 So, we're going to get started. This is the final panel of two days of a wonderful event. My name is Mikha Sifri. I am the co-founder and president of Civic Hall, which is New York City's Collaboration Center for Civic Tech. Come visit us if you're in New York, or just go to civichall.org to learn more about us. We have a terrific panel, and we're looking forward to getting into also a conversation with those of you who are here in the room and in the first six rows, because I won't call on anybody if they're sitting further back. Why don't we just do that, right, Mark, you know? You want to have, oh, good, she moved up, great, okay, thank you. So the topic is investing in the future of Civic Tech, and we have a terrific panel with three experienced funders. We, I apologize, because our fourth speaker, Cassie, is unfortunately under the weather, and was hoping that she might be feeling better in time for this panel, and is just suffering in her hotel room, sadly. What I'm going to do, let me briefly introduce the people next to me, and then I will throw the opening to each of them to speak for a few minutes about who they are and what they do, and how they think about their roles as funders of Civic Tech, and then we'll talk a bit about some themes that may have emerged over the last two days as they've seen them, and we'll leave plenty of time for questions from the audience. So to my immediate left is Stacey Donahue, who I have to admit is an old friend and colleague, we worked together when I was an advisor to the Sunlight Foundation, and she was on Sunlight's board, and more recently, Stacey has, well, that was back when she was at the Omidyard Network, and now their Civic Engagement and Governance Group has been spun out as Luminate, and you'll hear a bit more about that, and I should just say for full disclosure, that Luminate is a funder of Civic Hall and a long-time ally to the entire field. Stacey leads Luminate's investment team across the globe, and so she really has a very broad perspective on where our field is and where it may be going. Next to her is Lucia, I'm so sorry because I'm probably going to masquer your name, Abelanda. Yeah, Cazalé, is that right? No. Okay, not bad, and she's a director with the Fundación Avina, which is based in Mexico, and which has been around since 2008, building important relationships with different organizations working in the social, business, and government sectors, within Latin America primarily, but not solely, and she is a native of Uruguay and lives in Mexico, and she's been with the foundation since 2013. And then finally, all the way over is Paul Lenz, who is with the Indigo Trust, which is a UK-based grant-making foundation that says it works to create a world of active informed citizens in response to the accountable governments that together drive positive change in society, and they primarily fund in sub-Saharan Africa, typically providing small and high-risk grants to projects in places like Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda. Okay, so with that, I'm going to, everybody has their own mic, why don't we just work our way down the panel, and we'll take four or five minutes each to sort of make some opening remarks. Hi everyone, thanks for sticking with us in this very last session of the day. This is the dreaded final session, but appreciate the energy and enthusiasm, and we promise not to bully anyone any longer for people who want to be anonymous in the back. I'm just teasing. So yes, I work at Luminate, which as Mika described is the spin-out from Omidyar Network. We were previously the governance and citizen engagement initiative within the broader Omidyar Network. Last October, we spun out, but we still have the same mission to create stronger societies by enabling people to participate in governance, to get the services they need, and to hold power to account. And so as part of that, I had been, have been with the organization for over 10 years now, and started funding civic tech almost towards the beginning, particularly in the U.S., and recently we've had the opportunity to reflect back over the last 10 years of the funding that we've done in the civic tech space because of the spin-out, and we've learned a lot of lessons, and actually I just published a blog post about it, but I can share just a few highlights here. So I think the first thing I would say is that the world has dramatically changed in the last 10 years. That's probably an obvious statement in some respects, but the rise of populism and authoritarianism, the backlash against the intended or unintended consequences of technology, have really fundamentally changed both the civic and the tech part of civic tech. In response, there's been ever greater engagement of people in governance, as you've seen with the women's marches across the world as one example, so it's not all negative in the sense that the apathy that we used to see 10 years ago, and even really five years ago, has really been replaced by greater engagement, so that does give me some hope, but the overall context that we're working in is very, very different. And so because of that changing context, and because of some of the things that we've learned by investing in tech-led solutions over the last 10 years, we've actually decided to make some changes to the way we're investing going forward. And when I say investing, I mean both grant-making and for-profit impact investing in the civic space. So the first important change is one about language, but it's significant. And so going forward, we are investing in civic empowerment and not civic tech. And on the one hand, you could say that's just semantics and that's just words, but actually it's more than words because what it means is that we have fundamentally recognized that tech is an important thing and an important part of what we're trying to do, but it doesn't work in isolation. And that was a pretty hard realization for us to come to. Mika had not described it, but many of you may know that our organization was started by the founder of eBay, Piero Midiar. And so we have a very tech-centric legacy and we really believe strongly in the power of technology to empower people to have impact on their own lives. And what we've seen is that tech in isolation doesn't do it. And in some cases actually has negative effects. So one of the things we're doing going forward is reorienting our focus around the combination of online and offline solutions, which many of you in this room I think have been doing for quite some time. And so maybe we're a little bit late to the game, but I wanted to recognize that that is a really important distinction for us and a reorientation of our work. We'll still be focusing on both the participation side of civic tech and the service delivery side. Those are the two pillars that we typically talk about. But on participation, as I said, we'll be focused more on integrating the online and offline components. And secondly, we'll be focused on trying to get the voices of those who have been underrepresented and marginalized to be heard. So a few years ago, our approach was very much platform-oriented, which is to say that we thought about technology as a neutral tool that anyone could use to amplify their views and their voices. And we cared about the act of people being able to use technology to amplify their voice. And for us, the