 All right, thanks for coming, everyone. So this session is Funding, Scaling, and Sustainable Growth. And we have three speakers. First up is Lucia Casale from Fundacion Avena in Mexico. We also have Helen Turek, a senior researcher at the Open Government Partnership. Sorry, senior regional coordinator at the Open Government Partnership in Germany. And Brandon Nolten, who's the lead digital architect in the government digital service in the UK. So each of them will be speaking for around 20 minutes and then we'll have 15 minutes at the end for questions and answers. So we'll begin with Lucia. Hello, everyone. My pleasure to be here. It's my first time in Tic Tac, so I'm very, very pleasure to be here. I will try to speak slowly because in Latin America we speak very quickly and speaking in English is not good. So I will try to speak very, very slow. I will present some lesson learned about a program, an alliance called the Latin American Alliance for Civic Technology, ALTEC, we call it, that works in Latin America. But I will start for the beginning. I'm Lucia, I'm a new Ryan that lives in Mexico and work for an international foundation that's called Avinah, that works for sustainable development in Latin America. Basically, from Latin America to Latin America. So we've been working in Latin America for 25 years. And this is ALTEC. And ALTEC supports the development of really supports the improvement in citizen participation using technology but seeing the technology not as I am. It's more like seeing like a vehicle to change public practices and private practice to accelerate impact. And when you think about our work in five years, you think, I don't know, we have supported 50 projects in 11 countries of Latin America working with different governments, CSOs, media between all those countries. And you think about diversity. You think about different realities, different languages, working with people from the cities, people from rural areas. But the real thing is that this is our community, how our community looks like. In generally, civic tech and transparency community in Latin America is pretty homogeneous. We are talking about men and women from cities that have PhD and masters and have been working a lot with transparency and accountability that is quite different to sink in a very diverse and inclusive process of participation. That is what we need when we think about the challenges of our democracy today. So we started to think a lot like two years ago, how we can get a more diverse participation in the civic tech field in Latin America how to increase the engagement of rural areas about women in different countries of the region. Most of the, more than the 50% of the population in Latin America are women. And the percentage of participation of women in Latin America is very slow because of violence, poverty, access to quality education. So we decided to start specifically to try to have an inclusive gender perspective in the developing of technology. Sorry for that. So, but it's so difficult how to create an inclusive participation without inclusive organizations. If you have like a very homogeneous set of organization it's difficult to disorganization engage different type of population. So we started to start with almost 30 organizations in 12 countries of Latin America to understand how to, or what was the feasibility to incorporate gender perspective. So we make a very long study and experiment that takes almost one year trying to understand the feasibility to institution feasibility, how the institutional where to incorporate a gender perspective. The hierarchical position, the culture also the political feasibility how the leaders of the organization will be open to incorporate this perspective. Also the technical, if the organization has the technical knowledge to incorporate a gender perspective and a more inclusive perspective of technology also the operation of feasibility. If they have the means to evaluate to really concrete like economics resources to try to implement this type of policy. After that we realize by meet about gender and inclusive technology that I would like to share with you. The first one is that in general when we talk about gender and technology the first things that we talk and we say is that when you have in the team of the organization some members that know about gender that mean that the project, the organization or even the event has a gender focus or is more inclusive because in some way we talk about gender that is completely false. The gender equity must be explicit to different means and for that is necessary that people train and develop different process inside the organizations. Also another thing that we hear a lot when we are talking about technology and citizen participation is that if we have in a room for example a workshop or events or I don't know a campaign a lot of women's and this project is automatically gender focus also in campaigns, no? Most of the person in the campaign were women so the campaign was gender focus so have an inclusive perspective and that is completely false because the organization is impossible to compare to have women in a room and to be able to create a more inclusive process. To create this inclusive process you have to think about dynamics and really review the relation of powers between the different people involved in this process. The third one is the willingness of a team of an organization to implement a gender vision in technology or an event is sufficient and sometimes and I see it a lot with government they want to create an inclusive way to participate but if you don't create the right mechanism specialize with specific protocols that take in account the difference in access to participation between men and women this process is not gender focus and it's not inclusive. The poor organization that works towards citizen participation or from the perspective of rights automatically promote the gender approach. We work a lot with human rights organization in Latin America that all the time are thinking about protecting rights but that necessarily not mean that these have a gender perspective or to have a more inclusive perspective. Perhaps we are talking about protecting access to information but no are thinking to have like a diverse access to information from the women's in the south of Chile to the women in Brazil. Finally, the gender perspective is only part of the the gender perspective is not only a part of the feminist agenda, it's a collective construction so it's not related to be a feminist and to create and to have a more inclusive technology don't have to be involved with feminists. And finally for us at the end of this whole process of experimentation is to recognize that technology is not neutral and if we want to scale civic tech we must to take in account that technology reflects our priorities, our preference, our prejudices and it's crucial to take in account this to really create more inclusive and a scaling process of participation. I think here in Latin America and also around the world. Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Helen Turek. I'm working for the Open Government Partnership. I have some slides as well if we could bring those up in a second. Yeah, it's my first time here at Tech Tech as well. I'm very happy to be here. Not my first time at the OECD, but I'm really here to learn and sort of soak up some of the information from the civic tech community because this is quite new for me. And with this presentation I hope to give you some ideas about how we can use OGP and Open Government approaches to support some of the work that you're doing and some of the projects associated with civic tech. I've heard on a few occasions that the Open Government and civic tech communities are not well integrated and I think this is an interesting thing because I imagine if you were to look at a Venn diagram of the two communities, there would be an obvious overlap. But I think we just haven't got around to sort of filling in the details of what that overlap looks like and I'm keen to build those connections because technology is really an important part of OGP's work. We have the ambition to make governments more responsive, inclusive and open with the idea that a more open government which allows public input and oversight is more credible and is more effective. And when we're talking about values like transparency, accountability, participation, it's really technology and civic tech projects that can bring that to life and make that very concrete. So through apps and through portals and platforms and really translating that into more information for the public, holding governments accountable and providing space and opportunity for participation. Yeah, so I'm going to give you some examples of really interesting civic tech projects that have taken place as part of the OGP process and I want to explain how being part of that process helped to catalyze something or bring something extra and give a bit more impact. Some of you have probably heard about some of these examples before but I want to show you how a platform like OGP can possibly help. So before I do that, just to give you some background on OGP, who's heard of OGP? Just, okay, all right, so that's quite a few in the room. So just some brief background. We are 79 members. Our newest country member is the Seychelles. I actually have some colleagues doing a kickoff workshop in the Seychelles this week. So Paris is lovely. That's... We're also working with local governments as well. So we have local members, 20 of them, and they range very much in terms of what they look like. So we're working with big cities like Seoul, Paris, Buenos Aires, but also places like a regency in Indonesia called Bojina Goro, a county in Kenya called El Goya Maraquat, also Ontario and Canada and Scotland. So we're working with a very diverse range of local governments. And part of the OGP partnership is, of course, the thousands of civil society organisations that we're working with. We're also working with multilateral organisations and other international NGOs as well. When a government joins OGP, they commit to three things. The first is a real constructive dialogue between government, civil society, citizens and other actors to define public problems which can be addressed through open government approaches. Secondly, they're committing to a two-year action plan which contains concrete commitments that address those public problems. And thirdly, they commit to an independent monitoring and assessment process. So we're looking at not only the progress on those commitments made in the action plan, but also the quality and depth of engagement between government and civil society. Before I give you the specific examples of civic tech projects that have been scaled via OGP, I want to briefly talk about Open Gov Week. So this took place last week, and I think this is a really cool example of how one OGP commitment in a country action plan was scaled into a global event. So back in 2017, the government of Italy held an open administration week where they invited other stakeholders, be it students, public administration bodies, civil society organisations, to develop their own events or activities under the banner of open government. And it was really that idea of, let's let a thousand flowers bloom. And the Italian government encouraged us to take this global. So we've done this the last two years. And last week, we had over 500 events across 55 different countries, within some non-OGP members as well. So that was really cool to see. And this is from Colombia. We have the Netherlands. This is Indonesia. This is Canada. This is Paraguay. And this is Secondi-Tekaradi, which is a pair of twin cities in Ghana. They're part of our local program. And a number of the activities that took place as part of Open Gov Week were civic tech-related initiatives. So there was hackathons in France and Canada. There was some open data workshops in Argentina. There was also people were rolling out tech for anti-corruption monitoring in Ukraine. So even though this broad initiative is not technically civic tech related, it's very much part and parcel of a number of the events that took place. Okay, I'm gonna jump into the three examples. This is an image from the anti-austerity protests in Madrid that erupted in the wake of the financial crisis starting in 2011. There was one particular protester. His name was Pablo Soto. Maybe some of you know him. He was a skilled engineer and he worked amongst a smaller group to help try and organize the protesters. It started off small and manageable, but they realized they needed some way to communicate, develop their tactics, develop ideas, vote on those ideas. So they built a platform to do this. And then in 2015, Pablo Soto, he was representing the Aloha Madrid, a political party, and he was elected as a councilman to Madrid City Council. And he took that software into the council and they rolled it out as a platform for Madrid called De Sede, Madrid. And this platform provides the opportunity for voting on participatory budgeting. Citizens can make proposals for how the city should be run and you can vote on those proposals. There's public debates. So this is a really holistic public participation platform that is used now in Madrid. And what is interesting is in 2016, Madrid joined OGP as part of the local program and within their first action plan, they committed to scaling this platform beyond Madrid City Council. And they did that. And now over a hundred cities and also some national governments are using this software. This is the underlying software, it's called Consul. And it's really exciting to see how this grew from one city to over a hundred and it's really built out a large community around the software and they actually have conferences and they meet to discuss how they're using this public participation tool. And I think there was three important things for the scaling of this. One was the fact that they always knew that they wanted to scale. So they built in some important factors to begin with, of course it's open source, it was free and they also set up a small international team who was going to be doing the outreach and the liaison. The Consul team also told me it was really important being part of the OGP network and that really helped them create that intergovernmental communication that was necessary for them to make the right contacts to set this up in other cities around the world. And we also have the Consul platform being used specifically for OGP processes as well but also much broader processes. And the third thing that was important was the fact that OGP helped to deepen the dialogue between government and citizens. And that was absolutely key for making a platform like this successful, to have the citizen demand and the interest to actually engage and use it. Okay, my next example comes from Kaduna State in Nigeria