave the O.G.P. process leaving the government hanging so so in the context of O.G.P. Mexico went from being one of the most sort of cutting edge reformers to being one of the most retrograde and what this suggests is that the the Mexican experience suggests that what that it's not just that it's hard for transparency to lead to accountability it suggests that these arrows are now pointing in opposite directions this a paradigm case of how you can have a fairly legally and institutionally established public information access reforms at the same time as you have quite entrenched and intractable institutions of impunity and then one of the one of the last terms is sandwich strategies and sandwich strategies it tries to capture the synergy between reformers both in state and society it involves virtuous circles of state society coalitions that try to empower each other it starts with the point of departure that that a genuine pro accountability actors in the state are weak that genuine pro accountability actors in society are weak but by coming together they can empower each other and begin to shift the balance of forces and I first put this idea out in a book in 1992 and essentially didn't get any traction whatsoever it's been it was it was lost to history I gave up on that that was before I realized that I'd kind of buried the lead in the book but it turns out that a colleague in the Philippines June Boris used this term in cross-cultural context he adapted the context of a sandwich shed it's inherent Western bias and talked about the bibinca strategy which is a rice cake in the Philippines that is simultaneously heated from above and below and if you Google bibinca you'll see pictures of actual rice cakes but this one is the cover of his book and one of the remarkable things is here the term actually did get uptake in the Philippines based on my experience with Filipino colleagues they tell me that the term is still widely used in the Philippines but it's used it's meaning has been watered down originally it referred to convergence of forces between real pressure from below grassroots movements pushing for the implementation of agrarian reform sympathetic technocrats in the system who are willing to stick their neck out and promote implementation to really invest their political capital in pressuring the apparatus to deliver on the government's promises and so it involved taking into account the productive role of conflict where you had a state society coalition in conflict in favor of accountability pushing back against state society coalitions that opposed accountability but today the term has been watered down to simply meaning state society coalitions which using the term constructive engagement essentially means that the civil society partners in that coalition are expected to not engage in any adversarial approaches whatsoever they're they're they're assumed to provide unconditional loyalty so it's it's a it's a mixed story so the takeaways today are that accountability strategies face the challenge of communicating more effectively we and the issue here is not only how to govern better how to improve let's say government responsiveness but really in a position of needing to push back much more proactively defend rights and democracy against the challenges and so I think we really need to unleash our creativity to think more about how can we come up with terms that really have more potential to go viral and that to go viral not only in in cyberspace but also to go viral among the the more grounded and grassroots constituencies that whose whose power is going to be so important to defend rights and so there I'm proposing here just to wrap up two approaches that are especially relevant and I've mentioned some examples today the first is how to repurpose existing terms like whistleblower to communicate and how accountability initiatives more effectively and the next one is how to invent new terms that actually are grounded that makes sense to people where they're at and so just to sum up I think we we can say that accountability keywords are both contested terrain and terrain worth contesting thank you how are we doing on time you can pretend if you want to take questions please please and thank you that was both fun and extremely interesting and one thought that struck me which is about the open washing slide literally but I think pertains to the broader conversation was I think there's a a causal story perhaps missing in it which is that I think part of what many of us and I said sorry I should I'm Karin Christiansen I'm chair of open knowledge but I am also for my sins a former politician is the that we are using weak transparency initiatives to actually try and engage with and counter lack of accountability and I think that is one of the the missing causal stories in this that I think is it's certainly the the way I have attempted to use analysis that many people in this room do but I do think that actually reflects on some of the broader issues in this as well. Thanks other comments Rosie here hello I'm Rosie McGee from IDS in the UK whoops formally of making all voices count I was just interested to see on your last slide about repurposing terms and coining new terms you didn't mention reclaiming old terms and I struggle with this one a lot because as somebody who comes out of the participation discourse and practices of sort of 15 years ago and more I think there's a lot that needs to be reclaimed about notions of participation and citizen engagement and a broadening of the notion of participation to also include contestation not just co-optation type participation so I was just wondering what you what you say on that. Thanks that's a great point yeah back Hi my name is Christian Medina I'm from open north in Montreal Canada my question was regarding translation of different terms so you've you pointed out that that a lot of the times it originates in English and then translates to a different term or we tried to translate to a different term but have you seen evidence or more evidence of it originating in a non-English language and translating to English like from my own experience in Columbia I know a lot of concepts regarding corruption are very creative in Columbia so spreading the marmalade means a certain kind of corruption related to clientilism whilst being a crocodile La Garteria is more related to top-down clientilism No that's that's a great point there there are many other terms in Spanish Cuentas Claras, Quim Pagamanda that are part of an accountability discourse that is that is left out by those who who simply stop it saying well there isn't a good exact translation for accountability and and therefore there's a great blog if those for those who are interested in the global accountability blog which talks it which starts off by quoting an English professor who announced that there is no term for transparency in Swahili and therefore the concept doesn't exist well it turns out the term does exist in Swahili the person who claimed that doesn't