 Okay, so hello. Good afternoon. My name is João Vasconcelos. I work for the OECD. It's a big pleasure to be here with you. It's also a challenge, as you know, to try to share this session after the lunch break in the second day. In any case, given the topic and also the interest that normally these kind of areas can bring, we'll try to make this session as interesting, as active, as provocative as possible. So the topic today is how to basically bring the citizens on board, mostly from a perspective of governments, and assuming that, as the title of the session says, that two heads are better than one, and how to mostly bring the civil society on board to work with the government. So during this session, I think we have here a very good panel of speakers. I have on my right Ms. Paula Forteza from the French National Assembly. I also have Mr. Álvaro Herrera from the government of the city of Buenos Aires, and I have also Ms. Anna Neves from representing the civil society from Noman. Before giving them the floor, I'll try just to introduce you here a little bit on our topic. And to start with, this was based on the discussion that I had previously with the speakers that is trying to understand what is, and being general about it, what is the general perception that citizens, or eventually, civic tech organizations have regarding governments. And when we talk about government, we talk really the institution, the public institution as a whole. And one general perception, and we can talk with every citizen out there, is that governments are complex. They are big machines, difficult to understand, difficult to manage, and also difficult to interact with. Sometimes, even, citizens look at governments from a perspective that, okay, they are big machines. They are also trying to always try to have some kind of control of procedures on how to direct citizens in terms of services, managing expectations of citizens. So, also, this perspective sometimes comes up. And even if we can jointly think about these two ideas of complexity, of big control, even of bureaucratic perspective, that's a bit the figure that we have from government, so that they can be quite scary sometimes. And I think you can share this vision with us. I'm trying to be provocative here, but mostly, I think we have a general understanding that citizens look at governments, that public institutions as locked institutions. So, with some that sometimes are opaque, not very transparent, difficult to understand, and sometimes even not really willing to cooperate with citizens, although some efforts are being done from that perspective. But I can assure you, and working with governments all over the world, from OECD member, but also partner countries, when you try to get the feedback from government officials about how to work with the civil society, how to have engaging policies, how to bring the citizens on board. We have perspectives like this one, like, let's be open and collaborative, let's bring the citizens, let's give them voice, let's share data, let's do all kinds of events so that citizens can have some kind of co-responsibility, some kind of co-ownership of the policies that are being put in place, mostly from a perspective of being open, having a open government and make it really, really an institution that wants to bring the citizens on board. Sometimes, even, we have this kind of perspective, that is, you have public officials that are so committed, they are so happy about having the citizens on board it, they have this kind of naive perspective of, hey, best friend forever, so let's have everybody here to cooperate with us. But, I can also assure you that this sometimes also happens, that is, governments do a big effort to bring the citizens on board, the civil society, the companies, the academia, all kind of stakeholders, and by one reason or another, and that's one of the things that we would like to discuss with you, the civil society is not really responding to the calls of government. Sometimes, some initiatives are put in place, and actually, whether we're talking about open-date participatory budgets, crowd-sourcing initiatives or others, so the civil society, the one that demands to be heard and to participate, it's not really there. So, trying to be provocative again about this, so the main issue of this, of our discussion here today is precisely how to make sure that governments and citizens, through digital technologies, are really able to work together, how to manage the expectations of both sides, which kind of winning perspectives or winning approaches can we have to really have this kind of good partnership and good collaboration. So, I'll give the floor to each one of my speakers here in the panel to give, so they can share their perspectives on this. So, I'll start with Paula, and the perspective from the French National Assembly. Thank you for inviting me, I'm very happy to be here. So, I think maybe the question can be also reversed. Maybe we can say it's not that we have to bring citizens on board, but we have to bring institutions and political representatives on board. We have in this, like, tech for politics or tech for public affairs movement, two big families. We have the open government and now open state movement, which is more of a bottom-down, top-down, sorry, movement, which has been gathered around the OGP, the open government partnership, where we have a kind of network of reformers coming from a little bit all over the world, and which are doing this effort of trying to be open, to do open data to launch all kind of initiatives, but that have trouble sometimes to mobilize communities and civil society. And we have on the other side this civic tech movement, which is more, which comes from civil society, where we have tools that have been used more during social movements, like in France, we have indignados in Spain, we had occupied Wall Street in the US, we have the movement in Taiwan, and we choose these tools to take collaborative decisions and to mobilize citizens and to work together. But that sometimes can get a bit