realization, and for me personally, is that we're not here to amplify everyone's voices the same. Because there are lots of people who already have their voices amplified, and technology tends to amplify the power of the people who already have it. So what we're going to be doing is amplifying the voices of those who haven't had the power and thinking about how technology and offline organizing can do that better. And that's also a really big shift for us. Our legacy was very much neutral, we were sort of apolitical, and while we're not partisan, we will be assertive in the stances that we're taking about who we're trying to represent and work with. On the service delivery side, we will also continue to invest in what some people in the room might call GovTech. For us, that is a subset of the larger civic tech set of activities. However, we will be doing that very much with an eye towards solutions that government use, technology solutions that have users and users' privacy and protection at the core. It's become increasingly obvious that there is a lot of potential danger in the types of technology that governments can use to become tools of surveillance, to say the least, and that's obviously not something we're interested in supporting. So we'll still be focused on things that are civic and things that are tech, but we'll be doing more than that and we'll be doing it very much with an eye towards empowerment. So I'll stop there for now. Thank you. Perfect. Okay. I think I present Avinah so many times in these two days, but I go again. Avinah is a Latin American foundation that work in sustainable development and basically we focus in something that we call collaborative process. We believe that when we put in a room people with different perspectives, different backgrounds, private sector, civil society, media and academia, we can achieve greater things and accelerate change. That is the basic theory. We started to change, to use the combined of, we started to work in 2012 with social innovation and after that we add business and technological innovation and we try to combine the three types of innovation in order to accelerate change, believing that the use of business innovation could create more sustainable process, but the social innovation is crucial to create and to work in the offline field and also the tech part could accelerate and go cheaper, all this process. Basically we do many things in Latin America and always we focus in Latin America, so I feel like an infiltrate here, talking about Latin America, but yeah, why tech? We decided to start to fund tech because we spent so many years working with traditional CSOs and they started to be in a digital world and we find that it was an opportunity but also a necessity in order to bridge the gap between the civil society organization and this digital world that was coming. So we were, we were, we've been working between trying to bridge the gap between the reality of most of these organizations in Latin America that are like organizations that work in the biomass, that work in the Amazonia, that works in different parts of the region and the use of civic tech. In this work I think I can say after like six years working in the field that it's not so much, that we have like a bigger community in Latin America that we have in 2012, that we have more than 300 organizations that work with civic tech and they are connected that they work together in so many cases. We have spaces that we annually use in order to discuss and have some kind of coordination in some issues that are prioritized by the community, that we have like a community that is useful and yes, and is good for the ecosystem, but also we have, we have like a great challenge nowadays that I think is that around the community of civic technology and open data or open data is going, are like, erasing new communities that are not so well connected and I think it's a risk not to have this type of connection. For example, all the digital rights community that have their own spaces, their own dynamics, but at the end is part of the same problem. When you are talking about how a journalist have the live risks in the field, you are talking about digital rights, but these digital rights are connected with the technology that this journalist is using, so at the end I think we have an opportunity and also we are quite focused on the next year to reach these communities in Latin America in order to have a more integral sense of the policies that our countries are developing in the region. Also, we are extremely focused on creating more bridges between the specific communities that are working in topics like climate change and water and political innovation in the region with the tech community. Not only creating a specific collaboration, but also creating a specific process of common agenda to create different projects that really have an impact in the region. Yes, as a final thought, we are like rethinking how we work in the region because when we started to work in 2013, we were working mainly in co-creation. We work a lot with all these international framework related to co-creation, but the co-creation nowadays in Latin America is not so possible in many countries, so we are more in a position of resistance or mobilization, so I think how we can combine a process in order to have co-creation, but also with a great component of resistance and mobilizations. Hi, I'm Paul, sorry a bit loud, I'm from the Indigo Trust, which is a relatively small UK-based foundation. We award about $1.3 million in grants every year, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, as Mika said earlier. I want to reassure you that even though I'm sitting here as a funder, I know what it's like to not be a funder. I spent seven years at my society, seven happy years, and during my time there, the single most important figure, the one number I knew every single day, was how many days we had until we ran out of money. And that was foremost in my mind all the time, so I don't want you to think that I'm sitting up here just with no concept of what it's like to be a practitioner, an academic and activist, someone who's having to go out there and actually get money. In terms of my reflections over the conference and also some of the earlier comments, I would just like to echo what Stacey said earlier about the fallacy that I think many funders have fallen into, including Indigo, that the tech is an end in itself rather than simply a means to an end, and that having that offline component, be that as a means of engagement, but also in terms of specific activities is hugely important. When I think back to some of the presentations that I've heard, full fact yesterday, technology is important in there, but actually the hard graft is human beings analyzing and assessing the presentations that Jay Powell did looking at impact. Again, the technology there is really simple. It's SMSs, but those are SMSs that can swing elections. And I think that's an important lens for us to look through in the context of this. I've also been thinking about the impact of the work that I achieved when I worked in my society and now at Indigo as a funder. And if any of you were in the earlier session that Luke gave about the work of grassroots, I think it was astonishingly self-reflective. And I fear that as a practitioner and as a funder, I too easily