 Rwy'n credu y cyfnod yn cyffredinol o'r sefyllfa ysgwrdd. Rwy'n meddwl am yr oedd ymgylcheddol, rwy'n meddwl am gyfaintol, ac rwy'n meddwl am y gweithio y byddwch i'w gweithio arni. Rwy'n meddwl am gydig i gyda'r hwn o'r sgwrdd ymyl yn cymhwyllol. Rwy'n meddwl i'r sgwrdd ymgylchio arni. Rydw i'n meddwl ar gweithio'r sgwrdd. Fylltodd ar hynny o gweithio, Dyma'r unrhyw ychydig i'w casio, Otwzek a Stefan Mac. Hyddi gweithio. Rhaid i. Rhyw ddim yn yma'r gweithio, ddweud â ddim yma pob yma i ddim yn y gweithio. Ac rwyf wedi bod yn ei hun. Rhyw gwybod hwnna gydig i'w ddweud, ond rydyn nhw'n ei wneud. Dwi'n fydda i'r eich hir a'r ddweud, byddwn yn ei rhaid i'r eich hir. Felly rydyn ni'n gweithio cyhoedd yma i'w ddweud. But you probably are also a bit tired so I'm going to start with some hard facts. Did you know that by 2020 there will be 30 billion IoT devices connected to the internet? But at the same time, an analysis of 10 million leak passwords show that the most commonly used password is 123456. There is a social network called AHA that enables LGBT communities to communicate anonymously with peers all around the world. But at the same time, the seven most popular social networks I owned only by three companies. Did you know that the tech industry uses more energy electricity than the airplane industry? But at the same time, there is an AI bot in Brazil called Segoneta de Amor that holds politicians accountable. So you might be thinking now, is the internet healthy? Is it serving us, our society? Or is it unhealthy? Is it damaging us? Maybe you're here to hear it from us. After all, we need our session when the internet is healthy. Maybe you are expecting some kind of score. But the answer is, as usual, also in life, it's complicated. My name is Kasia Adonoseg. I'm by education, a lawyer and political scientist, but by heart a long time digital rights activist. And I think about this issue a lot in my private life and in my professional life. I work for Mozilla Foundation on a project called the Internet Health Report, and I'm here with Stefan. I'm the data and research analyst for the Health Report, and I have a background in media communication studies, and basically my job is to look into the studies that became included to talk about the health of the internet. Many of you probably are familiar with the work of Mozilla as the creator of the Firefox browser, but Mozilla is much more than that. The foundation we do a lot of advocacy, awareness work. We see internet as a public resource, and we try to keep it open and accessible to all. And the Internet Health Report is part of this work. It's an annual open source publication where we gather stories, so we interview people, we visualize data and talk about studies. We try to answer the question whether the internet is a force for good or whether or not, and above all who and how is doing something about it, just like many of you today in this room. And also I imagine that many of you here are researchers and civic tech activists, so on a daily basis you deal with the question how to leverage technology for public good. And I imagine also that you sometimes wonder what does it really mean, public good, especially in times when many product decisions and development that are very made with well intentions have many negative unintended consequences. So we're here not to give you a ready-made answer, obviously, but in the next 20 minutes we're going to present a framework that we developed at Mozilla with many partners, a framework called the Internet Health, that gives us a way to think about the Internet and its all complexity, that gives us guiding questions to understand which kind of Internet do we want to have and where we are now. And by the end of the session hopefully you're also going to find it useful, maybe as a tool in your work how to think about this thing, how to think about the Internet as an ecosystem, how to connect adults, and also how to use this framework as a tool to leverage change on a local or global level. So how are we going to do it? First we're going to present you the framework that consists of five issues. We're going to shortly dive into each of the issues and explain their meaning and also try to think about how this applies to civic tech. Then we're going to shortly tell you about how do we put the Internet Health report together, because it's an unusual thing, our process. And then Stefan will tell you more about data and research and how he works with researchers' academics around the world to do data visualisations. And finally I'll tell you a little bit about how people and organisations are already using the Internet Health report in their work. We hope that maybe you can also find it useful to advocate for your cause. So you probably already know that when we talk about Internet Health, we don't mean it in a medical sense, it's not about the Internet being sick or healthly doctors' hospitals and so on, but it's more about public good. Whether it solves us or it harms us. And when you think about your work, I would argue that civic tech is contributing to a healthier Internet, but at the same time healthy Internet, a healthy ecosystem is a foundation for civic tech to have actual impact. If the system is distorted, so might be the impact of your work as well. If you imagine the Internet being an unsafe place or an unwelcoming place, it's going to be difficult if you operate in such a system to get the impact that you're intending to have. So let's have a look at the framework. These are five issues. These are lenses which help us to analyse Internet. We first ask whether Internet is safe. So we talk about privacy and security. And the Internet is now our environment. It's where we live, where we love, where we communicate, and we want to feel like ourselves. I think you would agree. But you only can feel like yourself if you can trust the system that protects you, if you have actually trust. I think in the last years and months we've seen so many headlines about one bridge after another, being at least me personally I lost some of the stress. My personal credit card data was leaked out after I bought a yoga mat in the US store. I got a notification from the shop two months after telling me to check with my bank if everything's okay. That's been great. So our financial, social, political and the most intimate data might expose us to harm once it's leaked. In the upcoming report, we're going to publish the next report in April 2019. We're going to be also talking about the threat that comes from sharing the DNA data. But what about civic tech? When you think about privacy and security, that should also definitely be a concern. And I wanted to ask you here in the room how many of you think that the technology you're building or it's being built as part of civic tech, do you think it's secure? And does it consider the privacy of users? How many of you think that it is? Just a few hands and how many of you don't know? And it should be that not so many hands. I think that's also a signal that that should become a bigger priority. People trust when you offer services or when you offer services and so on. That should be a place where the users and the citizens can trust you. If you lose the stress one time, it's going to be very hard to get it back. The next issue that we ask, the question we ask is how open is the internet. So that's an issue that the civic tech feels you're very familiar with. The openness of the internet is part of it. That's how internet came to be, how we know it. It's an underlying infrastructure of the internet that enables participation, innovation, and so on. So we kind of take it as a given. But right now, at least at Mozilla, we're talking about the so-called third way of open, because the context changes a bit. And the openness is a constant threat. We always need to fight for it. Especially in 2017, the debate sharpened when we witnessed a lot of debate about misinformation, hate speech, and harassment, and people started asking, how can we have an internet that is both open and inclusive? So there is a tension there. At the same time, there's a lot of debates around copyright. There is governance, but they're shutting the internet down, just as they please. At the same time, we have corporations who are enclosing control of our web technologies. Most recently, there's so much debate about artificial intelligence and how openness should be. How do we keep the corporations and the AI accountable? It's also something I think is