isolated and that sometimes didn't get the political impact they were hoping for. So I think these two movements are kind of losing strength, and I think that if we want to save them or to make them obtain their results, we have to make them work together. And that's the only way we will have a real political impact, and that things that come bottom up will trigger real political decisions. That's the real issue. And in order to do that, we have some examples of people coming from civil society that got political responsibilities. We have Pablo Soto, for instance, Audrey Tang. I am very humbly trying to do the same, coming from civil society and getting a spot in the National Assembly and trying to hack the system from within and trying to make it change by infiltrating, let's say, institutions. And so I think that's the way to go, but we need to scale this up. We can't all only rely on some individuals that are doing this in a kind of isolated way. So how are we doing this at the National Assembly? We are trying to go beyond these platforms, these participatory platforms that have become kind of like playing fields, where political decision-making guys say, okay, you kids can play around here and we, the adults, are taking decisions on the other side. And when sometimes all these participatory initiatives are manipulated and used for communication aims and where anything that comes from these platforms doesn't translate in real political decisions. And so what we're trying to do is say, let's map all the entry points, all the moments during the legislative process where our participatory elements can be plugged in. And so not only do one consultation that is isolated and that happens like a way of the political process, but let's plug in citizen participation, citizen arguments all along the process. And so for instance, in the legislative process we have the moment of the agenda setting that can come through petitions. We have the moment of the amendments, the moment of the discussion between MPs, the moment where we follow up the implementation of the law, the moment where we evaluate the impact of the law. And in all of these moments, citizen can contribute and can have a word or something to say about it. So there's a lot of tools that can help us do that in a more dynamic, iterative and dynamic way. And so in a more technical way how we do this, because one of the challenges of all these platforms because today we have the tools. We have so many tools all around the world. A lot of them are open source. We can use them from one country to another. The problem is not the tool, but it's how we can outreach or make the right people get engaged on the platform or on the tool. And I think we have reached the point where citizens get engaged. Citizens respond to consultations, citizens participate. But they don't see that they're getting more and more frustrated because they don't see that this translates into real decision making. And how we're trying to take the problem the other way around and say we will first think about tools that are useful for MPs in our case under daily work. For instance, a platform to manage amendments. And where we're sure that they will use it because it's useful for them, it's practical and it's something that will simplify their work. And then we plug in features, participatory features on this tool like voting system or proc on arguments, et cetera, so that we already have influential people on the platform and they are organically exposed to this expression, citizen expression. And so we're trying to do this and it's really starting to work and we think it can be, it's an experiment, but we think it can be a way to turn the problem around. So that's my first... Ah, okay, good. As you know, as you can see I'm not a tech person. I work for the government. We're learning, but it takes some time. Well, at the beginning of the, in your opening remarks, Joel, you talked about how to bring citizens and civic tech organizations on board. And for us, those are two very different venues. I must say that we are very good at bringing citizens on board and we're not so good at bringing civic tech organizations on board. And that's something that is, it's a challenge, it's something that we have to improve. This slide has some examples of all the citizen-oriented policies that we have. Last year we launched an online participatory budget project which was extremely successful in terms of the quantity of citizens that participated. We got more than 26,000 proposals. We recently launched a project that's called Commissaria Sarcanas, the open police stations. So once a month, every first Thursday, the police stations which are more than 60 in the city of Buenos Aires are open to the public and the chief of the police station must be there with some members of the local parliament and members of the executive branch to be accountable to citizens, to listen to the citizens and to learn from their problems. Yesterday I told you about our platform on public works and also the city mayor and the deputy mayor have town hall meetings three times a week, each of them. So we can say that we are very close to the citizens and we are doing our best to try to listen to them and to process and capture all that information. And I think that's one of the key areas where civic tech organizations can help us. We are obtaining lots of information and we're trying to make a proper use of it, but I think we can improve and we can learn a lot by the type of work that civic tech leaders are doing and the type of projects that have been discussed over the last two days. And at the same time we are having problems at the city level in finding civic tech organizations that are focusing on cities and specifically in public services being delivered in the cities. So that for us I think is one of our biggest challenges. And at the same time we are open in spaces where this collaboration with civic tech organizations could take place. We are broadening the civic space, we are building new venues for enabling this type of interaction that so