fell into the trap of looking at output measures rather than impact measures. And I'm glad to see that many smart organizations are now really thinking in those terms and facing difficult truths and then trying to find ways to overcome them. And there's a bigger issue that I've been thinking about the last couple of days. Tom Steinberg, the founder of my society, described much of the work that we do as an essential public good akin to having libraries. It's so fundamental for our democratic systems and processes. And as I almost always do, I agree completely with Tom on this point. But I think we've got a problem. And I don't think anyone's really talking about it. And that is that this sector is effectively funded by the benevolence of smart, wise, and lovely billionaires and some fantastic foundations. But the problem is those billionaires die. Those foundations change their strategies. I think back five or six years, making all voices count. $45 million for civic tech. There's just not that kind of cash moving around today. And so the kind of, I guess, provocation I have both for the audience and for the panelists to think about how do we ensure that these things that are so vital can be funded and supported in the long term? And I think back to the library analogy that Tom made. And I think of Andrew Carnegie, the American industrialist. He became the richest man in the world because his wealthy neighbor let him, as a child, use his library of 400 books. And so when he made money, Carnegie went out and he started building libraries. He built 2,500 libraries. But he didn't just build them and fund them. He knew that wasn't sustainable. The communities where he built the libraries had to commit to staff them and repair them in the long term. And in exchange for that, they got those libraries. Now it's a slightly tenuous analogy. But what I don't have an answer for, but what I've been thinking about a lot is how do we have the equivalent to those libraries? How do we have fact checking? It shouldn't be down to just a small band of people scrabbling for grants. And I think some would argue also it shouldn't necessarily be funded by the organizations who are being fact checked themselves, following on from the earlier Facebook presentation. But as I say, it's a provocation, a question that I don't have an answer to, but I'd be interested to hear what people think. So thank you, Paul, for actually moving us into the second part of our conversation. Sorry, did I jump ahead too much? No, no, that's great. You set it up nicely. Because when I was going to ask all of you to address and Paul sort of opened the door is you've been here for the last two days soaking up the conversations and the presentations. And so I'm wondering, in addition to the comments that Paul made, the other observations or big thoughts that have struck you, I think there was certainly one consistent theme that came up a number of times from the very first morning from Bex's presentation. And then in a few others was the idea that the field of civic tech has gone through phases and we are maybe in a phase of maturing and consolidation. And then I do remember seeing a tweet from Nathaniel Heller, I don't know if he's in the room, who used to be with global integrity saying it's hard for him to swallow this idea that we are actually maturing and consolidating when so many civic tech enterprises don't quite have a sustainable source of support. Other than the beneficence of foundations. So open question, either engage with those observations or if you want to add some new ones to the mix of what the last two days has sort of brought front of mind for you. We'll start again with Stacy, I guess. Yeah, so we had a panel this morning that was focused on Latin America but I think some of the observations are more global in scope. What really struck me was the difference between people in the room who considered themselves activists and people in the room who considered themselves something else. And we had an interesting discussion about what that something else was and whether you could be an activist and also a collaborator with government when it comes to technology and were those two things in opposition. And it strikes me that in the world that we live in now with political movements the way they're going, there is kind of a moment of reckoning around civic tech and whether or not it is a tool for political change or a tool for providing services to citizens. And that's always been a little bit of a, I wouldn't say an identity crisis but there have been kind of two orientations around the community that we broadly call civic tech. And I feel like those divisions or kind of orientations are getting ever more stark and that even on the sort of service delivery side that we once considered more politically neutral, that that's not even politically neutral anymore. At least in the US context, who gets services from government, what kind of services they get, those have become very political and partisan questions. And so I'm really struck by and would like to understand better how everyone in the room thinks about themselves as a technologist, as an activist or something else and how we can try to weave those things together. I'll test the room very quickly. How many people here would first and foremost identify as an activist, advocate? You know, you have an agenda, you're trying to advance. Okay. Yes, of course. Nothing will stop you from doing that. And how many of you would say that you're primarily like trying to work with government in collaboration as a vendor, as a service improver? And how many, this doesn't describe you at all? What would you say instead? What would? Researcher. Researcher, okay, yeah. Anybody else? Yeah. Evaluators. Okay, evaluate a researcher. Okay, that makes sense. We should recognize that this is also a conference filled with academic presentations and valuable insights from that. Any other missing identities? Yeah. Media. Media. Good. Yeah. You should be up on the panel. You're a funder. Great. Okay. So, yeah. So, I mean, there is that tension. Sorry. I interrupted. Did you want to finish? Okay, go. If I could bring two topics that I think that was a surprise for me that was not, or were not so mentioned, one is the, who is the user? We are talking about a lot of participation, about people using technology, but it was not a big present of the person who are not connected, and around the world there is a lot of person who are not connected to internet or the use of civic tech tools are quite difficult. I'm thinking perhaps with my perspective of Latin America, but I'm thinking in El Chaco Medicano and La Masania, part of Paraguay, even when we think in big enterprises that only give access to specific platforms, and they have like a restraining hit, okay, access or restraining hit in Spanish, to this participation, so it's like a big, huge problem when we talk about inclusive participation when we are talking about a mature ecosystem and growing and have a more, really to impact in democracies and to build inclusive democracies, not democracies for the people who live in cities. Also something that bring me a lot is, for example, when I see the field in Latin America, we have seen a big amount of new enterprises related to civic tech. If I can, we just finished, a couple of months ago, we finished a map related to the