relevant for civic tech as well. In the future, you're going to be using it or maybe using it already. You'd like to know what goes inside the algorithm. Also, the question is like, who's going to build machine learning solutions and artificial intelligence that benefits our societies? What are the incentives that play and so on? So in the upcoming report, we're also going to be talking about exactly these issues. Artificial intelligence will be a big topic. The third issue of our framework is digital inclusion. So this inclusiveness, I just mentioned. So we ask who is welcome online. And probably most of you already heard that half of the population is online already. That means half of the people are offline. But even within the people who are online learning, there is a big digital divide and it's still growing. So it's not only about having access to internet, but also how it passes your internet and who has access to it and how does this access look like. A healthy internet is a fast internet. The same applies to civic tech. And the question is like, who's building civic tech technology for whom? Who can benefit from it? How do you create safe and welcoming spaces? That considers such factors as gender and age, geography, speed and so on. Next issue is rapid literacy. So we ask who can succeed online. This issue is tightly connected to the digital inclusion. We say that getting online isn't enough. So it isn't enough only to consume the internet, but we want everybody to be able to have the skills to participate and to co-create the web. So it's getting easier and easier now. It seems that web literacy is at our grasp. We have a lot of devices that have intuitive interfaces and so on. Even people who are not able to read can now access the internet. But these are just the skills that will pick up on their way. There is a lot of skills that we still need to acquire as a new digital citizen, let's say, to tap into the full pool of opportunities that internet offers us or to avoid the risks. And that's especially true for groups that are vulnerable, for example activists that are prosecuted in countries with authoritarian governments or LGBT communities and so on. So that's also another issue that I think the civic tech field needs to think about. And I'm aware of the research, but it's all in my society's research about who benefits from civic tech. We also should ask the questions between the people we address with the tools you're building, do they have skills to actually use them, and do they understand the environment they're embedded in. And finally, who controls the internet? Here we talk about decentralisation. I personally think it's a crown jewel in our framework. As we all know, we have a few large players, five of them in the United States and some of them in China, which is world on its own right now, that dominate much of our online experience. But we think that the internet is healthier when it's controlled by many. And I'm not going to list all the problems that are resolved from the extreme consolidation of power that we're witnessing right now online. But we need to start asking questions how do we rebalance power between the users and the big corporations that control our user experience. There is no easy answers to that, but maybe we can think about peer-to-peer solutions. We can start discussing business models, alternative business models such as there's a movement of platform co-registerising, and so on. I think that this is also relevant for civic tech. To me it seems as a distribution of power and letting the citizens participate in common decision making is at its core of civic tech. But at the same time, you can look at your own field and ask yourself, is it centralised or is it decentralised? Who's funding it? Who takes decision? Who ends up building civic tech? That also applies to the infrastructure that civic tech relies on. Which infrastructure are you using to be most effective? And which incentives are there at play? All right. So we went through the five issues. I hope I wasn't too fast, but I've been looking at me to hurry up. So this is the framework we work with to create the internet health report. These are the questions we ask ourselves. So now a couple of words about how we put the report together. The report started in 2017. So now in April we're going to be publishing the second full version. It's a collaborative effort. So it was designed from the very start as a shared resource. But we're not doing it alone. We're not sitting in Berlin or in Toronto and writing it down, which we think is important for internet. We're actually doing it publicly. We do a public call for ideas. We did it in October last year via Twitter and on our website. We asked what should go into the next report. What do you think is relevant for the internet? Was it healthy? Was it unhealthy? And to almost always a surprise, we got more than 300 people who submitted substantial ideas via Twitter. But we also got really long essays via email. People put their hearts out telling them what's important for them. And many of these ideas ended up in the report that we're going to publish in April. The second part of the collaborative effort is that we're working with worldwide network of experts, analyze people from the web foundation, access now and so on. And they actually do line item edits in the drafts of the report, making it better. That, of course, our editor, Salama Larsen, who is in Berlin, that gives her a lot of sleep last night because it's an excruciating process. But it makes the report so much better and there is a much stronger feeling of co-ownership. And how we work with data, Stefan will tell you more about it. Yes, thank you. So I will try to be quick. So basically this collaborative effort is also influencing the way we work with data. I will try always to include the researchers whose data we use in the report, asking for clarifications, but also inviting them to provide feedback on early drafts, for example. And I'm sure that many of you here have access to interesting data of a study or do research themselves. And there's so much out there that we're not aware of that we would love you to get in touch with us. And I just want to outline some of the very basic criteria that we use to select data and studies. So the first one that you already see here is that we are interested in studies that have a global perspective. And when we say global perspective, we mean global relevance. This can either mean that the data or the studies is really global in scope, but that's of course the exception. What is much more common and just as interesting to us are studies in data which help us to put a global phenomenon into context to basically to see how a global phenomenon manifests itself in a particular context. So for example, a study about misinformation in India, for example, is totally interesting to us, especially if we have other studies and data that help us to contextualize the situation and get this more transnational perspective. The second aspect that is important to us when we select studies is that we are always interested in trends, of course, because this is an annual report that tries to assess current developments on the internet. So if we have a study or data that shows us whether something is healthier or unhealthier over time, that's always something that is interesting to us. But it doesn't always have to be about trends. We are also interested in studies that help us to understand connections and dimensions of particular phenomena. So next news report we will, for example, try to show the connections between misinformation campaigns, harassment against journalists and the question of social media platform governance. The last point is pretty obvious, but if you have a detailed methodology section and access to the data that you have, that's very helpful. The methodology section is usually not the problem. Most of the studies we do have a good methodology section, but it's sometimes missing, though, and this is why I want to point it out is a clear description of what the limitations of the study. Often knowing what the data is not telling us is just as interesting for us as the actual findings, so we can put it into perspective. And as you can see on the slide, if we have access to the data, we will take a closer look at it and it enables us to come up with our own story suggestions. I just want to emphasise that we're not only interested in quantitative study or research, we're just as