speak Swahili and then it turns out that that just because it may not exist doesn't mean the the if the term doesn't exist doesn't mean the concept doesn't exist and the blog goes on to argue that well we didn't have a term for television before television existed but we don't really have any trouble understanding the concept now that it exists so yeah and back thank you my my name is Stefan Verhulst Gulf Lab so my question is related to what George Lakoff has worked on which is really about the power of framing which ultimately is about each word means different things to different people with different value sets and so if you want to be powerful with regard to a specific word you have to realize that for instance in the US Democrats will react differently to certain words and Republicans and so how do you take the power of framing into account when you assess terms like accountability this is all about framing in fact originally had a slide there talked about well people used to say the medium is the message and maybe framing is the message so this is this is all about framing and and the causal stories argument is is all about framing so thank you for that in front I'm playing a demo from making one voice account previously but now an independent researcher in Malawi on the sandwich strategy I kind of get struck with the changing nature of that sandwich given the context contextual dynamics which produces movements of actors from one side to the other say for instance change of you know after elections maybe in an opposition party has gone into power it will certainly shift some actors who are in government now going to civil society and I think that also either can can downscale the way you were advocating or it can it can push it up so I think those movements are important to watch because those movements of actors some who were activists in civil society when they are now in the state they don't become they don't return the activism they had in civil society somehow they are for you know faced with other new challenges or incentives so I think the sandwich is nature and the way it moves along has a lot to do with those contextual dynamics as well and that also has effects on what would one would go weak accountability or other terms that one might use so to me I think we need to factor that into the equation that's that's a really great point and in the Philippines that process is referred to crossovers under the previous government the Aquino government there were many of CSO leaders who joined the the liberal government and they turned out to be not very helpful allies to to civil society organizations they basically expected unconditional loyalty based on their past track record and the the result was not very productive and they took a lot of things for granted in a way that a lot of sort of liberal technocrats around the world took way too much for granted and we're now paying the price I should say that in terms of the the definition of reformers in this approach there's a fairly precise definition it does not refer to those who have certain intentions it does not refer to those who are saying the right things it refers to only those cases where reformers within the state managed to get their hands on the actual levers of of of of the agencies that are able to deliver tangible forms of support or enabling environments to make collective action more viable and less risky in other words if the reformers are not able to reduce the threat of reprisals for collective action then they're not really delivering to the civil society so it's a it's a fairly bounded understanding of what counts as a reformer otherwise we we miss the distinction between those who just talk the talk and those who walk the walk okay hi Emily Shaw-Gavex I really enjoyed this a lot it got me thinking about lots of things among them one of your early slides talked about downward versus upward accountability and it made me think about the constituencies we're talking about one important constituency here is powerful people versus you know the folks outside of CSO as the folks you know we think about in the the Black Lives Movement for example how does power work with your system of thinking about who is accountable to whom well this this is all about power and this is about the essentially the need to have a power analysis throughout the system and not assume that that data speaks for itself or that by itself information is going to drive drive change I think that this is the subtext here is is how do we think about change strategies first in order to decide what kind of information or data is really going to drive it in contrast to starting with the data and then trying to figure out what can we we can do with it hi Thiago Peixoto from World Bank so since we're talking about terms a civic tech as a term has been very undefined or over broadly defined as technology for the public good so delivering pizza over the internet could be civic tech to some extent so for you what would make technology civic what does the civic term means for you well that would be seems totally contextual and really depends on who's using it for what rather than assuming there's something inherent in in the tool tools can be used for a wide range of purposes so I think that's that's really where we're going here and I look forward to learning more in the next couple days about the different ways in which the tools are are being used and and what does it take to deploy them strategically so just in front here yeah yeah hi Zach Brisson from Reboot thanks Jonathan this was really interesting but it actually left me a little pessimistic so I'm kind of wondering as you were unpacking the challenges of using language it reminds me you know the curse of babble right can we ever actually overcome this issue where languages interpreted differently in different contexts per what Stefan was saying or is there a possible future where we might need to think about ways to not rely on framing or or specific words to still drive this work forward I think not relying on framing would let others do the framing and that's one reason why we're we're losing I mean in many cases losing losing control of the terms of debate I think the really the the challenge that I'm posing is how do we be very proactive and mindful about trying to influence the terms of debate the the terms that that lift up some issues rather than others that that point fingers in some directions rather than others and I think that's I think it would be you know while it while it it's depressing because we're on the defensive I think any any other stance would be unhelpfully unrealistic because that's the reality that that we're facing and it's really time to think about strategies to push back rather than hoping the the data will speak for itself thank you Michaë and my resender from democracy reporting international we are NGO working in many countries I would like to follow up on the question on framing and lack of what I found most interesting in this whole lack