 and a good morning, afternoon or evening to you, wherever you may be. Welcome to this, the fourth TicTac Civic Tech surgery, organised by my society and supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, focusing today on storytelling and reach. How can we amplify our successes beyond the Civic Tech community to evidence our impact through mainstream channels? I'm Gavin Freeguard, a freelance consultant working with my society on the TicTac Labs programme, among other things, and also an associate at the Institute for Government, Think Tank and a special advisor at the Open Data Institute here in the UK. I'm 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 like, and thank you to everyone who has done so already. Over the next couple of hours, we're going to discuss some of the challenges and dilemmas we face as a global Civic Tech community in making sure that people know about what we're doing, that people are aware of our successes, and that we're able to speak beyond our Civic Tech communities to mainstream channels and wider public. For these first 10 minutes or so, I'm just going to outline how it can work and give you a bit more background to what we're hoping to achieve with TicTac Labs, at which this event is a part. Then we'll explore various questions about storytelling and reach with the help of some fantastic speakers, and with all of you having a chance to share your thoughts as well. And then we'll think about what might help solve some of the challenges that we've surfaced. So some quick housekeeping first. Today's event is on the record. It's being recorded and will be published online after the event, 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. You're very welcome to share details of the event on social media, hashtag TicTac. And if you'd like to contribute to today's discussion, and we hope you will, you can use the chat here on Zoom. And you can also use the padlet board, but you'll soon get a link to it if you've not had it already. If you've not used padlet before, you'll see it has the questions we're going to discuss, and then space for you to add your thoughts and comments by clicking on the plus signs underneath. Feel free to populate it throughout the event. There'll also be a few opportunities later to unmute your mic and tell us what you're thinking as well. Now for a very quick introduction to the TicTac Labs programme, which is run by my society with the support from the National Union of Democracy. The aim 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. TicTac, which stands for the Impact of Civic Technology Conference, started as an annual global in-person conference in 2015. We hope there'll be another in-person event in the future. In the meantime, we've converted it into the year-round TicTac Labs programme, of which this event is a part. Our steering group, you can see them on the right-hand side of your screen, identified six big challenges common to civic tech around the world. You can see those challenges on the left, as well as today's subject, storytelling and reach. We've so far covered subjects including the accessibility of civic tech and we'll move on to others, including music civic tech to tackle the climate crisis. For each of those six topics, we'll organise a civic tech surgery, like today's, to delve further into the challenges and possible solutions. After each surgery, there'll be an Action Lab, or a small working group of around six people, who will commission a piece of work to help solve some of the challenges raised. If you're interested in getting involved in that, we'll tell you how to do so at the end of today's event. By the end of the programme in 2023, we hope we'll have six pieces of permission work, as well as increased connections and learning across the global civic tech community. This is our fourth civic tech surgery. We've already commissioned some work on public-private partnerships from the first surgery. Our second Action Lab is discussing what's commission on accessibility at the moment, and we're currently looking through the applications to join our third Action Lab on Accessing Quality and Information. Take a look at the TIG Tech Lab's website for more information on all of that. So today, we're focusing on storytelling and reach, and particularly this big overarching question. What would help the global civic tech community to amplify their stories and successes beyond the civic tech community? So how can we tell everyone, mainstream channels, the wider public, about what we're doing in order to have the greatest impact possible? Underneath that big question, our objectives for today are going to be to discuss the challenges involved in all of that, and understand what the biggest common challenges are when it comes to storytelling and reach, to share what we've all done to try to overcome some of those challenges, to discuss what else we've seen that has succeeded in amplifying civic tech projects through mainstream channels, and perhaps share some existing project evidence research, etc, on the topic that might be beneficial. And last but definitely not least, to explore how the TIG Tech Action Lab that will come together after this event can help address one of those common challenges by commissioning a relevant piece of work. And the way that we'll run at today's event will take those first three questions, the challenges, what we've tried to do to overcome them, what we've seen others do to overcome them in order, hear some perspective from our speakers, then give you some time for silent working to share your thoughts on the padlet board and the Zoom chat, and then for all of us to reflect on what people have been talking about, there may