interested in qualitative research, even though in qualitative research you often don't have data to visualise or you cannot share the data for privacy reasons, for example, but that doesn't mean it's not interesting to us. Like a qualitative study about misinformation in India, to use this example again, it's just as interesting to us as a quantitative study about the same subject. And with that, I will give it back to you. And to the last part of our presentation, how can you use the report? So, Steph, I told you a little bit about how you can contribute to the report with your research, but you can also use the report, the framework itself of the report that you're producing for your own cause. So, to give you a couple of examples of how it's being used already, the New York City created their own local internet health report. They used the framework of the five issues, and then they turned to the communities in the city, and they told stories, for example, how open data is being used for rent control in the city, and so on. And we're working also with conference in Latin America that's going to produce a whole internet health track as part of the conference. We're also going to produce some locally relevant, originally relevant content with them that also will be turned into local health report. So, why is this good? We found it very useful, too, to gather communities, work on issues, to connect with those, to connect the communities with each other, and also to uncover research that is locally relevant, doesn't have to be global in this case, and the local health report that it's locally relevant, and then, once you visualize it, you can start using it for advocacy. We also had cases of integration of the reporting curriculums. A professor in Toronto, as well as a teacher in Cairo, integrated the report as part of their lessons and whole student scores. And we have dozens and dozens of events all around the world happening where the internet health report is a conversation starter. To, again, talk about the issues and the internet and how it's perceived on a local level. So, please be here to also learn from you and then to involve you in our work, if you are up for it, to make our work available and useful to you. These are our email addresses we hear for the whole conference. Today and tomorrow, the first one is mine. If you want to do something with the report, the second one is Stefan. If you would like to, if you have some research you heard about the research you could use, just hit us up. And, most importantly, on April 24, the next internet health report is coming to the internet near you. Thank you. We'll do questions at the end. We'll have more Ruben Stein and Tim Davies talking about the state of open data. Hello everybody. I'm very loud. Do I need a microphone? Okay, I'll be fine. Hi, welcome. This is really exciting for Tim and I because we've been working on this for 18 months and we can finally discuss it publicly and tell you what we think for now. So, we are the state of open data. So, what the hell is the state of open data? We are a very ambitious research been done for 18 months. We have 66 authors, 37 chapters, one of the authors in the room here, Barbara. Looking at open data from different perspective, our idea is to look at a decade of open data, sometimes a bit more, and try to be very critical and understand what is the history of open data and maybe where we're going to move forward and how we can basically shape open data in the coming years. And I was thinking on Rebecca's keynote this morning and the stages of civic tech, and there are some similarities and some stuff that are different. Also, this is very qualitative research. I think it's interesting, so I'll tell you also why. So, why are we doing the state of open data now? So, if we're looking from the Obama declaration of open data from 2009 until now, we have many changes and we think this is time to take stock of open data and understand where we were and how we're going, but also a thought, if you're a practitioner new to open data, you don't really have one source to go and understand what was done before you, when and how, and this is where we started with this ambitious project of starting to understand how different sectors, different regions, different stakeholders are looking at open data and what we can learn from it. So, we hope that this will be a very also practical guide to people from different type of stakeholders to understand and work with open data. We want it to be useful. We also want it to be academic enough and rigorous enough so we can support it. So, we designed a very nice complex methodology that not always academic, but we think it's helping us to move forward. So, the state of open data started in stages and we believe in the state of open data that research methodology is also open participatory and try to be inclusive. We do understand that we can't include all people all the time, but we try to be as inclusive and possible and see different lenses and different points of view. So, each chapter started with their authors looking at specific questions of environment scan, basically try to understand what is the history issues that the thing that should be discussed who evidence and resources. Then, what we've done, which was for us was new, is that we put all of them on a Google Doc and asked people to contribute to it. We had 145 different contributions for a topic like open data. It's pretty nice and besides of our authors, so with it we have like 200 different contribution of people discussing with one another and giving input into the research and that input helped the different author to shape their chapters and write them going forward. Then, we tried to do whatever good research do is to give it to a peer review. It's not very academic peer review what we've done, but we did basically ask from a group of practitioner and people from academia and from government to tell us basically what they think is missing and what can work. So, they have all these prompts that are here. We then send it back for the reviewer for writing a draft and maybe two or maybe three. It depends of like how many feedback we got and hopefully, not hopefully, we will be publishing the full report in May at the OJP summit. So, I'm now going to hand over to Tim who will tell you what we found out in the meanwhile. So, I'm feeling this session as a whole, this trailers for upcoming reports. You've got your April Reading List sorted. Next up is your May Reading List and this is really useful for us to have a first chance to play these thoughts back. The final draft of the conclusion goes in in about ten days' time so your feedback will be really valued. What we've sought to do in this project is look at the landscape of open data through five different lenses. One of those cross-cutting, four of them become the sections of our book. So, the first lens has been a historical look. We say we're taking a ten-year view of what's happened in open data and you saw from Rebecca this morning this kind of sense that we've been through some periods in civic tech. Open data is a kind of subset of civic tech or a overlapping bit of the Venn diagram has done similar. We had our inception period. We had systematisation. We had expansion and we are very much in this period of re-evaluation, introspection, reflection as we all try and work out what this stuff we've been working on means today. And Amidiar and Luminat have also done some work where they find these phases. Now, I've graphed this a little bit to say expansion there is the peak of government excitement around the world and we are past that peak. We've got to be realistic. We're past the time when there will be big policy declarations talking about open data in that language. So then when we started to look at a regional lens that raised some interesting questions. Does that mean that we're going into a period where open data is kind of heading into a terminal decline? Are we seeing regions adapt and engage with open data in different ways? And what we see in the different, we had different authors look at their regions explore what's going on and we see different narratives emerging to sustain open data work. So in MENA for example it's wrapped up in a narrative of data driven innovation. In Africa we see a much tighter link to sustainable development data agendas and national statistics offices and framing there. In Europe there's been this longstanding link to a narrative of public sector information