far as I said has been mostly focused on citizens. We are members of now full members of the Open Government Partnership. We were one of the 15 pioneers that joined OGP. Now we are full members. We have hackathons, we have these town hall meetings, we have an innovation lab, so we have many spaces in which we could improve the type of collaborative work with civic tech organizations and in fact we resort to them quite frequently. Let's say on a demand that is generated by the government, we are reaching out to civic tech organizations for help and it's not the same, you know, let's say backwards. We don't get many requests from civic tech organizations and I think I'm a former civil society person and I know the power of agenda setting that organizations have. So I think there is a lot of potential on that field. Right now we are working with the GOV lab in a project called the Civic Challenges and we are trying to get their help to resolve together in a collaborative fashion with citizens and public officials setting teams, mixed teams of citizens and public officials to solve problems that historically in the city could not be resolved. So we do realize that sometimes for most of the time citizens know more about their neighborhood than public officials and we want to bring that intelligence, that knowledge into the process of policymaking and I think that for that purpose civic tech organizations could make a huge difference. And I think we are doing, I mean we have a gap and I think it's our fault. I think we are not, we do not have the right tools to convene civic tech organizations and that's probably our main challenge. So thanks a lot Alvaro for this perspective from local governments. I'll give the floor to Anna from the civil society perspective. First of all, thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I feel very humbled because I'm just personally interested in the topic as a citizen and it's really weird being the last one to speak because you basically said it all and I was also curious, thinking that it's interesting to have such a strong spotlight on us because I think it kind of mimics what really happens which is a huge spotlight on citizens but also on government to do something and I think the problem is we're still seeing citizens and civic society as a separate entity from government and I think that's one of the key issues. I had prepared some notes which I will scrap because you said it all as I said but I will pick on something that Joao asked which is why is civic society not responding and I think I can talk for myself but also from lots of different civic society organizations that I know and I interview and I think it comes from a huge disbelief because even when government opens the doors you still wonder how really open is that door and there is a lot of focus on government creating tools for crowdsourcing ideas and for people to vote on ideas but then your ideas on your votes what happens to them afterwards is still a very opaque thing so in a way, yes, you're opening the doors but on the other hand there's something that still fosters and promotes this spirit of disbelief and the other thing which I think is probably in the root of everything it's the lack of engagement from when government does things the citizen is not there from day one even build a concept of the tool if you're creating a platform you're expecting the citizen to use the platform but the citizen was not involved in the process of creating it and the same thing happens in civic society projects to be fair which is citizens have great ideas civil society organizations have great ideas and they go ahead and do it and sometimes not consulting and involving the government from day one and these I think these lack of engagement from day one is probably what's the core at the root of the issue of the mistrust because I think there's a mutual mistrust here the other thing and it's part of this mistrust that is sometimes promoted by this openness how many open data portals do you exist in the same country it's just unbelievable the amount of this willingness to be open and opening your data me as a citizen have this idea that if you're opening your data but you're making people to go to 20 different sites to find data you're not being that open really and this is just an example of I don't know, almost dividing to conquer and not being really it's almost like institutions are more worried about stamping the initiative and saying we did it and this is a negative acting collectively as a group in the public interest and that I think it's also a cause for this mistrust the other thing I'm just going to pick on something that Paola said which you use a really interesting expression which is hacking the system and we are in a great audience we understand totally what that means but it's interesting how many people see that hacking carries a huge negative term and as change carries it's almost equivalent in that sense hacking and changing it feels very threatening because at the end of the day government are people and they're human beings as well and if government needs to be conscious about the language it uses I think we as civil society need to be very careful about language we use and communicating with government because there is mistrust there as well and we should not promote and this mistrust and I guess finally what I would like to say just for this intro is I think and I'm and this is very much a personal opinion although I know it's shared by many I don't think it's for the government and the public institutions to do the work and create the platforms and make it all happen because I don't think that's necessarily a role I think civil society as much of an interest in making things happen as government should and it's okay for civil society to take the reins and make things happen I think it's important for government to find a role and accept a role as a facilitator and almost as a scaffolding I like the idea of a scaffolding someone who's there to support and make civil society go higher because I think there are