 Hello everyone and a good afternoon from a surprisingly sunny north London and a good morning afternoon or evening to you wherever you may be and whatever the weather may be. Welcome to the third tic-tac civic tech surgery focusing on accessing quality information for civic tech success. I'm Gavin free guard a freelance consultant working with my society on the tic-tac labs program. Among other things I'm also an associate institute for government and a special advisor at the open data Institute here in the UK. And I am your chair facilitator and host for today's event. Do tell us who you are and why you're here in the chat if you'd like. Thanks to those of you who've already done so very nice to meet you. Over the next couple of hours we're going to discuss some of the challenges and dilemmas we face in accessing quality information. Think everything from open data and API is to freedom of information and much else besides, and hopefully move towards some solutions to some of those challenges, aided by some fantastic speakers. In these first 10 minutes or so I'm going to outline outline high today will work and give you a bit more background to what we're hoping to achieve with the tic-tac labs program of which this event is a part. Some quick housekeeping first today's event is on the record, it's being recorded and will be published online afterwards, along with minutes of today's event. You should be able to access a live transcript here on zoom. Please let us know in the chat if you can't. Welcome to share details of the event on social media the hashtag is tic-tac. And if you'd like to contribute to today's discussion, you can use the chat here on zoom and you can use the padlet board that you'll soon get a link to if you've not had it already. There will also be a few opportunities later to unmute your mic and tell us what you're thinking as well. If you've not used padlet before it looks a lot like this. So the various questions will be covering today on the screen. If you want to add something just click on the plus signs that you should be able to see. We've already had some contributions, you can add more as we go along through the event today. And there will be a few periods of silent working during today's event, but we'll encourage you to add more contributions. That's the housekeeping done now for a quick introduction to the tic-tac labs program, which is run by my society with support from National Endowment for Democracy. The main is to discuss and tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the global civic tech and digital democracy sector. We want to grow the civic tech evidence base address some key issues and enhance the effectiveness and potential impact of civic tech projects. Tic-tac, which stands for the impact of civic technology conference started as an annual global in person conference in 2015. We hope that there will be another in person event in the future. But in the meantime, through the pandemic, we've converted tic-tac into a year round program of activities and events called tic-tac labs. Over the course of the program we're taking on six topics which have been identified by our steering group. You can see the steering group on the right hand side of your screen as civic tech's biggest challenges, as well as accessing quality information are subject to today. As we subject our public-private collaborations, ensuring civic tech is accessible, scaling and replicating civic tech, tackling the climate crisis with civic tech, and storytelling and reach. For each of those six topics, we're going to organize a civic tech surgery, like today's, to delve further into the challenges and possible solutions. After each surgery, there will be an Action Lab, a small working group of around six people, who will work together to commission a piece of work to help solve challenges raised. If you're interested in getting involved in the Action Lab, we'll tell you how to do so at the end of today's event. By the end of the tic-tac labs program in 2023, we hope we'll have six pieces of commissioned work, as well as increased connections and learning across the global civic tech community. For our third civic tech surgery, we currently have a call for proposals out on the first topic we covered, public-private collaborations, which closes on Monday, next Monday, the 28th of March. Check out the tic-tac labs website if you'd like to apply. And we've also had a surgery on our second topic, ensuring civic tech is as accessible and inclusive as possible, more to come on that one over the next few weeks. Right, we're focusing on accessing quality information for civic tech success. And the big overarching question is, what would help the global civic tech community to overcome common barriers to accessing quality information? Underneath that big question, our objectives for today are to discuss the challenges involved in accessing quality information so we can establish which are the most common challenges across our global community. We'll discuss some of those challenges have been addressed to date. Discuss what else might help tackle those common challenges that we identify. Share any existing projects, evidence or research on the topic that might be helpful. And last but definitely not least, to explore how the tic-tac action lab that will come together after this surgery can help address one of the common challenges we find by commissioning a relevant piece of work. The next session is going to run. We're starting with this introduction, obviously. We'll then move on to a discussion of the dilemmas, challenges and barriers that people face in accessing quality information. We'll begin by turning to our excellent discussants for three minutes or so each. We'll then give everyone five minutes of silent working to add thoughts to the chat and contribute to the Padlet Board. Then we'll see if our discussants have any reflections or if any of you would like to share some of your thoughts as well. This section will refer to question one on our Padlet Board, what dilemmas have you faced or are you facing when accessing quality information or data for your civil tech projects. We'll use the same format, discussants, five minutes of silent working on the chat and Padlet, any further reflections to ask what people have done to try and address those issues. That's question two on the Padlet Board. After that we'll squeeze in a short five minute break where you can grab yourself a drink, pop to the bathroom or add some things to the Padlet or the chat. After the break, it'll be the same format again to consider what might help tackle some of those challenges. That's question three on the Padlet Board, what do you think might help you further address these issues, i.e. are there any evidence or resource gaps. We'll then have 20 to 30 minutes to consider two big subjects. First, whether any of us are aware of existing evidence and research that could help us tackle some of the dilemmas and challenges we've discussed. And second, even that the Action Lab that follows this surgery will commission some work, what project ideas we think we could fund to solve some of the problems we've raised. We'll start again with some silent working to add things in the chat and on the Padlet, and then have some time for us all to discuss. Right at the end, I'll summarize what happens next in terms of taking this forward to an Action Lab. We've got lots of exciting discussion ahead of us this afternoon. To help us with that discussion we have some fantastic discussions we'll be sharing their experiences. They are Neha Maya Yali Atiga, the co-founder and principal leader of the DECRO PMO in Ghana. We've got Simro from Democracy Club here in the UK. Sarah Zommer from the Fat-Checking Organization Chequeado in Argentina. We've got Kareel Yusof from the Scenar project in Malaysia. He'll be leaving us at 3pm. But then joining us at 3pm will be Matty Carthy from the Open Data Charter. So fantastic lineup of people to help us through these difficult discussions. We're very grateful to all of them, as well as to all of you for joining us today. With that, I'm going to stop sharing my screen. So we're going to move to the first section of today's event. And that's all about the question, what dilemmas have you faced or are you facing when accessing quality information or data for your civic tech projects? As I said, that relates to column one on the Padlet. I'll ask each of our discussants to share their thoughts for around three minutes each. Then we'll have five minutes of