in European Union directives. In Eastern Europe and Central Asia it's accountability and anti-corruption initiatives who have got hold of open data used it in very focused ways things like open contracting or beneficial ownership transparency or extractives industry transparency. In Asia our chapter picks up on the fact it's been predominantly national level initiatives till now but argues that we need to see much more at the local level in order to be able to sustain open data in light of a changing national political climate in many countries. And then we also see real difference in the nature of communities Latin America having a particularly strong multi-stakeholder community where government and civil society work strongly together and in North America, Australia and New Zealand a real narrative of open data shifting to government analytics conversations and the state taking on how it embeds data practices internally. So that raises all sorts of interesting questions about whether these are just different narratives over the top of a common idea of what open data is or whether we're seeing a bifurcation as sort of heading off in different directions on a global open data community. And that expansion phase was not only a geographic expansion that saw initiatives in every region of the world but was also a sectoral expansion that's seen open data in a real wide range of sectors and we in this project have been very informed by the Open Data for Development Network and the International Open Data Conference and things like the G8 Open Data Charter and we used those to identify 16 different sectors there were many more we could have covered but where open data is in practice and we've tried to look at the state of practice around open data creation, sharing and use in these different settings and we see for example in agriculture really large networking initiatives through things like the global open data for agriculture and nutrition network that tries to bring together private sector, public sector and third sector stakeholders to talk about creating open infrastructures in extractives we see initiatives like the extractives industry transparency initiative, long standing initiative embedding open data in its practices picking this up as a tool to integrate in what it's doing in corporate ownership transparency we see post financial crisis open data again becoming a regulator's tool global legal entity identifies things to identify companies being open data baked in due to the advocacy of some key stakeholders and the currency of open data as an idea but across these sectors I want to just look at three which have maybe a different story and are quite instructive to look at both where progress has been made but also areas where there have been challenges so in government finance for example government finance work was pivotal in some of the earliest articulation of an open data movement where does my money go so the 2007 was a demonstrator of what could happen if governments unlocked their data made it available let people see it in new ways and yet government finance transparency has recently been seen as on the decline now that might be a countervailing pressure in the world but that may also show us where open data has not taken hold even though it demonstrated potential it's not made it as far in telecommunications a sector absolutely pivotal to data without connectivity we can't be sharing this data and yet there's been very little activity to date it's only in the last year or so that the conversations really emerged about how can we open up data on telecoms in order to think about some of those internet health report issues of who's got access what sort of access at what cost and in urban development city level where we've seen so much happen cities have been an absolutely key venue for open data activity and intersect with many other sectors like transport health and education what we've seen in cities we've seen a real trend of the outside agitators for open data being maybe hired in to work for the city maybe then given the data analytics the smart cities the big data agendas as well and open data becomes less of a significant component so whilst we've seen a real growth in the availability of open data in cities at the same time over this decade the amount of city data has grown even more so we might be absolutely better off in the quantity of urban open data but relatively are our cities more open than they were before or has the landscape changed an open data work not necessarily kept up so when we put this all together and say sectorally what's going on we have very much a picture of unfinished business of foundations laid some progress made but at the same time an identification of many more challenges and very high levels of ambition about what open data communities and civic communities want to achieve and so I think we're now over the first foothill which we thought the full summit of where we thought we were getting to but we can really see a massive climb ahead some people are questioning should we be turning back at this point should we be realising this was a pointless journey anyway I think what comes out of many of these chapters is a fear that we've got a long way to go but a sense that we've made it this far so we need to kind of pursue onwards we also use a lens of cross cutting issues I'm going to try and be very brief in these these few looking at data infrastructure data literacy questions of gender equity indigenous rights to data all sorts of conversations really in the last three or four years that the open data world started to engage with perhaps one of the biggest ones that's coming on the agenda right now is this question of artificial intelligence what does this mean for us and there are a number of different relationships between AI and open data to unpick but I want to focus on one in particular which is a tension perhaps between the vision of public problem solving that open data represents and that which machine learning represents because machine learning approaches do have this tendency to centralise data and analytics to play down agreements on data structure in place of training machine models to secure desired outcomes not asking us to understand the input and output just asking for it to be behaviourally useful to us on the other hand a lot of early open data ideas were much more oriented towards creating a sense of a distributed web of data empowering individuals to make sense of data in their own ways and bringing data structures and standards into view so that they can be subject to debate, oversight and scrutiny and we're at quite a confused part of this debate right now where some are really excited that open data is a fuel for AI or we can use open data just to open up AI as it's happening but I think what's come out of our analysis is that need to look deep and say these are distinct normative agendas distinct views of the world and we need to be careful that the ethics of openness are not lost in the rush to apply it as a tool to any problem out there and we touch very strongly in many of the chapters and we have a chapter on data literacy itself on this argument that open data literacy and data literacy is a massive gap we couldn't find evidence of many more than about 20,000 people in the last 10 years having had kind of data literacy training from open data funders it's a tiny, tiny number of people when you think about all those who potentially could be using and engaging in a real area I think under investment that's created a bottleneck we've got much more information available but we're not seeing that wider use and then we also lastly use a lens of stakeholders exploring how they've shaped and been shaped by open data and we see how early alliances in the open data movement all these groups are agreeing that at least they want access to data start becoming harder to sustain when you start to about what you want to do with it and who it gives power to and how it is used so governments are now focusing and Barbara really picks this up in a chapter on government engagement that governments are focusing on the need to develop governance structures to manage this as part of the business of government and that's immensely positive in a maturing of government engagement with data but also creates new risks of gatekeeping and governments kind of taking back some of the control that was maybe seeded early on civil society looking to scale up projects but finding they're maybe