many we were talking about two heads there's billions of heads around the world there are more heads outside of government than there are heads inside government and that's math and I think government needs to acknowledge that and respect that and embrace that as an opportunity rather than a threat so thanks a lot I think we had very different perspectives here and they are complementary among themselves so let me probably make you a first question before giving the floor to the audience that is we discuss more and more in the OECD and it's not a new concept the issue of looking at government and trying to follow government as a platform approaches so meaning the government try to be open the finding guidelines, standards and having a different attitude towards citizens to really bring them on board and co-create with citizens several solutions as I told you, it's not a new concept but it's something that we really feel that even in OECD countries and in most advanced OECD countries in digital terms it's still something that is being developed right now do you think that's a good approach that should be followed? Yes, no, what are the key issues that should be considered when following this kind of approach? Do you want to start? Yes, I'm very OK with this concept we speak of National Assembly as a platform or as a platform Parliament as a platform so we borrow the expression to apply it to the parliament but we see it more in tech terms in terms of the administration of the National Assembly to give resources to civil society open data, open source code open APIs give the technical infrastructure so that we have these actors all around that can develop apps, that can develop services that are alternative and that can give more tools to MPs, to politics, to politicians et cetera so we think that should be the way to go, that the institution gives the basic resources and gives the whole liberty to this community to create and to flourish but we think one of the points that is crucial for this to happen is to have this community around that trusts the system and that I think the trust issue is key and this work in the long term where we have a relationship that gets created and nourished on the long run and to do that for instance we have launched with my team a project that's called the Bureau Vert in French it's like the open office so every Friday I open my office and I bring in and I invite anyone who wants to come really but it's civic tech initiatives it's developers, designers journalists, economists and it's kind of a continuous hackathon because we all know that in hackathons you never have the time to do what you wanted to do and it's always a bit frustrating in terms of results and products that you can develop so we follow up projects on the long run and it makes them understand how the machine works from within and what are the real needs of the MPs so that their services and their projects are really responding to these needs so that we can maximize uptake afterwards so I think you have to have the technical resources that are opened up by the institution and you have to have this constant dialogue so that the apps and the services that are developed respond to the real needs and that's the way you can have an ecosystem that works I think Thank you I totally agree I agree with the project that the government has more it's a platform as long as it has more resources in some way it's an uneven field in which I think governments have more responsibility but I do think we have to pay a lot of attention to some issues that Ana brought up for example when you mentioned the problem with open data and open data portals we feel the same way we invest a lot of money on those portals but we don't know who's using them it's a very small public and we're trying to improve them to make them more relevant to average citizens and probably what we're trying to do is to give more public value to information I think that I also agree with you with the fact that the government cannot do everything and not all the apps and all the platforms should be done by the government if the government opens the information in the right format there should be a collaboration with civic organizations or companies like Google that uses transport information to improve their apps so we are very concerned in terms of generating a public conversation on the importance not only the importance but also the relevance of information and data because if we fail at that I feel like this open government movement and all the open data will be just a fashion that will go by but if we succeed in making these tools and these strategies relevant to citizens there will be a demand for that there will be an electoral demand people will care about when it comes to voting so I think that's a major challenge that we have at the time making these reforms and this approach to government sustainable Anna please I have a computer science degree so platform in my language means technology but I have also derailed to the soft side so for me it's no longer the technology is the technology and mostly the people who use it so when we look at government as a platform I think yes it's the technology but above all is the culture that surrounds the technology that will empower people and encourage people to use it for what we intend them to use so I think it's really important that government yes embraces these initiatives and opens the data but also make sure that open data is used every time it communicates and people are encouraged to use it and it's great if government does hackathons and engages or invites civil society to use the open data and create new apps or if they open the data and say yes it's here for you to use but it would be so much better if then they would say come here find a date and see all these great examples of what citizens are doing with the open data because it's also and we talked about the mistrust thing it's also interesting when government creates these open data portals and makes data available and creates his own tools of looking at the data because