civic tech ecosystem in Latin America, explore Latin, if you want to see it, and most of the organizations are really enterprises that have struggled a lot with the sustainable business model, but at the end, there, for me, there is a great area of opportunity. There is very little conversation about that. We always talking about funding and or crowdfunding strategies, but sometimes I think we have very little conversation about business model related to civic tech. I know they are so difficult and we have so many bad lessons about that, but I think it's a good topic to talk in a broader community. Again, I want to echo what Stacey was saying, not simply because I was in video grantee for six years, but I think the point, I think the point you mentioned around service delivery and inclusivity is key because, I mean, there are clear examples that if you have online services that you will be disadvancing certain groups, and I think there's a kind of a challenge for the whole room, which is that inherently digital services are going to be used by people who are wealthier, more urban and better educated than the average member of the population. That's true in the developed world, and it's even more true in the developing world, and I think that possibly we have fallen into a trap of even thinking about civic tech almost in isolation. That's unfair, we haven't thought about it in isolation, but we've defined it as a sector, as something separate but aligned to people who are human rights activists or climate change campaigners or a whole host of other things, and the danger is that we possibly become fixated upon the means rather than the outcome. I kind of think back to campaigners, the suffragettes in the early 20th century in the UK who were producing handbills and posters to try and get their message out there, and I worry sometimes that if we had been funders back then, we'd have put an awful lot of money into the people who were making poster printing machines, and were coming up with fantastic designs for the posters to make those activists more effective, but not actually necessarily focusing on what the goals of those activists were. Again, it's not something I have an easy answer for, but I just think that more broadly, looking at this technology in the context of those broader activism movements is important, and to your point about financial sustainability, Mark Ridge will tell you how easy it is to run a charity and also a commercial organization and be financially sustainable. For years, funders, including the dear media, would say to us, what's your sustainability strategy? How are you going to get to a point where you're not going to rely on grant funding anymore? And the truth is, well, we're not. It's really tough, and it comes back to that earlier point I made about public goods. Someone has to pay for this stuff, and I'm not sure who it is. Well, I just want to ask on that point, it seems to me that we do see some civic tech innovations or innovators, as the ideas get carried by people, being adopted by government. One example, in the U.S., we've long had a very bad congressional website, Thomas, which caused many efforts to build much better, more user-friendly platforms. And then finally, through a combination of things, the Congress decided itself to finally innovate and make a much better platform that's paid for public tax dollars. The talent that was built up by organizations like Sunlight Foundation or Code for America, many of those people are now working in government carrying the ideas on. So is that, I mean, that is an exit, if you will, or an impact. Sorry? Well, open Congress is not needed would be the answer, because the Congress itself, the site as well as Josh Tauber's site, does a good enough job that you don't need yet another platform. So that's one observation. Another one, I want to ask the panel, and then we'll throw it open to the room, are we as civic tech doing enough to address the sort of platform, you know, the topic of platform strong men came up initially with Alessandro Orfino's presentation that, you know, that civil society needs to take more of a aggressive, strategic approach to deal with the rise of platform strong men. And I'm wondering if there's a corollary to that, which is the platforms themselves as being anti civic. And are we are we not doing enough, or could we be doing something that we're not doing now to try to address that that the the type of healthy civil society that I think we're all imagining ought to be supported. How much are we failing to recognize this that there's like, oh, I guess, it's like Jupiter in the solar system. It has this immense gravitational effect on anything that comes near it, and it distorts the rest of the field around it. I won't say who I think Jupiter is, but I guess you can guess. So is there a need for the civic tech field to move in that direction in terms of the future? So I think that question is inextricably linked with the business model question, because these platforms that we're talking about have been major funders in the space, and a lot of organizations have have relied on that funding. And that's something that, you know, we've really struggled with, because we have started to take a much more assertive stance about the activities the platforms are doing to harm democracy and harm people. We were funders of the Dear Mark campaign, for example, and Dear Mark Zuckerberg? Yes, so just checking, I'm not on a first name with him. Nor am I. The Dear Mark campaign was a campaign around the activities of Facebook and Myanmar, as was mentioned earlier today, and was a social media campaign to highlight the genocide in Myanmar and Facebook's role in leaving hate speech on the platform that was later determined to have directly contributed to people's deaths. And some very strong civil society organizations in Myanmar collectively put together that campaign. And now other countries in Southeast Asia and potentially in other emerging markets around the world have been using that same methodology to try to attract attention to the ways in which Facebook can be a tool for terrible things in addition to some of the good things that it's also done. So, you know, one thing that I saw today that I thought was a really interesting signal is that the British, I think it's the British Museum today decided that they are going to decline a large contribution from the Sackler Trust for its, I guess the Sackler Trust has technically or in the past done donations to a variety of arts institutions. And this museum decided that they did not want to be associated with the Sacklers because they are, for those of you don't know, the family who had a pharmaceutical company that basically created one of the biggest opioids that has created a huge opioid crisis that's affecting millions of people. And to me that was a really interesting potential future signal for when organizations that require funding from philanthropy make a values-based decision that they would rather not take the money of an organization that they feel has done societal damage. That was a pretty big moment and I'm not comparing an art museum to a small civic tech organization. Obviously those two things are very different but I think there are ways in which we might begin to see that organizations decide that they hold different values from the large tech companies that