silent working to add to the ideas on the Padlet or in the chat, and then we'll have a further five minutes or so to reflect on all of that. So for the first three minutes, I'm going to go to Neha Maya over to you. Thank you very much. It's usually an issue of bureaucracy than anything else. And so, whilst you think that information to be easily accessible or available, it's not that easy to have access to. I remember when we started on the pro we had to, at a point even purchase parliamentary information and data to be able to use them. But we're getting them in even hard copies and using OCR technology to extract the text from the scanned documents. But bureaucracy and the opportunity to circumvent it is what it is. And whilst bureaucracy exists for obvious reasons, it has also created a lot of inefficiencies that can be frustrating for everyone, whether a citizen or even an organization like ours. And what has happened is you found you found yourself in a place where public servants or people who work in the parliamentary service were exploited this to their advantage by making below the counter deal. So someone will tell you that I can make sure that you get this information or this data. But I'll take this from you, even though it's supposed to be open. And because you're also desperate to get that information to carry out your research or, or whatever work you're involved in. You would also end up maybe bending over and giving funds to these projects to get the information that you need. And so, they sometimes we intentionally hold the information requested until you pay the amount they're asking for. So for instance, if you're working on a corruption related project, and you have to engage in corruption to get access to the data you're looking for then you are actually back to square one because you're actually carrying out a corrupt act to get the information to fight the corruption or engage in any efforts around that. It's an interesting place we find ourselves in but that is truly the situation here in Ghana. And so that would be my first submission on this subject. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Let's go to Laura next. Yeah, hi everyone. And in Chicago is based in Argentina. We have networks in 2014, working together with other fat checkers in the region. Most of the problems are in general similar with perhaps different intensity in one country or the other. The problems are related with the, in some cases, access cause there are their laws or decrease that allowed us to ask formally for information, but that laws are not necessary in all the cases, apply in the sense that then the law write down, then in some cases is they just don't answer or they don't answer on time, or they use an exception that is not necessarily clear in the in the law. In a lot of cases, journalists or small organizations are not necessarily going to the judges to discuss if that request was good or bad answer by the government. And the other problem that we find is in some cases that the government when when it changed the party, the change in some cases the methodology or in other cases, the period in what they publish the data. And then, for example, in Argentina, since 1997, we have the salaries of the teachers all around the country, we are a federal country, it's useful to share to the community that they are really diverse salaries, depends on the provinces, and the provinces that are more poor in general pay salaries that are not necessarily the best one, and all related to the location explain that we need the better teachers and good salaries for them in the places that are the most complicated, and what the data show us is completely the opposite. And what happened this year is that the government stopped to publish that. And then we asked for that, first informally as a journalist request, and they said, we decide not to publish anymore, because it's not useful for discuss in an inflation context, the salaries of the public servant. And then what we did is a request, and after we did the format request they start to publish it again. And what what that case or example show us is that there are a lot of things that are not necessary. Not this pressure now. We have the right, we have the Constitution that allowed us to write we have the laws. And someone decided not to read anymore because of political reasons and that happened. It's a small example that show us that we are not necessary in a position where all the information that it should be there. It is. And the other problem that we find, especially for our project that is related to automatization of our checking is that the data that the government publish is not always in, in a format that the machines can learn or can read. And then that if I had to choose that two of the ideas on one side, the discretion of each government to publish to publish data or not, more or less, because of their convenience. And the other related to formats and, and how to do that. Thank you, Lara. Yes, I think data quality issues and governments discretion over what it gets to publish. I suspect a lot of people will be nodding along to that being a problem on this call. Let's go to career next. Hi, I'm Carol from Malaysia. Yeah, so we've had a long relationship with my society all the way back to 2013. We're Malaysia is also a Commonwealth country. So there's a lot of things that are in common with the UK and which we've inherited. So in Malaysia, you know in terms of dilemmas. One of the challenges we face is the fact that we have a very kind of Jekyll and Hyde or contradictory situations with how the government does things. On the one hand, for example, we have a strong federal let service by government and public servants to open data. But on the contrary, there are you know criminal laws that says a public servant vaguely in the act of doing their work. Not specified what can face for example up to 250,000 years dollars in fines or a year's jail for sharing that data, which another agency says they should be sharing. So we have a lot of these kind of contradictory situations and what we've learned is that you know, a lot of these laws when you don't have a like for example a federal public service to open up Internet Information Act or you know or an open default data by default policy or problematic laws like leftover from like say sedation laws and so on. It creates an environment where it's really difficult to get quality information, even if there are initiatives within government to do so. The other part I would say is that we often also look in terms of how we measure quality is to actually look at the examples of where we want to be, or we hope to be. And for that we often use, you know, my society's set of services. For example, they work for you or Ella Vitelli for FY, we look at the UK Government Digital Service. We're like, you know, we're fans of democracy club and what you they do during elections. You know, and also you know the work around say beneficial ownership data standards right. So what we found is that we then use those and an intention to access the quality that we have we then check, are we able to do these things. We check on whether the quality that we have the data that we have available allows us to do such things. And more often than not, when we measure these things, there's a lot of things that we find out that we don't have when we want to do something. Just to be quick, like for an example, my society has this, you know, common UI that says put in your postcode and find your MPs. So a common situation in Malaysia is like, okay, let's have that feature too. And then we find out that there is no data available that actually maps locations where or areas that the postcode covers in Malaysia so that's not possible to do all those things. So, yeah, so that's how we actually measure, you know, where's the quality and where the gaps by looking at, you know, best practices, ideal applications that we would like to do, and then measuring about where the gaps are for us in Malaysia. Excellent. Thank you very much. If you're if you're just joining us, do you feel free to say hello and tell us who you are in the chat in about in a few minutes time we'll open up the paddle at boards and allow everyone else to get involved as well but before we do that, we're going to hear from Sim about dilemmas based when accessing quality information. Thanks Kevin. So just to, I think we have a slightly different context to some of the other organizations here in that we mostly deal with election