I as a citizen and as a scientist if you want will always question if the visualization that it's being offered to me is the one that interests the government or is the one that I should be interested in as a citizen but this bit is a provocation so thanks a lot I think we've heard again different perspectives here several ideas are right now in the air let's call it like that so I would like also to give you the floor so you can put some questions to the speakers here so probably I'll collect for a set of questions have it there please can you please just identify yourselves and put your question thank you for a very interesting talk my name is Anna Coulomb from the Open University there's a growing body of evidence on the importance of offline or non online only spaces of citizen engagement and transformation so I'm wondering how much governments understand the potential of using online in combination with already powerful and existing offline spaces because perhaps I'm thinking it's not that citizens are not on board but maybe we're not knowing how to engage or where to reach them so interesting to hear more on that from you thank you we have other questions there please and also first here thank you so much for those interesting thoughts my name is Eshpa Nkwesiga from Parliament Watch so I come from Uganda and in Uganda when we had the presidential elections on the debt on the polling debt the internet was shut down and so what happened was a few brilliant people came up with this thing called VPN and they literally in almost a day taught the entire country how to use the internet if you have the main internet service providers shut down so the government said that it was because they didn't want the opposition parties to announce their own results which they said would lead people to just flood the streets in celebration of wrong election results so anyway they later reconnected the internet but more and more we see the same government using the same internet especially Facebook and Twitter as a platform or as a tool to make public announcements two months ago the president recently fired the head of police on Twitter so I guess my question to you is and this is a question to all the panelists from your experiences I guess how far have your governments gone in as far as using some of these tools to make public announcements thank you I'll just collect one last of this first round of questions I'm Jean Brice from Transparency International I will first start with a comment by saying I think you are expecting too much on technology and data because obviously we are developing technologies they are computer scientists so they cannot provide solutions to any kind of engagement issues they can just contribute to existing solutions so that will be my question to you when you want to engage for example women from a specific region or engage youth to politics what exactly is your approach where we can apply technology I'll be happy to hear if you could put my brain on and think about something I could develop that could help to enhance this solution so thank you we have already three questions I'll give the floor to our speakers Paul you want to start yes the first question on how to on the level of importance for us on how to articulate offline and online participation we have always done it that way any time we launch consultation or a participatory process we always do contribution events all over the territory and we go to the places we go to schools we go to universities we go to clubs we go to we don't reach eventually by only doing something online so I think it's key then we have on internet how do governments and political political figures use internet to do public announcements so in France we have a movement of political renewal with the Macron and the En Marche movement which brought in a lot of people coming from civil society and a lot of young people people that are very used to use social media and to use internet and these have changed a bit like the practices and we have a lot of ministers for instance that do online sessions on Facebook for instance or that use regularly sorry social media to communicate and to make political announcements so this is something that in France at least is getting stabilized as a practice the last question I'm sorry I didn't understand it very well but maybe my colleagues can come back to it afterwards quickly offline participation I totally agree with you it's extremely important first because there are sectors of the community that do not use technology or do not have access to the internet and we have seen in cases of ground base I don't know the term in English but ground base offline participation in for example for urbanizing some shanty towns or favelas within the city of Buenos Aires and those mechanisms were extremely successful in terms of the effect and the impact substantially probably more than our online mechanisms because it helped resolve very deep rooted problems of the city internet the use of networks and social networks and internet for making announcements I think it's political communication is changing all the time and yes lots of politics is going on online and in the city of Buenos Aires for example we have cabinet meetings that are broadcasted in Facebook so I think this is something that is everywhere now and it's unavoidable and for the last question if I got it right if you were talking about how to use technology or how to use using them or giving them more access I agree we have identified large sectors that are not using technology or cases in which for example elderly people that have a problem of being lonely because their relatives are not around and they do not know how to use the internet so we are developing a special program free where they have access to the things that they want this project was developed after a consultation process with a research project with elderly people and it has panic buttons access to medical information and to their medical records all type of things that are conceived to satisfy their needs but of course there