in competition with private sector start-ups in the same space and yet they don't have access to the capital to scale a big civic tech kind of conversation for us to unpack and donors really struggling with working out how to mainstream open data whilst retaining a distinct understanding professional skillset around it so I'm going to very quickly put up for you the 12 conclusions we try and draw out I'm not going to talk to all of them in any depth but very very briefly where's my where's my notes on the conclusions two that I'm just going to pick on one recommendation for researchers we need to be comparing open and non open models we have lots of case studies that just look at here was a nice project where we did something open we haven't got enough work where we say government could do this through data collaboratives through machine learning approaches to the proprietary or could do this in an open way what's the comparative advantage or disadvantage of those not the absolute we need much more comparative work looking for the natural experiments that we can use and for funders and for policy makers we need to kind of head forward on some twin tracks of activity we need to mainstream these ideas we need to take this into sectoral problem solving say open data is an approach is a tool, is a way of solving problems at the same time we need to continue to develop the professional skills the movement around it and that's a real tension and a juggling act to kind of strike so that's some of where we're going to I'll be happy to tweak this out share it and be really keen to get people's thoughts and feedback more can tell you what's happening first go to twitter and follow state of open data so then you can see all of the stuff that we're doing but we're going to basically release all of these recommendations and next steps for different stakeholders our website, our new website because we already have a website will be up on the 15th of May we are also having a book version this is the very optimistic draft it's going to be a bit longer than that and also available individual small pdfs web versions it's going to be on the web, on a pdf and if you really want old school we don't have kindle though we can make a kindle we needed to help us to spread the word we want this to be useful not only like sitting on a shelf so also something that I forgot to say that with all of our methodology even though it's a qualitative research we created some databases so we have databases of open data initiatives from around the world because of the scans we have databases of how funders or funding, which was hard to do so we have many databases that are going to be on the website, they're free and open because it's open data use them and tell them we already have one person who is interested and want to use it so please do and if you want to have a real cool sneak peak we're going to tweet we already tweeted it but we'll retweet our gender equity chapter so you can see what we've done there and how the chapters look and that's it, please use it and please give us feedback and that's it from us for now thank you thank you very much Metra, Matt, Stembech and Mika Siefrin civic tech timeline ride the head of the class so hi, I'm Matt Stembech is Mika Siefrin, hello and together with Alia Bhatia our amazing research team we've put together the most comprehensive timeline of civic tech ever attempted it's like a high dive today I'm very happy that Bex is here because it aligns with what she said this morning about the third age of civic tech which gives us both confidence in our theories this is the timeline of civic tech it spans 25 years from 1994 to 2018 we're tracking project launches so discrete projects, not just organizations we're also looking at broadly, kind of false dichotomy off the bat, but the tech are the products, the apps the websites, the data of civic tech and the social is everything people do the conferences, the meetups the funders, kind of the field building side of civic tech so we're looking at both of these from 1994 on project launches and where are those coming from so this is all rooted in a project and I and a third collaborator Erin Simpson started three years ago called the Civic Tech Field Guide in fact we introduced it at the TicTech conference in Barcelona I think if memory serves the first one and we've been crowdsourcing contributions to it ever since then it was a Google spreadsheet for a while it is now a full-fledged WordPress site it has close to 2,000 entities in it and we are looking for you to adopt your project as well as add more data and so what you're getting here is just a taste of what this is enabling in terms of the field beginning to understand itself better why are we doing this somebody once said to me that fish need to be their own oceanographers I've never been exactly sure what that means but I do think that it really does help to have a map if you want to figure out where you're going and looking back at where we have been is the beginning of that sense making so that's really what we're at here what we're going to do today is focus on three research questions coming out of this very simple thing that we have done which is collect the start dates for all the current entities in the guide and so there are three questions we want to get to the first one is just is our field growing how much is it growing is it still growing and we'll get to that in a second this is what I'm interested in is this field started with open data portals and issue reporting apps and legislation commenting apps has it gotten more complicated since then and we're going to measure this by category diversity of the projects so in the civic tech field guide we track 232 different subcategories that's how we're going to try to answer this question and just to find this point about talking about the limitations of your data when you share your data there are many with this this is hand collected artisanal data this is crowdsourced data this is 2,000 or so projects from the guide which is the largest data set available in civic tech for chronology but it's not perfect and for one example there's unevenness across categories the other day I found a set of Canadian innovation labs public innovation labs and if I imported that right now we would skew a bunch of our results so with the grain of salt we're going to explore this data set this data set is creative comments like everything else on the field guide so if you want it just come ask us all we ask is attribution and non-commercial use cases okay so the first thing to say is that there are other timelines for example there's one that I built with a bunch of collaborators back when we were running our site techpresident.com it's a timeline of important intervents at the intersection of the internet and politics and it's still there you can find it at techpresident.com another really interesting timeline recently posted by Sid Hurrell who is a civic design expert is a look at key events that are primarily in the United States in the evolution of civic design practice we love these kinds of qualitative timelines it's important to note that they are really subjective culturally subjective inevitably deciding what's important is a subjective decision and so that what we've tried to do here with what we're presenting today is a little more data driven so let's start in the 1990s when for the purposes of our conversation it's important to note that there is pre-cursor specific tech before the 1990s there was a whole conversation about appropriate technology in the late 1960s you then see for example the field of ICT for D interactive communications technology for development which is still going that I think really starts to pick up in the 70s and 80s but for our purposes this is really about what people started to do once the internet became something that lots of people could not only read but write on and so the first thing to notice here is that in the earliest days and this is just the tail end of the long timeline we're going to show you that really around 1994 is when things start to pick up in terms of a variety of initiatives this is not a coincidence 1994 is when the mosaic the Netscape browser was published and people finally began to use the web outside of just academic specialists who knew how to do that a couple of key events in the 1990s there are many but just a few examples the first website built by a federal elected official in the United States was Ted Kennedy the