pre-election information so we have a very short timeframe in which our services are relevant. It's, you know, at most two months before the election happens itself and realistically it's just in the week or the day of election. There's a few interesting things that that may be a different shape of problem to everyone else's. First of all, UK election administration is fragmented it's it's it's organized at the local authority level which means that there are for national action there are 400 separate organizations that carry the data that we need, and no other part of the UK state aggregates or joins that data together. So we have a sort of a fragmented data problem where we have to very quickly gather data from lots of sources into one place, standardize it and make it useful to people. So that's that's kind of one shape of problem that we have. Another another one is again I mentioned the timeliness. I make a distinction between sort of haven't got good words for it but maybe real time data versus statistical data. And what I mean by that is the UK has a has a superb statistical office where there are those lots and lots of very high quality information about the state. But the publication cycle, almost by definition is is lagging what really happened so if you want to know, you know some performance standard from the previous year, you can almost certainly find it but if you want to find it. You know, for today, it's, it's basically impossible to do. That doesn't matter most of the time but but if you think about the election timeframe, that's, that's really important to us. One really practical example of that is electoral boundaries aren't published until about six months after the first election for those boundaries. So if you want to know, you know, who's who's got an election happening. You can't find out until six months after the elections happened. And it feels like lots of the conversations about open data. Don't really take that into consideration. There are lots of good open data portals we've got in the UK data.cov.uk, which does a good job. But as I say it's always post hoc statistical data that has this quality where it's it's been written once and it will never be changed. It's a snapshot. So yeah, I think of, I think of lots of open data as almost like printing a book and putting it on a shelf in an archive, then having it as a service that's available and working on that I think is really difficult and a real sort of cultural change because when we say open data, I mean one thing and lots of people mean the other thing. So there's a fair amount of stuff that I could talk about but I think those are the two that's the timeliness and fragmentation of the two things that I've got there. Brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. So when I say brilliant, thank you for your contribution. Well, brilliant. That's what's actually happening in the real world. And thank you all for keeping very much to time as well. So we're now going to set a timer for about five minutes to give everyone the opportunity for a bit of silent working. If you can answer the question, what dilemmas have you faced or are you facing when accessing quality information or data for your civic tech projects on the padlet. That's under column one. That's where the question is, or you can also use chat here on zoom. So five minutes. Off you go. Brilliant. Well, thank you very much everyone will have a quick look at what everyone's put down. Thanks for all those contributions. So we've done that if anybody would like to contribute thoughts, sort of verbally orally, do put your hand up using the reactions button that you should see probably at the bottom of zoom. So let's see what we've got on the padlet. We've got inconsistency which is something that's come up already. And that seems to be standards in some cases but not in others and things might be put into scanned PDFs which are difficult to use. By measuring quality of information we use examples of tech that work such as those in the UK, which is the point that we've already heard as well. And there are formats that don't allow robots to read so the data is not in a machine readable format. There's great keeping by organizations who stop at the information being released. Poor knowledge of the Freedom of Information Act on the side of public officials. I think a lot of us can relate to that one. Efficiency of government services that services may not be fully equipped or resourced to be able to deal with some of those data requests forms used for data collection do not collect all of the data required for a full open data publication. This is an example from Open Data Services and Open Ownership about beneficial ownership data. Data is not available at city scale as some problem with different boundaries. Government officials have negative perception on information requested and will feel that the information will be used to expose certain corrupt acts. There's a lack of transparency. Things are not available because it's filed as a national security issue or various other things. We've got a range of repressive and vague laws for access to information data in Malaysia, which we've heard a bit about. Most valuable data lives on private platforms that are inconsistent partners, for example, social media platforms who are very inconsistent and how they share things over time. There may be particular challenges in including children as rights holders in particular bits of data. Personal data may present in public data sets. Government may not have the data, it might not have the data that we expected to hold. And here on the chat we've also got nepotism being a possible problem. We need education to help people use it as well. So lots, lots to think about there, lots of food for thought. Does anybody have any further reflections on any of that that they want to share before we move on to the next question. If you do, please do use the hand, the raising hand tool that you should find under reactions at the bottom of your screen. Anybody got anything to add on any of that. Do any of our discussants want to come in on any, or we've got a hand up from Hamza. We should be able to unmute you and hear what you think. Excellent. Go for it Hamza. But quickly, just to share that in Nigeria we have a problem of the public officials actually as to, as head of sharing some information. Because some of them are even worrying that they may lose their job or they may get queried or some concerns. I remember recently I went to a ministry of works where I actually had written a question for an information on an abundant project, and they had refused to give me the information. So I had to go when I went, I met a director at the ministry, and he said, the information you are looking for actually we can't give you and I asked why he said, I'm not permitted to give you. So, to summarize, I had to give me a copy of the freedom of information act that we have in Nigeria, and that director admitted to me, he is not even aware of the freedom of information act. So eventually, he gave me the information I requested. Thank you so much. Thank you, Hamza. So we've got people not being aware of the sort of requirements of various information law as well. Anybody else wants to put their hand up. Otherwise we can move on. I don't have a hand button because I'm a host so I didn't know where I was trying to look for it. There's something really interesting about. So in our case, we have a very good working relationship with the UK Electoral Commission, and that's essentially because the commission understands that we're providing a service that isn't really controversial and is useful to the public as a whole, and it's complimentary to the existing laws and augmenting it. And we still have frustrations inside that but it's not fundamentally a combative relationship. So I think there's something really interesting about if you're trying to get information about from the government about something that will fundamentally embarrass them or show corruption or bring them down. You're going to have a much harder time than if you're doing something that facilitates better service delivery that they want to have happen. The relationship between the long term aspect of civic tech projects and their relationship to the state is a really fascinating dynamic that that maybe it's not for this call but I think that's a that's a great sort of thing to think about as well and part of all this. So I think things may change as a sort of product services and relationship