which is also part of our local program. In Kaduna there was a recognition from government and civil society and citizens that infrastructure projects were not being implemented properly, that money was going missing and things weren't getting done on time and getting done properly. So the state decided to start monitoring these projects. Originally it started enlisting the civil servants working for the government to go and start looking at these projects to see if what was supposed to be spent was actually being spent and actually happening but they realized they didn't have enough people so they crowdsourced citizens to do this for them. So this launched the Eyes and Ears project which engages citizens to report on the infrastructure projects via an app, via a hotline, also social media and text messaging so it's really a citizen engagement crowdsourced project. So this was actually launched before Kaduna joined OGP but with the first action plan of Kaduna in 2018 they committed to strengthening the broader citizen engagement ecosystem around this Eyes and Ears project and they did this by developing new kind of offline techniques including town halls, a radio show, trainings and really focusing on inclusion as well so ensuring that minorities and vulnerable groups are also being pulled into this broader ecosystem. My final example comes from back to Italy. In Italy, Italy is a recipient of EU cohesion funds and without wanting to sound too Trumpian but it's literally billions and billions of euros we're talking about when we're talking about these funds and this brings with it a risk obviously of corruption but it's also waste and general mismanagement but also there was a feeling in Italy that people didn't realize, didn't know what was being spent on these projects and why these projects were chosen and also what were the outcomes of these projects. So in 2012, the government launched this platform called Open Cohesiony where they put open data about every single project that is being funded by the cohesion funds so that ranges from huge infrastructure projects like highways and down to individual student grants so it was really the entire spectrum of funding. But what was interesting, they really focused on the reuse of this data and they built a couple of spin-off projects the first is called Monathon this is as you can see a combination of monitoring and marathon and this basically encourages the public to pick an interesting project from the Open Cohesiony platform and to go and self-organize and to check whether that's how that money is being spent and with that project is being delivered and then they should deliver a report to the platform. The other spin-off project which this is a really cool project this is the Open Cohesiony School which takes that monathon model but it's built out into a broader civic educational program which includes things like, you know learning about public policy, developing digital skills how to use open data, data journalism also things like they actually go and conduct interviews with people working on the projects meeting with local policy makers. So this, so as I mentioned Open Cohesiony was launched in 2012 and that was at the same time Italy joined OGP and the first OGP action plan had some commitments which supported parts of this broader project and when I spoke to the Open Cohesiony team they said it was again really important to be part of the OGP network and what was important was that they were already pretty well connected within the EU given this is a sort of an EU project and they were linked to governments working with the same kind of funding but they managed to make connections way beyond the EU so they cited a specific example where they met someone from the Philippines who was able to help them work through a specific challenge or problem. So that was one thing that was important. Another thing that was important was the fact that in Italy there have been numerous administrations since the launch of this Italian politics is quite dynamic let's say. So having Open Cohesiony connected to an international initiative and within it in the OGP action plan helped them with the continuity across administrations and got more buy-in from the rest of government and sort of had that support that was necessary to keep the project secure. And what's interesting also is then the current Italian action plan is under development at the moment and they are talking about possibly inserting Open Cohesiony's school into that platform to scale it much in the same way that Madrid scaled the city of Madrid beyond borders so that's something under discussion at the moment. Okay, I want to summarise also that's a image of the monitoring from Monathon. I want to summarise these three examples with a few observations about how OGP might be able to help civic tech projects. So one, as I mentioned, is this international connection so OGP is a huge global network of thousands of reformers and I think having the very specific connections between governments can be very helpful for some projects and others it's a more general being part of that community we can help make the connections to overcome challenges that's a big part of the work that I personally do and a number of my colleagues is trying to identify those opportunities to make connections and to support projects across borders. Second thing I think is important is the Government-Civil Society Cooperation. I had in the presentation this morning from Rebecca like we're at the stage now, the civic tech community as the stage now where it's really important to be working with institutions in a very constructive way and not just to be shouting at them. The OGP model is designed exactly for this. It is designed to build trust, to build cooperation and relationships between government and civil society. So if that's something your project needs, OGP can maybe help deliver on that. A third thing which I mentioned in the Italian example is securing government buy-in. In many countries, action plans are signed off at cabinet level and we always have a ministerial contact who is responsible for OGP at city level that's usually a mayor. So obviously that commitment is different from one country to the next but broadly speaking, it can help secure that political support and inter-governmental attention for a particular project. Fourthly, OGP offers a really strong framework for implementation and accountability. OGP action plans last for two years and we monitor those. So if a government says they're going to build a platform or a portal or something by the end of 2019, we're gonna check that and we're going to write a report about whether that happened and deliver that to the government and then they should respond to that and you could go around knocking on doors. So there is a very strong implementation accountability component. And then the final thing which didn't come up in these examples but I think worth mentioning. In many countries, donors, bilateral aid agencies, multilateral institutions are involved with OGP and are supporting action plans and the implementation of specific commitments. So putting something in an OGP action plan can help get financial support and bring that attention of donors. And something that some of you may have listened to earlier this morning about the OGP trust fund. This is a World Bank hosted fund which is our first effort at providing direct funding for the four parts of the OGP process and that