of approach that he made very clear this is not just the technical choosing of the right words and then everything is fine but that he said that it's a reflection of our deepest beliefs and you know you said we we are in the defensive and many of these terms are very contested now and I agree with that and I often have the feeling that we also have to clarify again for ourselves what we stand for you know we take for self evident we all like democracy human rights a better world but then we talk to other people say I love democracy and that's why I voted for Trump because it's anti-elite that's democracy and often we are speechless because we feel that's our term and how these people take it but often our answers are not very rich or not very well thought through so I feel in many ways we also need to go back and be clear you know we are in the defensive what are what are our front lines what are we defending actually and I would like to hear from you if you also feel that's a fundamental question often now of what do we stand for so all this framing and finding the right notions is good but often we maybe suffer because it's not clear to us anymore what exactly it is what we mean when we say democracy human rights rule of law or whatever it may be I think that's really helpful because the focus of today's talk has been how do we communicate what we stand for and you're quite right that that does imply an assumption that we already know what we stand for and therefore it's a matter of communicating but I think what an emphasis on keywords does is it looks at not only how does the term influence the debate but we also need to think about how does the debate influence you know what terms we choose and lift up so yes it's time to go back to first principles particularly when so many of the terms have either been slipped from our grasp or have been watered down in so many different ways and that's sometimes the price of success in other words the incredible takeoff of the value of transparency compared to 20 years ago has come with the risk of being watered down and distorted so when the more optimistic view would be to say that's the price of success at projecting a term or a value into the global discourse and we need to I think take more proactive measures to address the threat of hijacking and watering down Thank you Thank you so much for your talk it's been really interesting my name is Mi-Van I work at Full Fact it's a fact checking charity One of the examples you gave a weaponized term was fake news and something that we're doing in the fact checking community is trying to explain that there's a lot of complexity in this term fake news and actually it's lots of different types and these different types have different motivations and then they have different distribution mechanisms and picking any one of these combinations results in a different solution and I think that all of the terms we're kind of talking about all have this buried complexity in them like you say on accountability on transparency so if we're trying to reclaim these words or frame them in a particular way that is most valuable to talk about we have to start digging into that complexity and then the question becomes how do you dig into complexity at that kind of granular level and communicate that in a way that is meaningful when actually it's really hard I wondered if you had any thoughts on that That's a really good point some of the attempts to address fake news at least in the US have been quite limited because they only focus on obviously invented sources fake websites and bots and so forth and they don't address the penetration of fake news into the mainstream media so the fact that Fox News itself is the primary source of fake news is excluded from the definition of fake news by some of those initiatives so that's a huge huge problem and I think one hypothesis is that that term was that term was first deployed in the US context during the campaign as an attempt to push back from Trump but I haven't done the research to really document that that's the impression I had from the campaign and then it was lost to us and I think one of the challenges there is to be more forthright in calling out the mainstream media that is independent that does represent the fourth estate in the US was very reluctant to call out lies as lies it was a big news when they started to say that a statement by Trump or one of his allies was false there was a essentially a lag of at least six months it wasn't until well after the election that lies were called lies and I think that was a huge missed opportunity to challenge the that phenomenon so thank you for letting me have a second go this is a really brilliant input for starting off the tic-tac conference two years ago at the tic-tac conference in Barcelona which was one of my first bits of adventuring as a sort of anthropologist social scientist into the world of data scientists and technologists in my presentation I really wanted to use the term epistemology and the term paradigms and I didn't dare because I thought that we would all be talking past each other if I did but I think what's happened in the world in the last two years and lots of the things that have been said in the presentation this morning are a call to all of us to go think about that because what truth is and what fact is and what opinion is is a completely different thing depending on what epistemological paradigm you're sitting within and working within and my perception then was this world of people that I didn't know very well was sitting within one and because almost everybody within it was sitting within that one the paradigms were invisible they were part of the wallpaper and people weren't aware of them but an awful lot of what's coming up here when you said Jonathan about how much framing and meanings matter not just to academics absolutely I mean they're what they're what give the meaning or take away the meaning to the work of data science and technology the use of technology and fields like governance so I really hope that this can kind of start us off to an epistemologically aware kind of debate throughout the conference it would be brilliant you know paradigms an interesting case of a term that went viral among academics so it starts in reference to scientific revolutions and then it becomes applied to by academics to a whole range of other fields but I don't I think it would be hard to say that it went viral outside of academia and that's where causal story might be a handier term it's a little bit more intuitive we've got time for one more question yeah I just want to say that in this space I think that it takes courage to not only choose the word but define what you mean by the word that you use and in order to in the in this space that we are trying to take moral and ethical stands in spaces where there aren't structural incentives to do so it takes courage to put a moral or ethical value in the word that you use and we need to continue to do that very good thank you very much