materials over time. Excellent. Thank you. Nehemiah, thank you. I have to add to what Sim said. When, when the government agency or the officials realize the value you present with the idea of what you want to use the data for they would release it and case in point just like you mentioned the federal commission same here in Ghana when we wanted to digitize the information on where to find a polling station to get registered for elections. Initially they didn't want to give us the data we scripted that from their site. And then once we put that online they realize that oh this is what the guys wanted to do. And this is something that we also got to use short codes to get that and immediately they give us the correct ones so they give us one that we're not expecting because of the initial pushback but I think sometimes they need to clearly understand what you are trying to do to get them to jump on board so value and proposition should be a way to get data from some of these folks. Thank you. And before we move on to the next question, I'll take a quick contribution from Oriomi. Okay, thank you very much. And I think my own feedback sometimes it's about like same said it's about civic tech and demanding for accountability and you know exposing corruption sometimes. I know we worked on a project, universal basic education projects in Nigeria. This time around we scripted from the budget, and we're able to put out like seven projects from the budget. However, when we wrote to the national body, we discovered there were over 119 projects in that same year. And that was because they could release the information. Now, the, the, the funding thing was we actually requested for one state at the time that was released by the time we went back to say we needed for other states, then there was a pushback. And it was that, oh, we cannot release this projects to you, you need to go to the state level so sometimes it's always funny with, with civic tech when we're trying to push, push this information out there, how they can be pushed back from government officials, even though they know what you're trying to do at the end of the day so it's different stories for different countries. I think that's my feedback. Thank you very much indeed. And we'll now move on to our second question. And that is what, if anything, have people already done to try and address some of the issues that we've discussed so far. This relates to question to column two on the padlet. And I'm going to go to Carol first this time so I know has to go fairly soon so over to you. So what we've learned is the fact that, you know, we still try to implement, you know, like our like either, you know, like they work for you or a little bit tell you within our local context. And when we do these things, we actually learned that, you know, we, we learned about that we can implement it in a way that works in our environment that, you know, with the faces of challenges that we face them. One of the things that we learned, for example, is that, for example that bodyshee, I think in East Africa, or Nigeria, and ended up with a similar approach to us in Malaysia, where it's like if we don't have open contracting data, and it's all in digital then we can still have open contracting data if we, you know, get this document scan them in and then convert them into data. So, so we're still able to do it but you know in a rather about manner. The other thing that we learn is that sometimes we adapt some of these tools in a way that makes sense for us. So for example, my society had a project earlier where they try to store data on politicians, you know, in an open data standard. And then here in Malaysia, we're like, well, the politicians are also businessmen, and also, you know, and also possibly criminals as well. And they ended up actually putting up all the data on all the businessmen and their relationships in a database that was supposed to be meant for, you know, to power they work for you. And so it did work really well for us in the sense that it solved our needs and our political situations where politicians and businessmen and cronies are the same people. And it worked for us that actually ended up breaking my society's interface because of the different use cases. So yeah, so what we've learned is that you know these challenges are not always a hindrance. It can actually lead to us learning more about how to actually use them in our local context. And another point, for example, is like for like elevator telling, even if you don't have an FY act, what we learn in Malaysia is that we can still apply, you know, the standards on how to measure performance from elevator telling. And then we also learned that just the act of storing all the different requests. And we also used this data on a mapping of which government agencies actually hold the data that we're looking for. So it's not just whether it's an FY request but other things just by learning from, you know, local implementation so yeah, but what I got to share. I'm going to give you some ground for optimism there, which is always good. And I'll go to Sim next. Sure, so I think that the other two things I said before so there's the fragmentation and then there's the timeliness of official data on the fragmentation we've essentially used crowdsourcing we have, we have a huge community of people who have a very focused weekend, getting into that we need. It's coming up in a couple of weeks if anyone wants to take part. I can share details. So, so that's been a huge thing in that community maintenance has meant that a job that would take one organization, thousands of hours is can be done in a weekend, which is really great. The timeliness stuff and the infrastructure stuff. We've just built a lot of the very, very basic infrastructure that we need to exist. We, we manually build a database of all of the boundaries that take place. Just so that we can get that data before that it's published officially which is far too late for us. That sort of work that. I mean it works it's a solution but trying to find any sort of sustainability or funding for that thing when you try and explain even what the problem spaces and all the funders get really bored and don't want to hear about shapefiles and things like that is is interesting so it's it's a funny bit of hidden work that we've got that we need to try and find a good way of communicating because it's not apparent that. Well as someone said earlier you know if you want that really nice my society looking postcode to thing service, you've got to have the bit in the middle and that's the boring bit but it's the important bit so that's that's about that. Also, as I just alluded to in my comment before, we've just partnered with with those 400 organizations to 400 local authorities we've spent a long time making friends with them. It's not easy, and it's again it's quite it's quite boring not that they're boring but it's quite boring tough to do have the same conversation 400 times. And that's something that we've only been able to do by hanging about for the last six years or so, and getting more trust from the from the state itself. It's interesting how both of you talked about the sort of way that you've had to fill in the infrastructure have to sort of work around how government is approaching what should really be basic information release but never turns out to be that basic or straightforward. Thank you. Let's go to Laura next. In our case related to the challenge about formats, not able for robots. It is more or less. What we said is one to one conversation with organizations that are working trying to improve the access to information policies in general because from Chicago we are not necessarily sitting in the same table as government, asking them to change their policy then what we try to do is to also give some examples for the organizations that are doing that work to knock the door of the government and explain with specific details why that is a problem. There's a certain problem not necessarily something that's going to happen in 10 years today is a problem and and related to to the discretion or or that decision of when when the government decided to change for example the period of the publication or stop publishing something that used to be published in the past etc. We use the more traditional strategy of a watchdog journalist saying having a good conversation with the public servant in the private conversation but saying to his or her, I should tell the word is because if not they're not cost of the