be a chance to unmute your microphone during that bit. We'll then move on to the final part of the event, which is going to be suggesting possible ideas for work we could commission to help the global civic tech community overcome challenges in storytelling and reach. Again, we'll start with some silent working on the padlet board, and then get into discussion. And at the very end, I'll tell you how you can get involved in the Action Lab that will commission some work building on all of those ideas. We'd be glad to know that that's nearly it from me in terms of the introduction. Time to introduce our brilliant speakers who will share their experiences and kickstart our discussion today. They are going to be Daniel Caranza from Data Uruguay, Amy Leach from the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, Attila Yuhaz from K-Monitor in Hungary, and our very own LeVan Rhee Nixon from My Society here in the UK. We're very grateful to all of them, as well as to all of you for joining us today. So hopefully that all makes sense if you have any questions, pop them in the chat. I'm just going to stop sharing my screen at this point. Oh, I don't seem to be able to, so I'll try and get rid of that in a second. So hopefully all that makes sense. If you have any questions, please pop them in the chat. If you've got any thoughts as we're going along, share those in the chat or under the appropriate question on the padlet board. So hopefully all of that made some sort of sense. And we can get going into the discussion properly. So the first question that we're going to explore today is, what challenges have you faced or are you facing when trying to amplify civic tech projects and their successes beyond the civic tech community? That relates to column one on our padlet, if you've got that open. I'll ask each of our discussants to share their thoughts on the topic for around three minutes. Then we'll have three minutes of silent working to add our ideas to the padlet board to the chat. And then we'll have a little bit more time to reflect on everything that people have discussed and everything that's gone on the padlet board. So I'm going to hand over, first of all, on the challenges to our first discussant. And that's going to be Daniel over to you. Okay, good. Thanks. It's really nice to be here. Thank you all for the invitation. Okay, so challenges. I believe the main thing that we probably all of us suffer in the civic tech community is that we don't have like a single branding that we can go to. We are always doing new projects on different subjects on different topics with different partners. So I see the heads bobbing. So I think this is important for all of us. You're always reinventing your communications, your strategies, and basically the wheel once and once and over again with every project. This is obviously a huge challenge. And it comes with associated challenges like, do I have different social media accounts for every project? Or do I use my own social media accounts? We learned this very fast back in 2012 with our very first project. I think maybe two days into making the second account for the project, we realized like, hey, this is going to be a problem. We can't have a single account for everything we do because we won't be able to control it. So not only you have this whole branding thing, but you also have to explain every time what is civic tech, what is open data, what is this collaboration within Uber government. So basically, I don't want to go into how to address these challenges. But the problem is you are always a new version of yourself on every single project. And you have to adapt that version to new audiences, new publics. This also has a lot of contact with how much buying do your partners in different projects have with the project itself, of course, but with the communications of the project. When you have a partner that will take care, for instance, of the communications, this is not such a big deal because it's something that you can kind of hand over. But in many cases, you end up not only doing the whole work, but also having to care about communications that should be part of your partner's, let's say, worries too. And I think I'm not going to take too much time on that. So let's start over there. Perfect. Thank you, Daniel. As I said, I can see lots of heads nodding as you're going through some of those problems. I may hear about some of them again. We'll go to our next speaker now and that's Amy. Thanks so much. Likewise, I'm really, really excited to be here. And this is such a fantastic series of really practical action focused conversations. So the first challenge I'm reflecting on is that of communicating the impact of long term systemic change. So I work for the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. We're a network of 600 organizations composed of governments, private sector, civil society, all united by the belief in the power of data to push and progress change. And so a lot of our work is very systemic in nature. That means it takes a pretty long time. It's messy. It's iterative. To give an example, we work a lot with governments on their strategies and approaches to data. For example, kind of we have longstanding relationships with the governments of Ghana and Kenya. And I always think about this kind of systemic change like a spider web. There's so many different strands and actors involved. And so then often it doesn't feel very tangible. And I think often people are looking for impact packaged in these very kind of clear, nice narratives and stories. And that can be really difficult when you're talking about the kind of systemic lens. Zooming out a bit then I think data and tech can be