 Hi, my name is Maya Ganesh, I'm the Director of Research at Tactical Technology Collective. Tactical Tech is an international not-for-profit organisation and we've been supporting activists and human rights defenders to use technology safely and smartly in the advocacy and campaigning. Yeah, and I'm here to talk about the research work that we've been doing over the last two years. Two years ago we got a grant from the Making All Voices Count Foundation to do some research into why it was that the most marginal in a society were not adopting the technology tools for transparency and accountability work. They found that a lot of the usual suspects or middle-class people who are comfortably off were responding to the use of technology to hold governments to account. So given that we have connections and networks with technology, with the activist communities around the world, this seemed like a good question for us to sort of engage with. So we did two studies, one in Kenya and the other in South Africa. In South Africa we looked at the housing and urban development rights activism community and focused particularly on women and black and mixed-race communities, activists and try to understand what their technology use looked like. There's a whole typology to movements and the landscape of activism which practitioners of civic tech need to recognize before they go in and start trying to implement tools. If you're a lawyer or a mass-based organization, you're going to respond to technology and its role in your life quite differently and what you think it can do for you. And I think that the key point is really that people who are marginal in a society often don't enjoy their full set of human rights and fundamental freedoms. When you don't have that or when the state sometimes is the one that's violating your human rights or not allowing you to enjoy your fundamental freedoms, then you're not going to be able to engage in a dialogue around transparency and accountability around civic technologies. There's something much more fundamental that needs to be in place. Everybody who's the usual suspect often has some of those rights in place already so then they can move to that next level of engaging with the state in the way that it functions. So I think the message of human rights actually being a big part of civic tech is something that we've discovered through our research. I think one of the things we could achieve through civic tech or through events like TicTac which bring this community together is to raise some issues around the actual application of technology in society. The keynote speaker today Guy Grossman talked about issues around anonymity and how somebody who is marginal in society may not feel empowered enough to speak up because there is a social cost to being socially engaged and I think that technology on the one hand kind of makes voice and agency seemingly possible but at the same time you know sort of like accentuates these sort of social costs because people do become visible. So I think just recognizing the kind of way in which people work with use and play with technologies is really important. We're not just citizens who want to improve society you know we're kind of we have many many personalities and we bring all of those things to our activism. My main motivation for coming to TicTac was well first to present research that we've done but also to I think engage with the community and get critical feedback. It's one thing to present this to the community that it's from and it's about which is also important but an entirely different thing to present work to your own community of peers and you know use that as part of a you know discussion and collaboration going forward.