decisions you are making and that decisions is affecting the the access to information right of me then we use that both strategy one more trying to help the people. A lot of people trying to push this agenda inside the government or the parliament or etc but on the other side helping them also to put it on the front page or put it on the agenda to make a cost of that type of decision. And the historical strategy that we have in Tekealo and all around the world in different fact checkers is we work to make people be more interested about good data and then we are working on the demand showing for example when something is information and using data to explain that we are trying the people to value more that then that's that the general one, not necessarily specific talent but the big big talents that all of us has related to how we involve more people and not just we that are experts or activists in the importance of this, we need better data to make better decisions than if people don't realise or don't pay enough attention to that, government have less intensive to invest money or to take this seriously. Thank you and I think I think really interesting way of thinking about the demand side as well as the supply side when it comes to solutions as well. Nehemiah over to you. For us it's it's been a situation where we've tried to leverage relationships that we've built. I mean especially with people who have the decision making power and I mean this can be expensive in the long term due to the concentrations involved but it's convenient compared to the frustration one has to go through so sometimes we'll invite them to Brown Bag series which is learning events and they would sit in there and see the importance of the work that we do to everyone, every stakeholder including citizens which obviously they are part of even before holding the positions that they hold and so sometimes either out of embarrassment or out of just better understanding of our needs and the needs of citizens and they would then work with us to change the situation or the status quo rather than stick to what they've always done and so it's been helpful in a lot of ways in certain instances we really ask to actually either advice on how information should be made available on their websites or or even in different forms and what would be the best way to do that in certain instances they really ask us to actually either build the technology for them and to come to certain types of information so relationships, it has been a good approach for us to solve this problem. Excellent thank you again it's a really strong theme that's coming through how to build those relationships over quite a long time but quite a lot of effort into doing that and helping people to sort of learn what's going on and what they need to be doing thank you. So we're now going to give a message Carol you want to reflect on any of that before you leave. I don't know if you want to come in quickly. No it's okay. Just before I leave I actually put it in the third pilot, you know, on things that we can do. So there's a little picture and then I hope it's self-explanatory. So my colleagues are actually here Kelly and Issa. So if you have any questions on that approach. Yeah, you can't take them. And again thank you so much for having me. We're out and you know giving the time before I jump off to the next call right now. Again. Thank you for joining us. And for everybody else. And we're now going to spend five minutes thinking about that second question what if anything have you done to try and address some of the issues. And it's column two on the padlet feel free to put some contributions on there column two on the padlet, or you can use the chat here on zoom as well. We'll have five minutes for that a bit of silent working and then again we'll have some time for reflection and people to chip in so five minutes, what if anything have you done to try and address these issues. Second column on the padlet and time is up. Let's see what we've got in column two padlet what if anything have you done to try and address these issues. And I think a lot of similar things emerging including to what from our discuss that said as well, published stories in the media to increase the cost of stopping publishing or not publishing data. And archiving government websites, just in case any documents should go offline that's a good one. Speaking with the information commissioner here in the UK when free information requests have been refused and there are similar organizations and officials elsewhere as well. Work with the public sector to improve data capture something that open data services and ownership are working on. We've heard a bit already about post publication re standardization to try and to wrangle those different formats into something that's a bit more consistent. We're approaching data to citizens so open data for citizens through platforms, webinars, science diffusion and grounded ground based collaboration collaboration between non governmental organizations and government as well as a requesting information through the relevant government ministry to try to solve some issues and retaining a good relationship with the government so trying to avoid that confrontational approach and again developing personal relationships to get access to research data as well. Excellent. Does anyone have any reflections they'd like to share on any of that again please use the reactions button to raise your hand if you can, or sort of say in the chat. Otherwise, or if you're one of our discussants you can actually put your hand up and I'll be able to see that anyone got any thoughts on any of that before we go for a short break. No reflections on any of that. Monica that said let's hear from you will unmute you. Thank you. I think for me it's interesting to see that in another countries. I am in Mexico. We are interested in the quality of data related to the quality of water. So, along like 20 or 30 years ago, some of the researchers that found a bad quality of water. And have like this confrontation to government alliances, and maybe publish information with journalists and make like a lot of usey because they don't care about these issues, despite of the several negative effects to health. And now we are like approaching like more collaboration with them and they're more open. There's more information citizens are more aware of different things and I think that this culture, the transformation of culture like this and this public policies of the open government data and things like that are helping a lot of countries through that. It is interesting to see that this is happening in another countries because I have like the sense that maybe it is not being in the same way, but it's glad to see that it is going through this way. Yes, it's always always helpful to know who else is going through similar things and that there are a lot of similarities between countries but also some differences as well. Does anybody else want to come in on this before we go for a short break. Excellent. In which case, and we'll take a short break now we can grab a drink, pop to the bathroom or continue to add some things in the chat and on the padlock board, and we'll start again at 10 past three, where our next question will be, I think might help further address the issues that we've been talking about, are there any resources or evidence missing that will be helpful to us if they did exist. That's the question we'll come back to at 10 past three. But for now we'll be taking a short break for nine minutes or so. And well it's 10 past three. So we will get restarted. And in a few moments I'll ask our discussants to give their reflections on our next question which is, what do you think might help further address the issues that we discussed. Are there any resources. Is there any evidence missing that will be helpful to us if they did exist. And I will start by going to Matty Matty Carthy who's joined us from the data charter. First, and I know it's also been looking through everything that people have put on the padlock from the first couple of questions as well so Matty if you've got any reflections on some of the challenges and dilemmas that you face in accessing information. And if you've got any ideas for you've already done to try and address those we'd love to hear those as well as anything else that you think would help address the issues so and thank you for joining us and over to you. Thanks, and then sorry for being late I had a previous previous call that I