have previously funded them and want to make different choices going forward. Now the question is how are they going to make those choices when they need cash and I'm not naive about that fact but I think it links to what Lucy was saying about driving business models that give them alternatives. And what we've seen is that on the service delivery side of civic tech there are more sustainable business models that are available and actually flourishing in some cases which are companies that are creating digital technologies to help governments or nonprofits provide services better to people. What's more difficult is finding a business model on their participation side using technologies to have people participate in governance. Those business models are I would say unproven few and far between. There are a couple of examples I can think of but it's a much more difficult space and so I don't disagree at all with you Paul that there are some things that are just going to need to be grant funded that they're a public good and there isn't an alternative and so the job for us as funders is to figure out how to get other funders in the field to help fund the things that are a public good that don't have a business model. Just quickly on that point I don't necessarily think it's grant funding that's going to I think that would be wonderful but I just don't think we can anyone could guarantee that in 30 years time these things could be viable and I wonder to what extent as Mika said they can be potentially taken on those roles taken on by government and you might go well how on earth can something funded by the government be wholly independent but in the UK we have the Office of Budget Responsibility which is basically there to check the sums of the government and hold them to account. It's a rare example but it's possibly one that could be emulated because it I'm astonished by the work that people act full fact do but I also think it's insanely live in a world where political advertising has to be fact-checked by a third-party organization that's getting by on very limited funding. But do you think government organizations would be willing to fund activities the nature of which is fundamentally critical of government because that's a lot of what civic tech is. I think we have to see what we can achieve I think that in you know if you have a luxury I was going to describe the UK as a well-developed democracy but if you've been following Brexit at the moment that is absolutely not the case whereas if you have a luxury of being in you know a relatively well established democracy then I think it's a possibility. I think it's going to be more challenging in the countries where arguably these things are most needed so possibly a blended approach where there will have to be philanthropic funding but where we can see if we can work with developed democracies UK excluded to develop some of these systems and ourselves. So you know it's a good sign that the audience wants to start asking questions when they start raising their hands even before they're asked to so yes I see a question back there and folks start thinking your questions we have about a half hour which is great you had your hand up yes Adriana yeah sorry just tell us who you are yeah yeah and even worse I don't even want to ask a question of course I want to state my opinion well would you I have a rule for that which is please if you're going to make a statement at least make it in the form of a question okay so just put a question now my name is Adriana Gro I work for the prototype fund which is a project of the open knowledge foundation in Germany and the prototype fund is 100 funded by public money from the federal ministry for education and research in Germany and so I wanted to react to the discussion that was just breaking out which is for example we fund one project that works on a tour network so it's funded by public money whereas at the same time some government officials say we don't need a network like tour because in democracy why should you want to be completely private there's no one that wants to do your harm like this kind of line of thought so I think it is possible now I have to think how to make a question out of the statement which is maybe there are other ways how we can make it like we are a young program so I don't know if it will work forever maybe it only works now and it will change in the future if government changes for example so yeah the question would be how do we come up with ideas how we can fund civic tech activists with public money because I think that's a good idea in a way that it works on the long term as well I didn't say that just a comment on that it's worth noting that tour was and it may not still be the case but it's certainly initially funded by the State Department as a tool to help protect human rights workers a very paradoxical situation that one arm of the government funded something that another arm of the government hated so yeah and I think the intimation is that it could be that some portion of civic tech should actually be you want to work for improved government you should go work in government and that government needs to open up more to go back to Jim Anderson's comments at the keynote at lunch that you know if more government offices learn how to be more innovative they will start soaking up some of the energy and directing it and channeling it perhaps in in positive ways that right now is more diffuse in and and that may only be true for places that where you have a sort of relatively healthy functioning you know non-corrupt forms of government other questions comments while we look for questions oh we've got questions over here go yeah um sure and then the gentleman in the back we'll go to him next hi thank you i'm lina guider from citizen os my question is maybe i just don't know about this but um perhaps making governments like passing a law that a percentage of the budget has to be spent on citizen uh i don't know somehow funding some sort of civic tech or or some sort of citizen participation i know in astonia where i'm based right now the ministry of environment is is doing this on a larger scale and they are saying it's somehow in the law that um the environment is kind of like owned by everybody so everybody has to have a say in it so it's kind of they're they're going i i think it's just the somehow the people who are working there that are really active on it but they're pushing it through you know so it's on some level it's working thanks another statement not in the form of a question go ahead yes with the red hair yeah it was a question requiring engagement i mean you know there's been participatory budgeting happening on a um small to medium scale in certain countries around the world for for many years so that's sort of one form of that and brazil would be you know a great example of that in the us there are pockets of that so there's just been an announcement in the state of california that there will be a a fund for the state to be able to deploy more kind of 21st century digital technologies for service delivery that kamala haras just announced but it's more on the service delivery side and and creating more efficient government which is something that you know it's hard to say i don't want efficient government so everyone can sort of get behind that i think it's politically more difficult to