 My name is Andrew Young. I'm the Associate Director of Research at the Governance Lab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and I'm also the network coordinator of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance. To me, impact is really about the effect on people's lives. You know, whenever we talk about civic tech and open governance and these concepts, a lot of times it can be about process and people get lost in the process and think about compliance with commitments that governments have made to act on input that they might receive, and it gets lost a little bit. What happens to the person on the ground, the person going through their daily life? How do these technologies affect them? And to me, that's what the impact really is. So at GovLab, we focus particularly on data and collaboration as means to improve governance. And we do that primarily because we see those two functions as assets that are now available to governments that weren't previously because of a lack of technological capacity. So now there's a greater capacity to collect and analyze data than there used to be to allow for evidence-based decision-making. There's new network technologies that allow for inputs to come in from diverse people among the citizenry. There's new capacity for governments to enable collaboration through data by making it accessible to the public. So these are just new pathways toward improving governance that weren't available 10 or 15 years ago because we just didn't have the technological capacity. And whenever you have a new technological capacity, it's very easy to assume that it's the right way to do it because it's the new way. But what we really want to figure out is what's working and under what conditions and how can we amplify that and not just go with the shiny new thing because it's shiny and new. I think that we can give people a voice that, you know, through Civic Tech that they didn't have previously. You know, I think that it was one thing to vote every four years, some people every year, but sadly few, to create more touch points between government and citizens. And I think we've seen that now, but at TicTac already, we've heard a little bit about how it tends to be the people who are already engaged or are already well positioned to have positions of power within the citizenry who are using Civic Tech now. So I think the potential is really to get past, you know, engaging the already engaged and increase the touch points between government and those people who are currently not engaged in the Civic process. So at TicTac this year, GovLab is launching a new platform that we've developed along with my society and the World Bank Digital Engagement Evaluation Team. It's what we're calling the Open Governance Research Exchange, or OGRX. And it's a project that's really kind of based on this idea that research is increasingly being made accessible on Civic Technology, on Open Governance, on these many, many tools, but it's dispersed. It's often behind paywalls. It's hard to figure out how to access the findings and methodologies that are really relevant right now in this universe of research on Civic Tech. So we wanted to create one space where you can access the curated information on these different means of governing differently and giving researchers the chance to share their own research, discuss methodologies with like-minded researchers and just kind of act as a hub for quantitative and qualitative research on the space. So I decided to come to TicTac after also being here last year because, you know, I think that conferences on Open Data, on Civic Tech, on Open Governance, you know, there's lots of interesting work being done, but I think that a lot of times you hear people discuss, this is the project I'm working on. And I think that TicTac kind of stands out as an example where it's about the lessons learned rather than the activities. So having people discuss what they've been working on but then really focus on, and this is the impact that we've uncovered by doing this project, I think sets TicTac apart and is really exciting and, you know, it's been fantastic already this year. Like I mentioned earlier, hearing so much about the different communities that are and aren't being engaged through Civic Tech is such important and meaningful knowledge and I think that's something that I'm going to take back to New York with me and think about while we're doing our projects at GovLab.