first 311 reporting project done by the city of Baltimore which is a pre-cursor to many many many examples of cities starting to collect data Estonia there's somebody here from Estonia I was talking to before where are you raise your hand maybe she left many examples of what we now refer back to as e-government the field thought of itself as e-democracy and e-government I find it ironically funny that we're back at the OECD to talk about this but the pattern starts to change during the 90s and I really want to call this pattern out quickly which is a lot of early individual pioneers doing something that strikes accord and then grows into an entire category of civic tech in the bottom right corner how many people recognize who that is that's Carl Malamud who in the in 1994 basically took a government data set the securities and exchange commission reports that companies have to file if they're publicly traded and he turned it into an open freely available resource that you could get online he did it for two years until his NSF grant ran out and then he basically told his big user community if you want this to continue here's Al Gore's phone number and email address here's the phone number and email address of the head of the SEC tell them it should be a government service and lo and behold the SEC took it over working our way around the group Vivek Kundra who basically was the CTO of Washington DC held the very first open government open data hackathon opening up the city's data and inviting hackers in to play with it Jen Palka who had the idea of creating a fellowship program to bring tech talent into serving government with code for America or Eocolo of Ushahidi while there were other earlier examples of people just getting together to do crisis response using things like blogs it was Ushahidi that really turned that into a platform solution for many examples not just crisis response or election monitoring or beyond so that pattern is what then propels us into the degree of innovation we see in the community so 25 years is a long time in technology in several generations and while curating this data we found a couple of interesting instances one is that evote.com has seen several different projects start and close on the same domain name and the people powered brigades that code for America have won the name space against the millions tens of millions of dollars funding brigade so we've seen a lot of different projects in the world and that is a big decade of technical experimentation we have map mashups is the golden age of app mashups we get social media platforms we get people throwing spaghetti at the wall all kinds of things making nifty code to help people putting it online is said this morning we really see that start to happen is more the technical side of the field before the social side and towards the end of the decade more open data happening begin to emerge the predecessor of they work for you in 2004 spawns a whole bunch of my society projects that get adopted around the world and used by millions Google maps API is interested to learn that it came out after housing maps.org and Chicago crime map so people were mashing up data on maps before the API was even there for it and then of course the API itself spawned a whole new generation of mapping in civic tech and then towards the end of the decade we get things like bar camps more social things. Code for America starts to hack the bureaucracy and the social side of government tech which brings us to the 2010s right and this is where we think that the social side of tech of civic tech really flowers the bulk of what we found yes and we are still in the 2010s I know it's hard to believe feels like a century has passed in just ten years the 2010s is when civic tech becomes self referential. This is the field now beginning to talk about itself as civic tech probably the big bang moment for that is a major report that the night foundation put out at the end of December 2013 analyzing the emergence of civic tech focused on where money was being invested. I don't see Tom Steinberg here at the moment but Tom also wrote a post right around the same time beginning of 2014 talking about civic tech winning the name game this is also a moment I think where if you could go to the next slide Matt where you also see the sort of knowledge curation side really begin to explode in the field we see in terms of books, newsletters policy research that 2013 is a big date in terms of the number of launches of new projects centered on knowledge creation courses, catalogs and so on about civic tech these are all meta civic tech courses catalogs curation right next slide the other big change and you'll see this when we show you well we will we can't show you the fully interactive version of this because we're working with internet explorer here we just discovered but that in 2013 is where civic hacking meetups the launching of civic hacking meetups really explodes and that is we thought another really key basically confirmation to another point that we heard this morning about the social side of civic tech really taking off in the last 5-6 years so to the big picture zooming out this is 10 years here just abstracted of tech and social you'll see a lot of growth starting in 2008 bringing us to where we are now you'll see a bit of a decline here in projects launched so I'm going to get into that but back to our research questions has the field grown what do you guys think yell it yes yay and is it still growing so has it grown yeah that's an easy one by projects launched we see lots more through 2007 is really where it starts to spike and grow into where we are now and here's maybe a more helpful histogram of that happening so around 2007 we get this crescendo and this is new projects launched per year so it's not like projects in this space it's not we're not condensing right here 2016 in our data set we have the most launches that year so yes but importantly is the field still growing and what we find is it's starting to taper off the rate of growth yes it's still growing it's not condensing but in our projects the rate of growth is slowing green here is project launches per year just the absolute number of project launches per year the blue line is the trend is the year over year growth from the year before so although the space is still growing we're seeing in 2017 2018 a little bit of slowing which optimistic interpretation to respect's point this morning might be that we're beginning to see what works we're funding those things rather than 100 different experiments every year maybe our data isn't really good enough to say that so maybe it's still growing sharply as we think it'd be really nice to know budget size of organizations head count of organizations other impact metrics besides just the year they were launched so limits of our data set right there pretty prevalent has the field grown more interesting and complicated from a category count from where it used to be yeah, you're the right conference so these are some of the 230 categories we track on the civic tech field guide it's my team overwhelming but for us there's a big difference between people doing work to visualize a national government budget or people launching an electoral campaign using relational organizing tools that access your contacts on your phone those are entirely different sub-genres of civic tech we think they belong together but also it's more useful if they're listed separately so here we have in 2008 projects were launched across 43 different categories of civic tech and by 2018 projects were launched across 72 different categories of civic tech so we're seeing sophistication in a number of different ways both category diversification we're seeing entire NGOs spun up to be the intermediaries of civic tech partnerships between large institutions and even the lowly civic hackathon has gotten more specific and expert we're seeing more hackathons about the hyper local areas or hyper specific topics like the breast pump hackathon rather than just we have data what can we do with it everybody come to one room any pizza this is what you can view online if you go right now to civictech.guide you'll be able to hover over each of these squiggly tapestry lines to see the category legend unfortunately it does not yet work with internet explorer we'll figure out the javascript there but realer thanks to Shruti Modakirti helped us visualize this work and Ilya Batya helped us analyze it 25 years we're seeing a lot of growth and