could include the implementation of specific commitments. So that could include projects that were in an OGP action plan. I want to finalize the presentation by talking about what we could do better to work with the civic tech community and to support this kind of work. Firstly, I think you might notice that all of these apart from Madrid which is something of a hybrid are quite government initiated and government driven projects. We do have some really exciting citizen driven citizen initiated projects within OGP but I would like to see more frankly and so that's one thing. Secondly, I think just generally working with integrating, talking with the civic tech community. So this is obviously being present here today is one important step but I think we should be doing more of that. Thirdly, I think we can work with other organizations who are focused specifically on scaling projects. So for example, those who are funding, I'm living in Berlin, I've recently learned about the prototype fund which is a fund hosted by the Open Knowledge Foundation and they work to identify new projects, new apps and give one off funding to citizens to develop their ideas and I think it would be interesting to work with them to for example see whether there are projects that could be solved with open government approaches and whether that could be integrated in the OGP process for example. And the final point I think we could learn a lot from the approaches of the civic tech community. I think the methods of user testing, prototyping are really interesting and given that OGP action plans are government owned approved documents it can sometimes be a bit risk averse and I think I would like to see a bit more experimentation within OGP action plans and I think there's smart ways to do that and to be flexible and just to build in that kind of little bit more experimentation. So that's everything I have, thank you. My name is Brendon Oltan. I have at least one hat that is as an Irishman another one as a music teacher but weirdly at the moment I have one as a civil servant of the United Kingdom where I work in the cabinet office. Which I have to say is a really good vantage point if you care about trying to change the relationship between citizens and the state as I do and that is something that I think overlaps quite well with a lot of civic tech organizations. One of the things I got to do there was to be the tech architect of data.gov.uk which is one of our open government partnership commitments in the United Kingdom to make data open but the thing that I'm doing at the moment is acting as the tech lead for an innovation fund called GovTech Catalyst. So that's what I'm here to talk about. What we've been trying to do is to try to solve a tiny bit of this problem that government tends to have when it is very good at investing in innovation R&D, early basic research on one side and then when it actually comes to buying things and scaling and making it go bigger than that suddenly all the money has gone away and it isn't the same people thinking about it and it's not really something you can put into the world and that happens over and over and over again in the public sector. So we were trying to think of a way that we would do a sort of innovation fund but focus on scaling out from the beginning and make that the main thing that we were thinking about doing. So this is a little bit of our lessons learned from the first year of trying to actually do that. We did peel off some money for it out of the billion pound government investment in artificial intelligence in the UK. We managed to peel off 20 million over three years which in government terms, six million a year to try to improve services for 65 million odd people is actually not a huge amount but it's enough that we can do a lot of experimenting and look at scale quite quickly and so the way that we actually decided to do that was to focus a lot on that idea of partnership as was just mentioned, this idea that what we're going to be doing is connecting to tech companies, connecting to civic society organizations and specifically thinking about some of these civ techy sort of things that might help government to do its job better in delivering services and as an incidental effect of that or as a deliberate effect, create the sort of data and transparency that would allow more of those initiatives to go forward. So we created some public challenges and this was, we thought about, I think our funders at the Ministry of Business would probably have been happy for this to be a sort of go buy a bunch of robots fund and then go buy a bunch of artificial intelligence fund and then go buy a bunch of internet of whatever things but we thought that that sort of technology led question as Mark mentioned, first thing today, like it kind of begs the question, what's that actual question if the answer is artificial intelligence? So we crowdsourced what we were gonna actually be working on. We just kind of asked for ideas of public sector challenges and for each one we decided to ask them how well they understood what their users actually needed to do, like the person who actually needs to interact with the service, how well the public body understood what had been done in the space, so how well could they learn from what had come before and how much time and money and expertise and data and access to facilities and access to users can the public body actually put into this? So sure, we're happy to put in some of the money to do some of the work but that's kind of secretly about trying to get by and from public bodies to experiment. So we picked 15 things. I think a lot of them are very civ techie and then I'll say what we did to try to figure out how to structure this thing. So we did three rounds of five. We've picked 15 now. We're totally busy for the next two years. I've highlighted a couple that seem particularly civ techie. Finding, looking for terrorist propaganda online is difficult to find a single user for that but certainly trying to support a circular economy and understanding how waste works is actually a very civic problem as is dealing with loneliness and rural isolation, as is dealing with traffic congestion, as is helping local councils to support the people in their areas, especially more rural ones without a lot of urban areas, very tricky. Improving fire fire safety isn't necessarily the thing that matters to you until your house is actually the one that's burning but making better use of data for public sector audits is something where I would really hope to see a lot of both the resistance and the rebuilding and both the activism and the solidarity around holding government to account about whether we're spending money well and generating the data that lets people determine that. We thought that we would look at a little bit more about trying to find things that we don't want at our borders, not that that would in any way be a pressing issue for the UK. We did want to then look at our laws themselves. Can we find better overlaps between regulations that apply to a business? What is actually in effect right now? What do we need to send data to? How do you get better prescriptions when you move between different care environments that the government provides? And so we kind of found, we found 15, we funded them but we didn't know exactly what we were going to do in terms of trying to address the barriers. Like this essential problem of scale was the one that was still kind of