say we're going to pass a law to to create a certain percentage of the budget that's dedicated towards technology tools for participation i mean i love the idea i just don't know how technically physical feasible it is if i cannot for example in latin america sometimes there is money for the creation of the specific platform but there isn't any money for mobilization so even when when we're talking about specific and very good relation with some countries like uruguay and argentina that that in some specific cities there are a good relation between some organizations and the government and there is a specific collaboration in general and generally i completely agree with stacey the the the money and the resources are related to service delivery and anything for mobilization you know just to stacey's point in the united states in the in the mid 1960s as part of the war on poverty there was a lot of money that went to support local economic development organizations in very poor like in ghettos and there was a provision in that law that said these programs had to encourage maximum feasible participation by the recipients of the programs in the programs this led to the creation of local alternative political power bases and thus the program was then opposed by all the big city mayors who were being threatened by the possibility that poor people were getting money from the federal government and and being asked to participate more and as a result the whole thing was killed so and that's before technology so the the point being that power doesn't necessarily want more engagement and and people who've studied the value of increasing voice in does it change things tiago pejoto was here before it was written a very important paper on this has found that if you don't add teeth to voice government doesn't change so we have a an ongoing challenge gentlemen in the yes yes sorry for that intervening earlier my name is benjamin hoge i'm a founder of a regard citizen which is a french NGO that is 10 years old and does parliamentary monitoring open data advocacy political transparency advocacy running the main the french they work for you and we've been running for 10 years with the budget between i would say one and four thousand euros a year entirely volunteer with less than half a thousand people and it's still alive so i guess our sustainable business model is no business model excellent but of course we are all exhausted not sleeping enough and doing that on the side of our work of our jobs so i will ask the same question i ask in such panels every two or three years but the funders are different so it's all right and usually tom steinberg raises this question but he's not here today i mean he's not here anymore today so the question is why i mean can funder at some point try and go find projects that proved that they are already sustainable without money and imagine what they could do if they were funded and i i feel like NGOs like us cannot even submit a file for funding because just taking the time to do that takes so much time that we cannot even do anything like that it takes too much and also the step is so high that i was saying we have like 3000 euros to become sustainable with money we would need probably we're in france so if we want to have two people full time and just a small place that would be about 100 000 euros per year so that's a huge step and just getting it is pretty much impossible we discussed with some funders in the past but western europe yeah you can give up so my question is here is there what what can you imagine for such situation and do you think there's a possibility in the future to consider such such organization or they just died like in congress Stacy and i were like talking because at the end i managed al tec that is an alliance from for latino america and at the end is that is taking in account that some organizations are quite small i need more agile process with lower barriers and have need to have another accompaniment i don't know if i'm inventing this word but okay um related to strengthen i don't know some areas related to gender communication and other scenes so we collaborate with luminates with other funders like portico and another foundation like cna in order to have this this fund and cool achieve and reach this type of organizations and yeah yeah um we i i take your question very seriously into heart and we have thought about how can we reach and learn about and engage with small organizations um for who just the the application process as you say is incredibly burdensome and um and so in some cases we've done what we did with avina which was to start a civic tech fund that avina could actually implement because they had capacities that we didn't have to be able to have that reach out in that application process um but it's something that we think a lot about because one of our core tenants that luminate is around diversity equity and inclusion and we recognize that everything about the process by which funders try to find people to fund and the ways that people who want funding try to approach funders is inherently very unequal uh and um you know it's it's based on networks of people who know each other who have the same you know professional um sets of um of friends uh who have the same in many cases socioeconomic backgrounds in the same race same gender you know all of those things come into play and end up with a system in which certain types of groups get funded and certain other types of groups just aren't even in the flow um of of those conversations and so we're actively trying to think about different ways to approach that problem that are different from the way we do it now and i think you know doing funds is one way but there are probably other ways that we still haven't figured out need to work on but i was wondering paul if you had any thoughts on that because indigo also does very early stage funding for small yeah not in France i'm afraid but we tend to do because we're small we try and find the ways of using money that a small amount of money can make a little bit of difference or can help an organization that's not necessarily had any formal history and give them 10 20 25 000 and that sometimes works it sometimes doesn't sometimes other funders such as the media then pick up those organizations when they've had the opportunity to scale but we certainly haven't if we see someone who's doing an interesting project in the past we have said look even though you don't have an organization right now we will fund you if you can become an organization and get a bank account that will give you some money i think stasis point though about bias in funders is incredibly true i've only been in the funding world for about 18 months and it's so hard but it shouldn't be hard i'm just making excuses for myself it's all too easy it's probably a better way of phrasing it to pick people who look like you be it physically or psychologically who speak your language that you can understand and i think also there's something of a hurting aspect of funders as well you know if i'm approached by an organization or i hear about an organization one of the first things i'll do is see see who else funds them that's kind of crazy you know these people are already getting some money the people you want to be funding are the ones who you haven't heard of that no funders are talking to but to