diversity of categories and yes we think it has grown more complicated even with our limited data set so last point how useful is this data so this data is the product of an ongoing effort we want to continue to continue to complexify it right now we have to add lots of caveats because it is as Matt said artisanally collected it has a tilt towards the Anglo-Saxon world given who we are though we have had contributions for more than 80 countries and we continue to add to it so one thing we absolutely plan to do is as we add more content to the guide we will run this timeline again so that it hopefully shows a little bit more detail that we can trust the second thing is, as Matt will explain is we're also planning to go back into our metadata and add other kinds of things that we want to track and one point on why we think it might be useful data we really expected to find a recency bias so just organizationally we've been paying a lot more attention to the civic tech field guide in the past two years so we expect to see a lot more projects from those two years represented but we don't, we saw fewer 2017-2018 projects even though that's when we were looking the most so that gives us some hope that the data is not supervised we actually have a theory about that that either well it's one of three things one is intermediary filters, organizations and knowledge banks that are convincing people that they shouldn't just try whatever idea that they have the second is that the throw spaghetti up against the wall approach isn't working as much because there's a lot of spaghetti taking up most of the space on the wall and the third possibility is that some people have finally realized that there's certain parts of the wall where the spaghetti will simply not stick and they're not going to keep trying those ideas maybe just real quick looking forward civic tech is increasingly high tech AI came up with Tim's last presentation virtual reality and augmented reality are getting cheaper and more accessible sensors are getting cheaper allowing projects like heat seek NYC and then blockchain is still a thing and being used for lots of public companies so maybe ten years from now we'll all be here at the impacts of blockchain tech conference we got tib tech tib tech never so Miga alluded to some future directions we'd like to continue to interrogate this data we'd like to improve the data we're interested in the longevity of these organizations right now we're just looking at project launches what about the year they shut down or maybe it's a one off like a report launch that's fine we want to know that so right now we have the year ended data for about 60 organizations out of 2000 it'd be really great to expand that and look at sustainability in civic tech by category we could look at slices by geography of civic tech and we're also interested in founder diversity both by gender and ethnicity especially in the US so that's the website I should say all the data from the guide comes directly from civictech.guide so the timeline is populated with whatever's in the database so if you find yourself missing from the timeline it's really easy to go put yourself there but yeah and then if you go to slash timeline that's the interactive JavaScript pretty tapestry of civic tech it's really quit the metaphor thank you thank you to all our speakers we just have another round of applause for that impeccable timing so that leaves us with about 10 minutes for questions and that kind of depends on you it could be one 10 minute questions so we start later when they know Alex Super quick question sorry a minute it's just for civic tech but it's self-populating but have you knocked anything out that you thought of a way of have you explored looking at the github repo to see how many people contributed to a project because if you've got one project with 20,000 volunteers and one with two blocks in a shed they're different sizes of impact I think Chefan should take the second question about github contributors to civic tech projects given your research but on the first question yes we do actually curate in terms of say no to things and we don't want it to be just like a social impact tech project that's like everything ever one way we define what civic tech what's not is it for the public good in the sense that it's helping a shared challenge versus a private challenge so there's a lot of urban tech out there that helps you get through traffic more quickly and that might not be for the good of society that's just for you getting to work faster versus maybe something that helps reduce congestion and air pollution in the entire city might be more civic tech so we do exclude purely promotional super super commercial with no clear public benefit entries so beside working for Mozilla I also did research on civic tech before and one of the things I studied was civic there on github so this is why the problem is it's been a few years since I did this research so I'm screwed but what I remember is that the long tail is pretty long basically so there are a few reports that have a lot of contributors but there are a lot of smaller ones and it's like I don't think you can quantitatively say which one should be emphasized and which one isn't it's really like a question of context so I think it's hard to do that on scale but I would love to have more proxies for influence in these projects civicgraph.io the Microsoft project has the bubbles are sized by either team headcount or budget which I think is better than just chronology maybe I'd love to add that there's a question at the back there Hi Tris from I've worked on not working at the centre so I feel like a bit of a newcomer to this civic tech and on the open data world three fantastic presentations I couldn't help feeling that they would be added to with looking at the kind of context in which all of these things are operating and whether or not they in general are contributing to a greater public good so you know if open data is is having tremendous impacts in a small way whilst actually data in public sector in general is going backwards or civic space is shrinking in general you know civic is we're here I think maybe talking about the shrinking civic space around the world so I'm just really keen that these amazing initiatives and all of this inspiring work and leadership is also looking at all the context and making sure that they can see what that is from absolutely fascinating something with the chapters we've got we do try and look at that widening context and say one of the problems in the field is that they can work connecting with those and we really see variation across fields so on the first chapter on accountability anti-corruption says this in itself is a young field still working at change how we get back to change and leaders kind of entering into that in other spaces say agriculture we've got what needs to have to work really we're still just doing things around the edges we're not really getting into the arts in the kind of structure of issues in those spaces like we said in Government finance we've got some solutions but we've not done politics in the power of play in the decision making so I think maybe to connect back to all the presentations that really struck us putting together is a lot of practices relative to the eight historical and context three and we need to be much better at teaching people the history and getting people to think about context the web of civic technology is a gradient of broken links for the people who believe in we have a pool in our current practice as a sector we need to sort that out we need to know our history know our context engage with that loop it just feels like there's a shared purpose here which is about societal transformation and the question that I wanted to see is addressing more is are there insights about how we can push that transformation further by learning how some of the things are landing or being recaptured by the existing power cities are grabbing data and gender and making it less open is that something we should be worried about when we might actually add to this and on a positive token something that I said this morning that really resonated with me is maybe also civic tech gets harder to track because as we succeed it becomes more diffuse I have this giant bend diagram in my head where civic tech emerge from urban planning, government, politics journalism and communities the tech kind of brought these spaces together and maybe go back to being individual