alluding us. So being the government digital service, if you know us you probably have a sense that we're very big on kind of human-centered design in general and so we did some research. We wanted to try to figure out really framing the question in terms of like what's the problem here? Why is it hard for people to work with government? Why is it hard for projects to scale? Why is it hard to bring things from a sort of pilot idea into something that might make sense across an entire sector and would be financially and in every other policy way sustainable over a long period of time? It was all very confusing. It was all very unclear. Our funders at Her Majesty's Treasury, at the Ministry of Business, at the Department for Digital Culture and Media and Sport, these people all had different ideas of what this might be. So we figured we would have to try to unpack that a little bit. Our own team, we had the business case from the original £20 million and we could break that down into some questions but after we had kind of framed that, we did what we usually do, which is to go try to understand what are some goals of an actual discovery project and go out and talk to some actual people, which is how we do. So this is, we were trying to find places where the answer couldn't be found just by kind of reading documents but instead actually doing some interviews and talking to people. So we tried to mix, we talked to a mix of people in public bodies trying to do interesting work, trying to move on the quality of their services, use technology well and effectively, create good data and use it. And we talked to about half were organizations who had an understanding of technology and had an understanding of data but found it probably difficult to work with government. So our researchers, our user selectees, these were very tried to be evenly balanced. Of course it resulted as it always does in quite a bit of individual bits of information which we tried to lump and sort and put together. This was the first chance of one of our department for digital culture, media and sport being involved with the kind of pointy end of user research. So we got to baptize a few civil servants as well in the ways of post-its. And what did we learn? Learned a few things. So I probably don't need to tell you in any sort of surprising way that the culture of government is very tricky. Working with smaller organizations is perceived as being quite risky. Startups and smaller firms, especially when they're doing various projects, don't always have the capital and the time, the runway to actually wait out working with government. And so people say that government might do all this innovation stuff over here. We've got city labs and catapults and university transfers and R&D funds and fellowships, all sorts of stuff. But then that's nothing like the process that you actually go to if you're trying to have government invest in your project over a long period of time. So we needed to do a little bit about that. And even the people who were the best at this because in most cases, the civic organizations we wanted to work with and the tech companies we wanted to work with were way better at digital, way better at data, way better at human-centered design than the public bodies actually were. But they found it really hard to get access to the data that they actually needed to do a good job. I'm sure this doesn't, again, sound like a surprise and I'm sorry to say obvious things to a room full of experts. But I think this surprised some of our government stakeholders as well. That this was actually a barrier to keeping smaller enterprises and civic organizations from working with government. They could not compete with incumbents because incumbents had the database. And that's something that we saw a lot. And even when there wasn't a database that was wrapped up in incumbent, we found that a lot of the data that you would have needed to work with was locked up in other proprietary formats on desktops, on servers, places where you couldn't get access to. And so you really couldn't scale that. You couldn't really move out of the pilot phase. And that scalability is important because while we like doing pilots, government has to operate at scale. The stuff we have to make has to be for everyone. Really has to work for tens of millions of people at least. And this problem of scalability and knowing that you're working towards tens of millions of users, including the most difficult to reach users and the ones with the lowest digital skills and everything else about the difficulty of a universal service, that actually creates another barrier towards being able to do interesting kinds of innovation along with government. Because if you know that that's what you're going for and if the public body kind of sets up that partnership in such a way that they're saying, oh, yes, well, we'll experiment and then next year tens of millions of people, that's actually gonna be of a capacity problem for a lot of organizations who we otherwise would want to work with. And so even if you have the resources to show that an idea can work, it's very difficult to take that. And so again, gives more of an advantage to bigger companies, with bigger teams, with more money, with more runways, who can actually promise to be able to scale to tens of millions of people even if they don't even really know what the product or service is going to be yet. Working with government is an advantage. The actual sort of badge of working with government was something that a lot of people found very strong. It was, oddly enough, seen as being, deploying something in actual partnership with a local authority or an arms like body or an executive agency or a regulator or a rule maker, actually deploying something, it was assumed that whatever you had done must be much better tested and very rigorous. Anyone who has seen and worked with government technology probably knows this isn't always the case, but it is something that at least is the perception. So there are some advantages to actually working with government that actually help organizations to move on. Government doesn't really want to be an early adopter in many cases because of a somewhat natural conservatism of being able to, in the sense of needing to know that something will work, not being able to forward a lot of expensive failures at scale, but also more prosaic concerns like numbers of browsers you support and types of mobiles and ability to support and call centers and all sorts of things. It's tricky to jump into the newer things. And so the newer bits are perceived as being more risky. That makes it harder to come into government with an idea of partnership that depends on something that's kind of on the leading edge of how that technology might be developed. So government, I'm not gonna talk about blockchain and governments, it's its own thing, but if for some reason government did decide that this was a really important thing that we needed to know a lot about right now, it would be very difficult to do because it's tricky. The regulations are hard. In some ways, government actually has quite a bit of flexibility in buying things. We can do research projects, we can do innovation partnerships, we can do lots of ways of things that are not just typical contracts that are all written down with 50 pages or requirements at the beginning. There's nothing in the regs that says that you have to over-specify your projects. It's in the