are many sectors that need to receive more attention and could benefit more from new work by governments we are in Portugal so we are talking about the online and offline question I think I need to encourage you to have a look at what the Portuguese Government has recently done with the first national wide participatory budgeting process although the voting was online all the gathering of ideas was initially offline they basically went to the government went the Secretary of State in fact went around the country and had face-to-face meetings engaging with local entities and they worked the ideas so they engaged the elderly the people who don't use what have real needs so in a way it kind of also answers the third question I think at least it's an example of how it can be done and they literally worked with the people what's your pain and how can this pain be construed and used to create an idea that is good nationwide and obviously the voting was then done online but the core was born offline so it's interesting there are flaws in the process I'm the first one to identify them but I think it's a really really good first approach and I think it deserves your attention if you can maybe I can come back on the last question if I thought about it a bit I think you're talking about not having a tech solutionism approach or not expecting too much on technology I think the approach to have is to say technology is not an end in itself it's a means for a political will or a political program or a political action and there's always behind political action to put in place with this idea that technology is just a tool and a means towards a different end but I don't know if I understood we can chat afterwards if not so thank you I see one, two, three Hello, good afternoon my name is Marco Nopaki from ITS Rio, Brazil many of you have talked about the vision between solutions created by civil society and governments at ITS we always try to think our projects as multi-stakeholder solutions by design to potentialize social impact what are the biggest challenges to think civic solutions in a multi-stakeholder solution by design good afternoon my name is Jessica from Kenya my question is about the difference between civic tech and civil society is it that in your country majority of the time civic tech is run by organizations that are not civil society or just taking companies what would be a good model in your experience in the different challenges that you face in your day-to-day lives I think we have one more there yeah please Hi, John Bruce from Transparency International it's really great that we're having this talk with government and civil society on the same table but I think there's an inherent selection bias just by virtue of you being here you're already reformers and modernizers not every politician does the amazing thing that Paula is doing with opening the office on the Friday and letting developers and journalists come in and I appreciate my question it's very context dependent depends on the political economy I was wondering if you have any advice on how civil society can engage with politicians who are less willing to listen to us and who are not reformers and modernizers some maybe anecdotes or specific advice you might have on that thank you let me get another one Hi I'm Bruna, I'm also from Brazil and I'm president of the board of open knowledge in Brazil and also I lead an area of knowledge in innovation and organization a non-profit organization that works with public servants in over 100 cities in Brazil and our perspective is that the public service is somehow the first social control so in terms of tactics in this movement that we are talking about in civic tech my question is how can we make better use of public servants in this movement towards openness and what are the tactics that you've seen on this thank you we have already four questions I'll go to the speakers and ask them to be as focused as possible just talking about tools and about how we can make civil society and governments work together we had last year launched a project called the OGP Toolbox I don't know if you've heard about it which is kind of a mapping of all the existing civic tech tools designed or by civil society or by the government but more importantly where we tell stories about how these tools have been used or reused by different actors and what is very interesting is to see how we have this batch of tools that are open sourced and that are reused at the international level for instance in France which has been developed in Argentina and that's the software that we use today to make consultations in the French National Assembly we also use software that was developed in Iceland to make crowdsource questions to governments in the National Assembly we just had the chat that you are using to decide Madrid to make open budget in Argentina so that's how interesting that's the richness of this movement and how international it got to be and I think that maybe answers I don't know some of the questions sorry I'm trying to be as concise as I can and regarding how to onboard other politicians that are not yet familiarized with this way of working we have this challenge at the National Assembly we try to form them on digital issues on how to use digital tools and always with this very practical approach how these digital tools can help them simplify their daily tasks and their daily lives and their job and that's how they get to uptake to see the interest in it and then we move on to consultations to more developed and complex like collaboration systems so yeah I'll stay at that as for the question on the first one by Marco I think that one interesting approach is to have case studies proving the advantages of multi stakeholder approaches and that most public officials in Latin American countries are not aware of the advantages that these tools have and that's why many times they do not use it also it's true that they are more time consuming so probably you cannot use it for all parts of all the elements of the policy making process but I'm sure