answer your broad question about can you go from three or four thousand year a year a year to a hundred thousand year a year i think the hard answer is it's highly unlikely someone is going to fund you like that what my society did back in the early days and james clonin is in the room could probably talk more to it is they started off with a tiny bit of money and then they got a little bit more and then they got a little bit more and eventually they got up to the point where people were prepared to give them one hundred two hundred five hundred thousand dollars a year going from that small step to what you rightly say is the kind of money you need even for a tiny organization is super super hard yeah so just uh having someone paid just to find some more funding but just being part time we'll completely messed the whole dynamic dynamic but uh governance and uh if you if you change the governance of an organization yeah then it doesn't it doesn't have the same spirit okay there are other people with their hands up who haven't had a chance let's come to this side of the room here and then here and here i see okay hi thanks so much for the really interesting panel so far this is ariana keeman from the busara center for behavioral economics we're a research and advisory firm headquartered in Nairobi Kenya that specializes in behavioral research for social programs my question is for stacy i was intrigued and and actually really appreciative of what you were saying around focusing on civic empowerment as sort of the next strategy for illuminate and you spoke a little bit in more detail about the public service sort of delivery angle of your strategy as well about tech i'm wondering if you can provide a little bit more insight into the tactics of what you mean by funding civic empowerment and what that would look like yeah so a great example is an organization that we have already funded called amandla.movie that's based in south africa that has used mobile technology to mobilize and organize low income women in south africa to address issues that are specifically happening to them in their communities be it sanitation or high data costs of mobile data there's a whole number of campaigns that they've organized and the the organization includes of course using mobile tools to to communicate but also in person organizing and protesting and and it has been very effective so one of the things that we struggled with because of our kind of silicon valley heritage was this notion of scale and we went through a period where we were always talking about scale everything has to scale which is also you know a big kind of buzzword in the tech field and while you know there is something important about that because you can reach more people at theoretically a lower cost per head it really isn't the only way to impact and so one of the things that we're really coming to terms with now is that you can have deep impact on a small number of people but for whom the interventions are radically changing their lives for the better and we've gotten really comfortable with that as the metric that we're trying to to judge our progress by and not about the number of people touched and so Amandla would be a great example of that. Thanks. Erhard. Thank you. So my name is Erhard Grafe. I'm a professor at Olin College of Engineering and I had a couple of things stuck in my head based on the the conversation over the last 30 minutes or so. Mika you were talking about this idea that sometimes the powers of B don't always appreciate participation and that there's this tension within the civic tech community between those of us who feel that we're activists first and foremost versus those of us that are technologists that might be working with governments and then there's this spotty history of funders actually giving out enough money for the costs of tech to be properly implemented capacity to be built and impact to be evaluated and so connecting all of these three things I'm curious about our shared value as a community of participatory democracy which is not the same as the representative democracy that's been on the books in the dominant form of governance in all these countries that and localities that we're working in and I'm curious about what is our responsibility to actually convincing those powers that participatory democracy is valuable. How do you as funders see that as part of your responsibility to actually have the burden of proof to convince these folks with that power to understand participation is a good thing and I'm curious about fitting that into your portfolios. Good big question. Anybody? I think you should all sit Mika. I should answer that. I'm not a funder. I'm a builder. I have to raise money. So I'll take a stab at it to get started so one of the things I think is really lacking in this community or field right now is impact evaluation and evidence of impact and if we're going to try to first of all align around whether or not we all believe in driving participatory democracy forward as our kind of you know ultimate goal we have to be able to show to the people who are trying to convince what the impact is and we don't have a lot of that today and I bring this up because I know you are one of the people who works on it and I just learned about your work. So but it is something that we really struggle with a lot in this field because the main sort of form of impact evaluation that seemingly is most credible is RCT and that's incredibly expensive and so what I would really love is help from people in this room who are impact evaluators and researchers to help us figure out kind of what are the different ways that we could actually study and measure the impact on democracy different forms of democracy or on service delivery because as I said we care about both in order to have more compelling information to try to convince people that this is the right path to choose because today it's fairly faith-based if I can use that term and we really need to get more evidence. Completely Ari we spent like the last week discussing about that and some of my colleagues and allies even are not agree with this idea that participatory democracy is our common vision so we need a lot of study and impact evaluation in order to know that before it started to to act. I think there's another challenge as well which is that even if you have the evidence which we don't really have at the moment you need politicians who are rational who understand evidence and will actually make decisions based upon it and I don't think I have any idea how you sort that one. Other comment yes yes good thank you. Alyssa Zomer from the MIT Governance Lab so I'm going to pick up a little bit the theme about evidence so I guess the first thing is thank you guys so much for being willing to learn from failure like our own as grantees I will just say that the ability to talk with our donors about what hasn't worked as much as what has worked has immensely freed up the work that we've been able to do especially with the work that we do with partners and so I guess the one thing that is when you start off this session on like the changing global landscape around civic space the big elephant in the room is that a lot of these populist leaders and governments were voted in by the people by this very civic engagement and participation that we worked on and so I think one of the