disciplines I hope not because I think there's value in that crossover space but as we succeed maybe we don't have a name for the field it's just like how you do cities and how you do politics and how you do government if I could just add one tiny quick comment I also think this morning's keynote from Alexandra Orofino was important in terms of this field, this communities evolution moving and it may just be a blip and not yet a trend but the fact that, for example, illuminate previously Omidjar network which has funded a lot of civic tech is now talking about civic empowerment the Mozilla Internet Health there are normative judgments being made here or being pushed at so I think your question is welcome and I think that it is one of the things that is in the background of a lot of our minds a gentleman here it was quite inspiring session I have many questions but I will have a question for Matt for Mika and last week I will have some colleagues from the data analysis group who decided on Madrid and one colleague said he had a friend who was interested in doing a mapping for civic technology but it sounds quite cool but have you found that there are many guides typically it is not from the Argentinian people like some years ago but then when this OGB told the books that it has some nice categories from Sweden there is also this digital lab with the guy we in Barcelona did some other mapping for doing this in Barcelona as well there is the results of my society there is the results of the foundation the participation media we have 40 catalogs in our we have a catalog category we have so many repositories we have so many repositories and we are having the actually if you look at this TV tech guide I said to you that it is good it has a map finally we are doing mapping and I really enjoyed that now you have seen some other value like this so from all this observation what I found is like do we have to make a new guide every time we have a new guide how can we have some kind of a Wikipedia of this kind a Wikipedia of those for not having to reinvent the wheel every time we have a new question around the TV tech you might be happy to hear that code for all summit in Bucharest we got together some of the curators and said how could we exchange metadata maybe should we use wiki data so that every time we find something it also goes into Siri and Alexa and everything powered by wiki data so we are definitely working on that for us it is just a technical limitation on the development time we have that is literally the only barrier but we are all philosophically aligned on that there is a metadata standard called publiccode.yml that I believe was started by public code foundation in the Netherlands and adopted by the government of Italy and that would allow anyone pushing a civic tech project to github to describe the project in a standard way that any crawler could pick up and use but there is only 40 projects on github using it so I would recommend me has a civic tech graveyard which it contains it is in the guide it is in the ordinary tales but I wanted to thank you all too for including the point about AI and what is emerging this morning the idea that what is coming next could be very different from what we see today I think there is kind of a tension emerging between how much of the future of our world is going to be automated and how much is participation and where the two fit together and what the ratio is and also the point about open data I think actually I just want to toss back to you and as the senator marked one of our report with recommendations about dealing with technology but he made a very good point that data is valuable to different actors in different ways so if you are sitting on a mountain of data and you get another open data set it is immensely valuable to you and even though it is available to everyone equally yes I know data as oil is not always the best analogy but if you own a refinery you know what to do with it and even if oil is free to all we don't know what to do with it so as in the OGP world as you are thinking about access to open data and making data available in the future has there been some discussion about those organizations that benefit from the open data helping to support the tools for others to make use of it perhaps above the context yes so I think there are two parts in that conversation about open data and AI is vastly underdeveloped right now so it is a key kind of conversation to begin to in terms of that idea of people who have got the power through having refinery data and open data they can mix all the tools in that conversation about data collaborative states of trust governance systems to do that then that is an important part of it but I think you touched on the other important part which is the configuration of data sets that are out there affect who can do what comes back to that internet health support question of who is empowered by this and something I am particularly interested in is our role as watching the development of ecosystems and infrastructures and our need to address those very consciously to say if there are biases coming out of the system what data do we need to make sure is available to address those biases if there are inequalities of power in the system what do we need to be careful about when they stick in order to make sure this doesn't lead to a great rate of exploitation so I think certainly something that comes out of the work is the simple binary open not open is no longer kind of easy to sustain there is a big risk there that that pulls us in the direction of the easiest path but not closed hanging out to say they will solve the course and automate the way there is jobs and it challenges us to go back to some of those routes of civic tech where the participatory the data and those other forms of work were much more intertwined and that I knew when it comes down to your story but I think we have seen data civic tech organisations not as inactive as maybe they might have been back in 2000s also being part of open data for development and having a lot of authors coming also from the global south have helped us to see different power dynamics so yes we are from the global north but we did try to make sure that we do get this feedback and try to see these power dynamics from different eyes so it does help us to get it and there is a lot of power in the book as well so I am sorry so hopefully that will help but the data literacy part is the way forward and trying to understand how we can get more people to actually understand the data I think an interesting aspect to it is also to open data and also open content such as for example pictures or licensed under creative commons licensing I don't know if you heard recently there was a scandal with IBM using the Flickr package of images licensed under free license for training their machine learning so I think we need to ask ourselves also a question the consent that has been given a long time ago where none of us were imagining yet in the future how this data might be used what does the consent mean now and if we need to think about new licensing or new processes to handle that problem I would be also curious to think to ask if you have any thoughts on that regarding open data we have a lot so I think we are having a lot of looking at how open data is basically shaping AI but also what is the hype and what is not the hype coming into it and who is shaping this conversation because personally I think that we have a lot of hype there and we need to entangle and understand exactly what we are speaking about but we do have a whole chapter on privacy that also touches on ethics and how we are going into it and we also touch on ethics in AI and what does it mean as a whole big data movement because I think the one way forward is it's not open data can't be in a vacuum, in civic tech can't be in a vacuum and we all need to look at it as a bigger data movement and how we connect these silos going forward there's not only Mozilla working in a vacuum but how do we create those discussions between practitioners and then how we bring this discussion for practitioners actually forward to ground and I think this is the next hurdle forward that hopefully if there's a funder in the room I'm looking at math that will help you to think how we make this conversation actually on the ground as well so I'm a favour out of time I'd love to let the conversation go on but there's buses to go on thank you everybody and I'm going to drink Thank you