needed to participate in. So, during the break I started reading what everybody was writing so the open data charter actually promotes openness from from governments and challenges that we've been meeting now that we're fundamentally working on somatic open data openness. We've encountered maybe kind of a higher level of problems in understanding what the data means and let me just double click on that. For example we've been working on climate change data. There's a massive amount of data that governments create around that theme. Which at least with the governments that we worked with was created in order to like internally being used and to send to the UN as a reporting mechanism and government officials didn't understand why that data, like which added value openness would bring to that data. Aside from that that now that those governments are starting to publish that data, the level of ethnicity that the climate change data community actually actually works within made it made it difficult for the open data folks civil society organizations from from open data community to actually understand what the data was was like saying because there's a really high level of of technicality and terms and everything within the climate change community so it's not even kind of we kind of started to understand that we needed data translators you know like in order for for example to do a hackathon or online innovation challenge or something like that we couldn't just say okay just call people to reuse the data and figure out what to do with that because because they were stuck. So so and and each thing that we've been working on, aside from the anti corruption which is kind of the old, the old and that everybody knows agenda, still really important anyway. Those are kind of the challenges that we're meeting. It's, it's not that easy. Once the data it's out there the reuse bit as the data is getting super technical. It's, it's, it's a really high entry barrier and and climate change is super clear. I guess, I guess that's, that's one of the reflections that I that I have. And, and so, to be able to add value by reducing that for civic fetch projects. It's, it's harder and we're working on that but that's one of the biggest challenges that we've met in the last couple of years. And do you think there's anything that could help address some of those problems as well. So start moving the event into the practical solutions that we might consider anything that you think any resources or evidence that's currently missing them be quite helpful to us in tackling some of those challenges. So what, what we've done is kind of make the connections between the public servants that are actually going to creating the data and civil society organizations so they can actually speak and understand what like a national country, determine what contribution means, so that then the data it's it's more understand that it doesn't even have to do with metadata it like you could have like a data dictionary behind it but national and like like that term actually means something only for the climate change community so we needed to have those conversations happening. And also also with with civil society organizations that work within the climate change community that don't recognize themselves as data organizations, also kind of bringing them into the conversation and kind of making the point that that even advocacy projects will could be stronger if they use the data so trying to make that shift towards them not not not seeing themselves as part of the data conversation into like yeah data will help your but you, you might not be a kind of a data mining organization whatsoever but data will help your case, but it's just bringing everybody together via events, sessions, roundtables, blogs, podcasts, so anything can help to kind of lower that entry, as I was saying like that that entry barrier. So thanks Natty I'll go to Laura next. Hi Natty, I listened to Natty and she remembered me, the same problem that we have from the beginning. Perhaps today it's a bit more sophisticated for people that work on data, because the barrier is for us. And what I what I think is that this kind of translators or people trying to explain why these data can matter me should be part of the gap that the data community or civil tech is having for a long long time for the for decades. I think perhaps the new thing is in the institutional level or the anti-corruption, lots of the people that work in data feel more comfortable with the terms or the quality of the data etc. The citizens that we supposed to serve don't necessarily use to understand us. The new thing is with the climate agenda or perhaps the gender agenda or etc. There are specific things that also the data community needs to know before this translator for citizens. But perhaps what I'm trying to add is perhaps what Natty said is not necessary a problem, because they put us in the same situation that most of the citizens used to be in the past, related to our own agenda. Because what I think is we always have this gap between data and why that's going to matter to me. I don't know if if I was clear enough to make my point. But what I'm saying is I listened to her and said, okay, perhaps this is a problem or a chance or an opportunity to be more realistic about the gap that perhaps in the past we didn't have the chance to realize. Excellent. Thank you, Lara. I think, yeah, there's some quite profound points in there about understanding and intermediaries between different groups and government and particularly with the public as well. And so if anyone knows of any resources or evidence on some of that, that would actually be a really helpful thing to add to the Padlet. I'm going to go to Nehemiah next and then we'll hear from Sim after that. Thank you very much. So for us or for me, I believe that, I mean the full activation of the right to information law in Ghana would help, a long way to help solve this problem. I think currently the way they've implemented the law is to put a gatekeeper commission that oversees people requesting for information and then waiting until the information has made available or the commission would maybe give you a note or a letter or something to go to the state agency to get the information. But that in itself is a bottleneck and so proper activation of the law and enforcing agencies to release information would be important but also critically if you find ourselves in a place where some critical information is not subjected to ask and get access to services, but it's available and accessible by default. Then it helps everyone to society, citizens, academia, anytime you need information, you know that once you're working on this area, and the information is available by default and so what you need is to go to this particular place whether it's a web portal, or even if you went into their environment they may have some information kiosk there for you to access information, then it will be a good way to go but also maybe if there was a client house sort of for all public data, then it will help because I mean I don't know about the countries, other countries, but in Ghana the information is scattered across different government agencies and even different offices or departments and sometimes it makes it difficult to make sense of or even have tried to have access to them. And so in order to ensure that it's true any form of delays or any form of frustrations, if we had a client house where all the information is and I just go to this particular place that I need ABC and have access to it then it will be an awesome way to go about it. And maybe another approach would be building capacity for those who work in these agencies to sometimes be able to put the data in in forms that is easily consumable, especially if for people like us who want to ensure that this machine reader will and then it will be easier for us and rather than going to get a pile load of paper and coming to scan them and OCR them before you can actually do any form of work with so it's just it's just a situation where there's there has to be commitment from the government side in terms of stakeholders for us to be able to have access and make use of the information the way we need and we ought to thank you. So government delivery on things it's already promised in terms of information laws, but also somewhere where we can find all of the information and understand how to access it but also supporting people inside government to understand how they should publish it