culture, though, that gets built on top of the regulations that people say, ah yes, we must over-specify our projects because that way it won't be our fault if something goes wrong. This obviously is a giant problem when you're trying to do something for the first time. And I would say that lots of people think that there are lots of more regulatory problems than there actually are with government doing something different. People think that state aid rules are really, really difficult, that that's the limitation. But in many cases, departments don't really understand that at all. It's not actually all that bad. And the procurement process, of course, is seen as being risky if it's new with the result that tech companies tend to avoid government altogether. But this means that instead of avoiding government, it means that, again, the bigger players, end up being the ones who come forward to meet the needs, which means that those bigger players are the ones who are able to build strong relationships, which means that government then has a bias towards working to people they already know personally and then companies without those relationships and organizations and societies have a hard time building them. It creates a vicious cycle from that. Knowing that you win tenders based on the personal relationship rather than an understanding of what you're trying to get done can be kind of a problem, which really brings to the last area of risk, which is what this really is all about. Citizen critical areas are tricky to innovate around. They're tricky to do new things because the financial risk and also they tend to be the really sensitive policy areas. Like these are almost the last thing that governments want to experiment with when they're trying to improve a policy or service because it feels like the hardest bit and the bit where if it doesn't work exactly as you think it's going to work, you'll be in the most trouble. And one thing that governments generally around the world say is that they really don't want to be in trouble or at least perceived to be spending money badly. And indeed we should not spend money badly. We should be good at what we do, but also crucially need to understand how to balance these different kinds of risks together. So we have a hard time with public bodies not really because they can't see the whole thing of what it looks like five years from now not wanting to start with it and not wanting to start with it because it seems difficult. So what have we done with this? We've designed our, at least this tiny experiment that we're doing from Cabinet Office is about continuing to try and continuing to make a couple of structural changes that we think will address some of these aspects of risk. So the process that we've tried to start with first instead of starting from the sort of technology and then working back to who in government might need this particular kind of robot instead crowdsourcing the actual policy challenges and then selecting those based on the ability of that kind of public sector team to be able to support a real design process. That I think is something that we are finding is very difficult to build up that skill but is also resulting in challenges that we think have a pretty good chance of actually getting out there into the world because the team's behind them. And even after we go through the whole kind of mechanical bits of putting stuff out to a challenge and evaluating all that which by the way is still less time than government often spends to do things. We're kind of forcing a certain understanding of risk by funding five organizations simultaneously to try showing the feasibility of whatever it is you're trying to solve. Knowing that you're not gonna end up turning all five of them into something that you do for years and years but just simply to say we're going to look at the program space. So we've been funding in our program five companies simultaneously giving them 50K, 10 week development program just to show the basic feasibility of their approach of what they want to try, of the way in which the platform or the civic network or the activism platform is going to work before we kind of go into saying this is something we could do a sort of private beta. But even there, after doing those show and tells to see all of these different groups we keep going with another half a million to each of two companies to actually spend 10 months really building out the product with actual users, with actual data, building things in very much in partnership and co-designing with the public body. Again, as a way to try to make sure that we keep that diversity of thought to make sure that the different ideas are still being considered. And then with what should be a better mix between the approach and the need of the actual policymaker we're trying to make sure that well before we get to the end of that second phase that we actually focus on the mechanics of making it possible for government to continue to invest in this platform or technology or team by helping teams to get onto frameworks for purchasing by helping them to establish a commercial route to market by helping them find subcontractors or other relationships that will help them meet the needs of scale that the public sector knows that it will need kind of a year from now. And so we try to make it so that the actual mechanics of being able to not only sign a contract with your one lead customer at the end of this one innovation challenge. Yes, that should be doable, but also it should be something that is almost immediately can be bought by any public body, at least in the UK. Any public body can invest in it and start getting some of the advantages of that approach. So I know it seems very technical and procurement based, but the results of our research kind of suggested to us that it was actually a lot of those bits that we needed to kind of fix more than to try to just kind of come up with better ideas because everyone has really, really good ideas. There's lots and lots of good ideas out there and they can really succeed very well. So this is our, you know, very, very small team and we are somewhat regretting commissioning, you know, 75 simultaneous projects right at the moment. But we are definitely learning a lot by doing that and thinking especially about and that forces us to focus on our own kind of multiplier effect which is to help public bodies get better at doing the sort of user centered projects that will in the long run be, you know, quite, quite virtuous for everyone involved. So, you know, please do take a look. We would like to learn very much from what you're trying to do and what you're experimenting with and would be very happy to get in touch at any point. So thank you very much. Definitely appreciate your time and attention. Cheers. Thanks very much for seeing Helen and Brandon. Do we have any questions? We've got plenty of time for questions, so let's start. And if you could just stand and say your name and your organization or affiliation, that would be great. Yes, so I'm Eric Ries from Johns Hopkins University in the US and my main question is for Lucia. So when you're thinking about the kind of gender work and perspective that you're doing, I'm just curious about how you start and how you and your organization started doing that from a very tactical perspective, like what did you do with the folks in your organization and the folks you were working with? Thank you. I would try to answer as I