there is room for more use of these tools and I think one of the problems one of the challenges is the lack of knowledge so doing case studies and peer learning probably it could be a good approach and then on the question of civil society and civil texts whether or not they are the same at least in Argentina what we see we have a large civil society movement but it's not all fashion but it's more they have an institutional reform approach you know they are more political scientists economies, sociologists and on the other hand we have very few organizations that have technological skills so that's like a very scarce asset in our society and that's what with my presentation I mean to say well we need more investment on this type of organizations because everything that relates to evidence based policy and all the evidence generated by data it put public officials on the spotlight so it's a good way to improve policy and to make government officials accountable and how to engage politicians who are not reformers well we need to use this type of alliances I used to be a board member of the local chapter of Transparency International in Argentina and now I'm working for the government so I'm all the time telling my friends, I was going to say my former friends but we are still friends my friends how to support each other in this type of alliance and I think that type of alliance is very important especially in governments who have policies for civil society or for experts to bring governments that are mostly dominated by traditional politicians and also for the last question what I see in Argentina is that most government officials are not very aware of the open data movement for example so when we go knocking their doors telling them we run the open data portal and the data sets and there's 30 seconds of silence until you realize they are not familiar with that there's a lot of work to be done towards the core of the governments we are thinking of having an open data school or like an open data training program which is an idea that our friends from Govex Eric Ries and his colleagues gave us we need to generate more awareness within the government more capacity within the government to be able to use these tools and to be more aware of the advantages of these tools. Very quickly in terms of what I perceive to be the main difficulties or working with multi-stakeholders I think one of the hardships of working with government from the civil society perspective is there is an electoral mandate which in Portugal is four years it varies from country to country and that influences a lot the commitment to time the priorities and what civil society perceives to be a big issue today maybe it's not a very interesting one for media to cover or for the government to see as a priority and that has a huge impact on the level of acceptance and openness to whatever you're trying to create. In terms of engaging civil servers a servant sorry I like to think it's about inspiring them I worked in the government in UK so I was on the other side and I see a lot of hard-working people people who are committed to their work and love to do a good job and sometimes they just do not know how to do better so I think it's I like to think that it's a matter of inspiring them and it's not about teaching them what maybe what is about open data it's about what open data can do for them and how it can enable and empower them to do a better job. So I like to think about inspiration as a moto more so than information which I think it's scarier I'm looking right now at the time and I think we're really need to finish this probably you can address some questions here to our speakers during the break in any case before closing I would like to invite each one of our speakers to if you could share with us one lesson one thought one request here to this civic tech audience based on your experience during the last years what would be a key message a key idea that you would like to share I would love to have the opportunity to listen more to your stories and your use cases or the the examples that you have of civic tech initiatives that really had a political impact or that translated into decisions or and why do you think that was maybe we can launch like on twitter with the hashtag civic tech like some kind of examples if you have something to say so that we can go on exchanging about that and have some examples after this to share and to share outside of this conference. Thank you. Very short. Help us please. Does everyone have any questions or any questions or any suggestions that we are not familiar with? As I said, I am not a technological person. I have more institutional reform background and this today is speaking of inspiration for me. Every presentation I listened to was you know, I providing health information, immediately I thought of one problem we have in the city of Buenos Aires with migrant women who do not go to the hospitals because of cultural reasons and how we can use that type of idea to solve problems. I mean, I think we need to find mechanisms like this forum, you know, to have more of these type of encounters to get to know each other, to share ideas. We are very hungry of these type of ideas. I guess I'd like to invite us all, me included, to start thinking more of a we civil society against them government but more of a we who people who care about or versus people who don't care and don't care in the sense of maybe don't know enough to care about these topics and so but I think this is a different me versus them idea. So thanks a lot for sharing this. Thank you Paula, thank you Alvaro and thank you Anna. I think we had a lot of ideas that were shared here. For sure we will start having or we can continue our discussion during the break and I think you can all agree that this is a continuous effort. This is not we're not trying here to to find one solution, one answer or even a pack of answers. It's a continuous continuous process and I think that's also the commitment that each one of our speakers here had. So thanks a lot and okay see you around.