on our behalf that's really really helpful. Thank you. And sin. Yeah, it's, it's a big one isn't it it says lots of things to think about. The thing that's really clear I said in the chat the thing that's really clear to me is that the tech part of civic tech is really perhaps overplayed sometimes and what we need to be doing is is having a doing good job at building these relationships, both with people in the government and the potential users whether they're journalists or the general public outside. I really liked the point earlier about, and I don't want to kind of set up a sort of a hierarchy or gold standard here to say that you know my society is is is you know what everyone should be aspiring to or they do like my society. The point of going, you know, to what extent can we implement a freedom of information website to what extent can we implement they work for you do we have boundaries to allow us to go from postcode to boundaries, you know, trying to have a sort of a ranking or a checklist of things that are the capabilities that are there, and then some presentations of what you might do, you know if you had capability x in your country, what could you then do with it and why is that important. I think trying to evidence those things is is really important and and we get maybe a bit lost in the in the tech side of it. And if I can if I can insert a thing that I think we should do less of which is sort of the same, same as my first point is I think we focus a lot on on data standards and standardization, and maybe lead with that in our approaches to fixing things because when you're in the weeds, I mean I really understand it when you're in the weeds of trying to do something. I mean, you feel yourself saying if only this was all staff only somebody else could do this work basically if only this is all standardized and, and I could just do the fun bit. It would all be better and then you start pushing for a standard. But really, when you push for a standard what you're not doing is explaining why you want that and what what the value is to everybody else. So you probably should spend more time demonstrating that value than talking about the need for the standards, because it's a bit to take heavy for a lot of people. Excellent. Thanks, and yes trying to make it understandable to as many people as possible why these things matter. It's absolutely vital. Thank you. And we're not going to give everyone five minutes of silent working on this question, which is going to be column three on the padlet to feel free to put things in the chat as well. Five minutes on what do you think might help you further address the issues that we discussed, ie are there any resources or evidence missing that will be helpful to you if they did exist. So that's the third column on the padlet five minutes has already started. Let's see what we've got in the padlet. What do we think might help us further address these issues are there any resources or evidence missing that will be helpful if they did exist. Well we've got moving the mindset in a way of accessing information on an institutional rather than a personal level so accessing information through good personal work relationships so taking it up beyond that. So we've got tools for open data analysis can open data services have developed some tools that might help people to do that. Understanding the underlying problem that data is supposed to help solve before we start advocating for open data is it's about publishing with a purpose excellent understanding that to publish good data you need to help provide you with it. So explaining the value of open data standards rather than just advocating for open data standards in and of themselves which we've already touched on a little bit and programs that make data available and useful for society. Excellent. Thank you for all of those. Does anyone have any further reflections on any of that. If you do you can raise your hand using the raise hand tool under reactions, or if you're one of our discussants you can just put your hand up and I will see you doing so. Anyone wants to come in on any of that. No, in which case we can move to the final section of today's civic tech surgery. So thank you everyone for a really good discussion so far so we've considered what the challenges are. How people have previously tried to overcome them and some things that we perhaps like available to help us tackle those challenges in future. What we're going to do in this last section is start thinking really practically about some possible solutions. So the action lab or working group that will come after today's civic tech surgery will have two and a half thousand US dollars available to commission a project that aims to solve one of the problems that we've highlighted today. So what we'd like to do in the time that remains is consider two things. First of all, what's already out there that could help us solve the problems we've identified. Is there existing evidence are there existing resources that could help us tackle the dilemmas be discussed. That's column four on our padlet. And the second question is what project projects could we fund to help us with the dilemmas we've discussed, or as column five on the padlet that's it. If there was one thing the tick tech action lab could commission to help you better access quality information or data, the civic tech projects, what would it be. That could be learning materials, it could be events, it could be training, it could be case studies, it could be research, it could be all sorts of weird and wonderful things. So we're going to give you I think eight minutes or so. And we may not even need that long market that get cut that a little bit short to think about those questions. So what resources and evidence etc is already available, and what the tick tech action that could commission that's currently missing. Those are columns four and five on the padlet you can put thoughts in the chat as well. And obviously take a bit of time to read through everybody else's book there as well. Once we've done that, we'll spend some time discussing and reflecting upon what we have. So eight minutes on the timer we might not use all of it to fill in columns four and five of the padlet, what resources and evidence are already out there, and what the tick tech action that could commission that would help us overcome some of the problems in accessing quality information. So hopefully the time will start now. Excellent. Thank you everyone for all of those let's see what we've got. Let's start with the existing evidence or research or projects that may help us with our dilemmas. We've got the open up guide on climate change data, which is linked there I think which is great. We've got OGP the government partnership, which may be useful in understanding what open government data is already available in your country. If you've got social TIC or social tick this non government organization helps with technology appropriation sounds interesting if you put that down please do feel free to add a bit more detail in the zoom chat interested to hear more. We've got legislation advice so how easy it might be to get for instance, an FY law in particular country how to draft it, and how could the campaign be started. We're actually sitting into number five as well things that take action and commissions and sort of guidance on how to do that. We've got various projects which rank countries, when it comes to things like open data for instance open data barometer. We've got the CNR project in Malaysia, who are working from the ground up in applying best practices standards we may be able to learn from some of the work they've done, particularly when it comes to specific communities facing particular problems. We've got data partnerships, so for instance, Facebook has funded multiple civic tech groups to collect data and share that with the rest of the world. We've got UK law providing access to public sector data sets and some resources around that. And we've got Albert telly, which is the sort of engine powering. What do they know, and other and FOI related services around the world. When it comes to Padlet column five, there was one thing that tick tech action and commission that would help us access better quality information or data specific tech project. We have got case studies that focus on things that don't work and not only the successful experiences. Interesting. We've got training civil society and community based organizations on the relevance of access and quality