was saying, I work in international foundation and I lead an international alliance that's called Altec. And Altec spent like five years working with civic tech organizations in Latin America and one of the main problems in civic tech projects and organization and platforms in the region is the lack of engagement. For example, we have very successful project but at the end, they have like thousands of participants of in on the other hand, for example, you have like a very good moment at the beginning of the use of the platform. And after that, the use of the platform go down a lot, a lot. And when you start to analyze, sorry, the use of the platform and the different people involved, you realize that the type of participation is more or less the same. We are talking always about the same type of population related to the use. So we started to work with the organization and trying to know and understand what type, how they develop the workshop, how they develop the campaigns, how they try to engage with government, how they develop the commitment of OGB in the different countries. And thinking about that, we take a lot of information about that. So we develop an action plan for 30 organizations in Latin America. So we work with them for a year, trying to improve the way they develop technology, the way they started to sync in workshops, the way they develop campaigns, trying to include a gender perspective and a more inclusive way to engage people in general. So yes, at the end we have these meetings, but also we have like a very specific cases of improvement in, I don't know, like seven countries. Thank you. Many thanks to the panel. I would like to start by asking Lucia about a point you made around diversity, which I think is very important and inclusion. And to further ask, how you address the challenge of diversity within diversity? So for instance, we're talking about citizens, very important, but not a homogeneous category. Younger women, older women, women with disabilities, elderly women, we tend to forget that, they are part of community. I just want to understand better how you might respond to that or how you're responding to that in your projects. Helen, thank you for that example about Kaduna. I just want to understand a bit better because I live there in Nigeria and I've got some shared affinities with Kaduna State. And one of the lessons we're learning is that change will happen where you have changed champions, people in power, in government who want to do things a bit differently and they want to build systems. What are the lessons you're taking away from Kaduna State that you think we could scale up or replicate somewhere else? And thank you, Brendan, also for your intervention. This is not to put you on the spot. This is just a very honest question I want to ask because you mentioned the fact that sometimes maybe SMEs might not be able to get a big push in the door as much as the big multinational corporations. And interestingly, what got my attention was the last slide where you had a very hard-working team and the gentleman who had a post-it on his forehead saying how hard you work and I respect that. But it just occurred to me to ask, maybe your team might not also need to be a bit more diverse to replicate the diversity of the United Kingdom because sometimes it's about trust. Trust is also a function of who is talking to me and how I perceive their relationship to me. And so if we have a bit more diversity reflected in the team, might we be able to get more trust going? Thank you. First, thank you for the question. It's something that we are working on a lot and perhaps I don't have a complete answer. Avina is a quite diverse organization. We work from the Amazonia to Mexico City so the contexts are quite different and always I receive questions related to that. We try to develop some lines of works in order to be able not only to think in the gap between men and women, but also to think and to be more close to different environments. For example, we have a line of work related to civic tech in water and water. And other, for example, in biomass that we caught in Latin America is El Chaco Americano and La Amazonia that allow us to understand better and to develop civic technology thinking in a specific context and also in a very close alliance with the organization that have been working for many, many, many, many years in this specific context. For example, in the Amazonia, in Brazil, you have organizations that have been working for 30, 40 years and developing knowledge about the, for example, the forest, I don't know how to oversee the La Tala de Arboles. I don't know how to say it. And things like that. So we work in a very, very close relation with this type of organization and trying to engage with the, yes, with all the sector that work with them. Just about Kuduna, I'm sure you know far more about this project if you actually live there. But I think the key lesson that I wanted to extract from the example was that a project like Eisenhears, the sustainability and success of that depends on the broader ecosystem of participation. And I think that's really important when you have an exciting new project where citizens are asked to participate. How do you keep that enthusiasm going? How do you ensure the sustainability of such a project so they don't just report once and then say, oh, that's my job done, but they're motivated to continue. And I think that's why within the OGP Action Plan, it was interesting to see how they wanted to build out that ecosystem with online and offline techniques. And I think once you have that and you're working on that, then you can also develop new projects on top. And the issue you mentioned of champions, in every single OGP member, this is absolutely key. When we have political champions or champions within civil society, they can really help drive and push something forward. So that's absolutely key. And I think once, if we have champions in each sector that we're working with, that's the ideal situation, but that doesn't always happen. So identifying them, cultivating, nurturing champions, providing them the space and connecting them also with other champions and other countries is also really important. I'll just pick up the SME point quickly. I think what we're finding is that if we set small enough things to start with and then build from that rather than starting with the whole amount, we can actually set levels where the really big companies aren't interested in working with us because the small amounts at the beginning seem like they're not worth them doing a proposal. Whereas in fact, it does work fairly well for SMEs. So while we don't have a, in what we're trying to experiment with now, we don't have a cut off for organizations of a particular size, but 90% of the organizations we've been signing contracts with have been micro or SMEs in Britain and the larger companies just haven't really been, haven't been interested. I definitely take the point in terms of diversity of our own team. In our organization and the directorate we work in, our diversity is a bit better than the tech sector in general for both gender and ethnicity and other balance. The belt the same as the UK as a whole, but it's still nowhere close to where it needs to be. And I think that's a constant area of effort and something that we need to do very well on. We've made a conscious effort. I think we've done some, by doing things like having diverse hiring panels and, you