challenges that we're facing as you know MIT a group based in the north at like academic institution we partner mostly you know with grassroots civil society groups is how do we think about these questions of shifting power in closing spaces and I guess so that's like yeah the first the question and then I think we're also trying to think about ideas moving beyond the RCTs as gold standards what is the bronze standard which is like what we're trying to do through iterative design co-design with partners where we're still using quantity rigorous quantitative measures and also like how to build the evidence and so in that sense like how can funders better support building evidence where you have bricks that come together to build a house rather than like these individual pieces which is just something that we're struggling with within the practitioner and the academic community. Thanks. I just one just kind of initial reflection is that I think it's really interesting how we're using the word populist at the moment because it kind of seems to be it's a bad thing if the mass of people don't agree with us now if you look at the Wikipedia definition of the word it's somewhat contentious and some people say which should be removed altogether but if we think about we talked about populism in terms of the Occupy movement and things like that and we were kind of that was that was good populism and now we're seeing bad populism and you know I'm a sort of wet liberal snowflake person so I'm equally concerned about the rise of the far right populism but I think there's a bigger challenge which as you say um it's not a factor of democracy being broken it's more fundamental issues about people's understanding about actually what issues affect their lives and you know I hate to mention brexit for the second time sitting on the stage but hey nine days ago who knows what's going to happen we don't you know these were decisions made by masses of people who won popular votes now okay Trump didn't win the popular vote but even so millions tens of millions of people vote for they make decisions using efficient democratic processes and they don't necessarily make the the inverted commas rational ones in terms of their own self-benefit and I think it's important for us to take a step back and think about well what are those broader issues what is it how are we failing because if we focus on simply making you know a more efficient mousetrap we first need to think about why we have mice in the first place that was a very clunky analogy I don't know why I said that I will retake a conversation that I had today with Favreau from Interese and yes massively in Latin America people vote some candidates populism candidate Kate but I think also that could be an opportunity because at the end they are there and we have to work with that to reach and to have concrete teams themes of work and besides the difference and we were talking about political difference between right and left how we can reach and find these specific teams areas that are they interest have the interest from both sides in order to create movement and to create actions that could improve and could move citizen participation and could move some issues that are important for society besides the polarisation and that this regiment have been voted but so many people in Latin America yeah I think your point is great about populism and well if the people voted for it then isn't that what we're about but I think the difference is that when people vote a strong man into power who threatens the fundamental infrastructure of democracy then it's gone beyond what the people want because we're now no longer operating in a system where fundamental democratic principles are being observed and so or I think you know we need to focus is not on necessarily people's views or opinions on a specific issue but that people can hopefully come together on agreeing about how democracy is supposed to work and to the extent that someone who is theoretically elected into office and becomes an autocrat through slowly chipping away at all the institutions that prevent someone from you know becoming an autocrat that's where we need to to orient our efforts and and yeah it's a hard question I don't know what else to say except that we need to do something to orient around maintaining democracy okay I think we have time for maybe one or two questions go yeah I'm abusing my position holding the microphone use away obviously we're talking about investing in the future of civic tech here and we've talked a little bit about impact and we have to start with the baseline so assuming you know today where we are now is kind of the baseline for future measurement if you came back and had this panel at tic-tac in five years time or ten years time what impacts what outcomes would you have liked to have achieved what we do as funders like to be able to sit there and say well we invested x amount over five years in the resources like we have in this room in the context politically that we're currently in what would you actually like to to be able to say in five years time a great ending question I think what I'd like to see is clear impact that the fantastic tools built by people in this room and far outside it have it's kind of cliched and sappy but have actually helped improve people's lives in a tangible measurable way that you can establish wouldn't have happened otherwise and we definitely know it's possible and we definitely do see some examples of that I would like again I mean hey this is fancy world five years time I would like to see democratic systems that are truly honest and just I would like to be in the situation where people can't place misleading political adverts without it being identified and immediately stopped be it on a billboard or in a newspaper on Facebook that's what I'd love to see I don't know if we're going to get there or not though I think two two main concepts concept resilient and systemic changes in democracy that's called to build a stronger a stronger healthy societies with broader participation I made the bad mistake of going last I guess what I would like to see is first of all in five years that we're not still having the debate about what is civic tech or and what do we call it I'm so tired I was on the panel about that just last year with a cut about six months ago you know I would like to to see that tick tech is called investing in the future it's not about civic tech anymore it's about the impact that we're having as a community that includes tech it includes non-tech it includes building democracy includes getting services to people and it includes holding the powerful to account and however we want to do that with or without tech that's what I want to see well that's really an awesome place to end so I'm going to let the the conversation finish there thank you for really wonderful thought provoking and and revealing conversation thanks to our panel thanks everybody for coming especially those of you who moved to the first six rows I did call on some people further back sorry and thanks to our hosts from my society this is our last panel what's the what's the agenda now we all go out drinking karaoke yes talk to mark or any of the other people in red shirts to find out about the the evening festivities planned and give yourselves all a big round of applause for making it through