information and guiding them on how to engage the relevant institutions. It's very practical so far. And we've got events and training to include storytelling skills of public servants and data organizations or NGOs and journalists as well. Training on data, open data and data mining for thematic civil society organizations so they can learn to better use the data out there. And some of you touched on earlier many CSAs do not recognize themselves as data organizations. Earlier as well a clearing house data that's been made available today and we may have an example from the night foundation already on that research and on how to access and on how access to information laws apply to data sets and how those laws work work in practice against them quite practical to help people use that. And yes somebody's given an example of being unsuccessful in asking for a particular FY to be provided as an ongoing data set, which I think in the UK there is something in the act which should allow you to do that but whether the government is applying it is probably a very different question. And I think we've got some useful things in the chat from Monica as well, which goes to the social TIC and it's a Spanish website that can be translated to English as well. Excellent. So I will go to our discussants, first of all, see if they have any reflections on all of that. I'll go to Sim first, then Matthew, then Nehemiah, then Laura. So, Sim, what do you think? I was worried you'd come to me first I need more time to reflect but no it's there's there's loads of good stuff in here. I have to say my confession is that I end up being quite blinkered, you know you work on your day job and focus on the jobs that you see in front of you and maybe don't think about the wider international network, or even national network in the UK sometimes. I guess I'll take this opportunity to say if I can help anyone on this call I'm very happy to chat about things we've got some experience of doing the stuff in the UK. And I'd like to hear more about the stuff and sort of open offer to talk more with others. I think fundamentally that's what it's going to come down to is more events like TIC Tech is trying to host and more collaboration between the practitioners in this space. Fantastic. Thank you, Sim. Let's go to Nessie next. One thing that because I was reading the chat about the translation and everything and one of the main things that I think could be done is actually translating into not only Spanish, which is my main language. There's a lot of existing resources, and also French. There's a huge francophone open data community. The last tools that we created in the open data charter were actually in Spanish, French and English, because there's already a lot of resources but but out there but they're mainly in English and that actually makes it complicated, mostly for global south to to be able to use those those resources. So I guess that would be my main question. Excellent. Thank you. Yes, I think we have theme emerging about collaborating across borders and how we can make that as easy as possible. Excellent. Nehemiah, let's go to the next. I think that we need to focus on getting people tools that would be, should I say simple to use and also giving them the skills or giving them the training to be able to do each things because once you are looking at the key requirements around availability and access, then people need to understand how to make the data or the information available and how to make it accessible in in forms that people can easily consume. And so, if we can simply just provide simple skills or simple tools for people to work with in making data available and also in making data accessible, then we can get the masses to consume in our part of the world where sometimes Internet may not be accessible, or even if it's accessible may not be affordable, you want to always look at the most simplest or easiest ways for people to consume data and information. So if it means having partners or stakeholders that would get the information closer to people or demystify the data and information, then it's a good thing. So collaboration, capacity building and tools are the way to go. Excellent. Thank you. So again, very strong themes of communities, collaboration, capacity and tools coming through there. Laura, over to you. Yeah, perhaps starting on that is, I agree that we need, and I'm as it's clear focus on how we fill the gap with citizens and not with experts. And create tools that can allow in a simple way that more people can or make requests or look for data, etc. But try to create and use all the digital power of this community also to make me on board, much more people. I just put in the, in the panel, a tool that we create that basically helps people that are not necessarily people that know the law, how they can make a request. And then they made simple questions that people should fill the gaps or the blanks and just send it. It's not just one thing that we should do, but I think we also should be doing that type of thing. Excellent. Thank you. So again, it's sort of using the expertise of this community, the sort of data and open data and transparency. We're trying to reach beyond that to give citizens and somebody put in the pad that those civil society organizations that work on particular areas that don't think about data as much to be able to give all of those the tools and the capacity as well. Excellent. Thank you. Does anyone else on the call have any reflections or anything they'd like to share on any of that. If you do, please do use the raise hand tool down on the reactions button. Of course, feel free to put it in the chat on the padlet as well, we will keep the padlet open for a short one after this event so you can add some further things later. If nobody else has anything that they would like to say, then I'm just going to tell you about what happens next. And hopefully my screen share will work perfectly. Can people see a slide by my screen share. Excellent. That's always a good start. So as mentioned earlier as well, and civic tech surgery today was to sort of help surface some of the dilemmas and challenges and also to start thinking about some of the solutions. And what will happen is that we will come up with an action lab or working group and that will take those further forward. So that action lab will work together they'll commission some work. We've got up to two and a half thousand US dollars to be able to commission some sort of project to help us tackle some of the dilemmas and challenges that we raise today. Anybody can apply to join that action lab. If you've come today you probably already on the tech tech mailing list or my society mailing list, which is where the information will be. But if you're not please do sign up to the tech tech mailing list because that's where the details will appear. I think the link will be going in the chat if it hasn't already. And then once the working group the action lab has thought about what they'd like to commission, then there will be a call for proposals published on my society website. Again sign up to the mailing list to know exactly when that happens. I'm on the course of course this is published, you will be able to apply for that. So we've already got a couple of proposals out from the first action lab which is about showcasing public private collaborate to collaboration so that tech success stories. So you've got Monday to apply for that. There will be a call going out at some point in the next few weeks on making civic tech accessible and inclusive. And as I said, once the action lab following this civic tech surgery has met, there will be a call for proposals on something, which will help us all access quality data and information more easily. And you can indeed see the links in the chat. So, unless anybody else has anything that they are desperately wanting to share with the group. You will be keeping the padlock open for a bit as well so you can add things there. And I think all that remains for me to say is a huge thank you to our excellent discussants. Thank you very much to you. Thanks to everybody else who's joined us today and thanks to National Endowment for Democracy, as well for supporting the tech tech labs program. And keep an eye out for the call for proposals. You've got until Monday to apply for the first one that's out there. And yes, make sure that you sign up to the tech main list to keep up to date with everything. Thank you very much indeed for joining us and enjoy the rest of your day.