know, requiring and reaching out to other sorts of communities to find people. We've increased the representation within our various teams quite a bit. We found that actually it takes some work, but very much pays off in the diversity of thought around the table. But as always, it's something to keep working on for a long time. Thank you. Just a question for Brendan. The, I mean, the process is really impressive, but I guess it also builds on the fact that in the UK there's been a lot of experimentation with kind of digital services and designing them and procuring them for a number of years. And some of us are in sort of contexts where it's like, you know, it's still like 15 years ago, you've got a monolithic IT department that signed a big contract with SAP and everything breaks three years later. So where would you suggest somebody start? Because this is like the end point of a number of years if a local government or a national government wanted to get better at this kind of procurement, what would be a place that they would start if they didn't have all of those years of experience? And the second thing was just one question on the bigger and smaller. I mean, one of the things that big companies do do is sometimes register branches that look very small. There was a story recently about AWS getting SME support from the UK government because it looked like a small company. How do you kind of filter that kind of gamesmanship out? So the question of where to start, I think if you know what you're going for, if you have a sense of a standard, either that you've kind of created yourself or have a way to adapt, that seems at least for the digital service has been the starting point is to say, this is what we think good looks like. And then we just look for every possible opportunity to apply that. For organizations with a lot of legacy IT, the places to do that are usually when contracts are ending and when you know that they're gonna end a year from now, that's the time to kind of say, well, we could just renew this contract with the supplier or we could actually look at whether what's being proposed fits these new principles that we think are important and that may level the playing field enough. It still takes time. It has taken many years in the UK government. We're very, very far away from having solved that. It's just, you need to have people. I think I would say that the actual spend control and assessment kind of assurance power in government to say what good looks like instead of just kind of being an innovation lab in the corner. That's actually what's allowed us to make whatever progress we have even though we have so many miles to go. And the question on gaming the system, I mean, sure, lots of people can use Microsoft as a subcontractor and yet that's be fronted by a company of two people. That does happen. We try to set up the structure, I suppose, the landscape such that we get the kind of people that we want to work with. And if really big companies want to create approaches within this idea of iterative user-driven development and if they're willing to not come in talking about a lot of proprietary both software and data standards that we can't support and don't fit our standards, like if they're actually willing to change what they do. Yeah, we're happy to work with them. Not in the sense that we want to get relocked into a new set of standards, but just that if someone's willing to actually make a significant progress towards being more open in both their code and their data, sure, they should definitely work with the public sector. That doesn't mean we won't go to them only, if that makes sense. We have time for a couple more, so. Hi, thank you very much. So I had a question for Helen and one for Brendan. So for Helen, you talked about the thousand flowers idea and I think that's a really good approach and it's kind of underused because people want to avoid duplicating work when quite often it's valuable. But how do you prune perhaps unsavory flowers or ideas that might not fit either like your ethical standards or the other standards? And then for Brendan, where civic tech is quite often not-for-profit, how do you encourage kind of local government and central government to integrate not-for-profit? So free civic tech. So rather than procurement, just get them to use stuff that's all free to improve service to the free. It's a very interesting question pruning our flowers. I mean, the whole premise of OGP is this, let the thousand flowers bloom homegrown. OGP is voluntary mechanism and within a country how the OGP process looks like and what goes in an action plan is driven by the actors in country and I think that's really the beauty of OGP. We do have some mechanisms and channels for dealing with, I would say countries or governments that are acting contrary to what we call OGP values. So for example, civic space is always top of mind for OGP. Without the space for dialogue and action, the process itself doesn't work. So we do have a mechanism whereby, for example, civil society organizations or other actors can file official complaints to the OGP support unit if, for example, there is a serious case of squeezing civic space and for example, that's in process with Azerbaijan at the moment. So we do have some mechanisms in place, but as I said, it is a voluntary mechanism. We can't go around and check on every tiny little interaction. Of course, we're not policing anything, but I think this is called the response policy we have at OGP. I think this is really the key way for addressing those major concerns that might crop up within OGP. And I suppose a point on the nonprofits to your question. Of course, government behaves as a nonprofit and in many ways would rather work with nonprofits. If you're working with government though, there's something nice about a contract, even if it doesn't involve money, because it kind of establishes who's responsible and sets an expectation for how you're going to be working together into the future. If you need a public body to invest in, to continue to support your platform, whether they actually do work or someone else does work, you probably need to know about what its sustainability picture looks like into the future, how it's going to be maintained and patched and continue to be made secure, but also how you're going to continue to learn more about the problem space and how to adapt it over time. In many cases, when the value is accruing to the citizen, you have a kind of a very classic public good problem where it actually is in the interest of the state or the local authority to invest in keeping certain platforms going, even if that's just to support the sustainability of a nonprofit. Most public services absolutely need to be free at the point of delivery to citizens, but because all services need to continue to be maintained and patched over time and changed and adapted, someone should pay for that. And in many cases, it really ought to be government and is actually better for the overall ecosystem in the long run to partner with organizations who can do that. So I think it's entirely reasonable for nonprofits to ask government for money at the same time government very much is interested in lots of different kinds of business models for sustainability. And sometimes signing a contract helps us to say what we'll do on our end of the bargain over time. Anyone for a final question? No, then we'll wrap up and let's just thank our three speakers again.