really challenging areas for constructive narrative building in mainstream spaces. And reflecting for a second on kind of I guess what I'm talking about in the context of mainstream spaces. Here I'm talking about digital spaces like social media. Today that's obviously become increasingly polarized, driven by those algorithms. And so often the nature of online debate is much more polarized and stark than people's actual opinions. And I think also you see debate having to be kind of condensed into very kind of pithy click baity nuggets and sound bites and so on. And that's really tough because it then removes the space for nuance. And so I think it's always interesting to reflect on some of the kind of defining social issues of our time. Climate is one I used to work on migration which is another that's come to define a lot of public narratives often quite negatively. And there both of those are obviously hugely complex issues. But there is the potential to boil down things into neat statements and pithy statements and so on. Whereas I think when it comes to data and tech it's all encompassing in the modern day. But it is really messy and that nuance is essential. And so what we've seen is increasing focus on data harms and rightly on the anxieties around big tech and so on. But really that hasn't translated into a collective conversation about the urgency of the need for change and a more constructive dialogue about what a future looks like where data is used really fairly. And I think that is a major challenge for us all working in this space. And then finally there's a challenge around stepping outside of the echo chamber and also your immediate constituencies. So as we're a network we have quite a global reach but we're still constantly thinking about how we can connect with new kind of people, organisations and so on. And I think for kind of converting any of our work into those mainstream spaces then really extending the reach on a mass scale is a big challenge. So I'll pause there but I'm excited to hear more from others on this. Thanks Amy. Let's go to Attila next. Thank you and hello everyone. It's really great to be here. Yeah when Daniel said that this is people nothing I think I was the one because I can totally agree. So we are a very small NGO. Our topic is mainly centered around the transparency of public money and entities and participation in citizen engagement. And we do a lot of things like we do research, we do advocacy and the technology is just a tool that we use to straighten our activities. And it's just like six of us. So I have five colleagues and we are running two, three projects at the same time. So one big challenge is the capacity that we are a leader communication team, not a software development team, but we are a kind of civil organisation and we try to communicate with these other people and we do a lot of experimentation with the project, what's gonna work, what's not gonna work and at the same time we strive for perfection in our published material. So it's a long, long, long way until we get to that point when a project is published. So at that moment we are just super tired and it's just oh and we still need to figure out how to communicate it and let's get together the materials we get and find the target groups. So it's a lot of work and we often like the capacity to promote and to build up a communication plan beforehand. We properly define target groups and detailed calls and also to write or work on the communication material. So that's one challenge that it's somehow also part of the core activity, the communication, but also it's just not the main thing how we want to do or what we are doing. And shortly I just quickly, I just want to mention one other challenge is the maintenance that for projects, it's much easier at the beginning when you kickstart, when you are enthusiast about it and you have a momentum and media outlets are curious about your work and your audience is also enthusiastic about it and also donors are more willing to give you funds, but when you are done with the project then you are there with the thing that you have to maintain and after I don't know 15 years of work you have lots of projects to maintain and that's a big question, how to reuse and how to further develop or upgrade previous projects. And I think these are the two main challenges I could think about. Fantastic, thank you. And finally for our opening speakers, Liv. Yeah, thanks very much. Thanks for having me and a lot of what I've just heard from the other three speakers, again nodding my head a lot. So I've been communications manager at my society for over 10 years now and it feels like a lot of these problems we never quite solve them, they keep coming round and we try different ways. One issue that is repeated for us I think is that our work is quite often anchored in fairly complex structures. So we rarely have a simple story that the general public can just understand without a bit of background on what are our motivations, what is my society's theory of change. So for example when we're writing about things that campaigners might have achieved through freedom of information thanks to what do they know, we can't take for granted that the average person, the ordinary person in the street would understand even what the Freedom of Information Act is or that it's available to them. So everything we write has to begin with a little explanation of that. Society specifically as well, we make open source software and the great hope is that people will go and pick it up and install their own versions of that software and happily run websites that help people make freedom of information requests or report potholes to their councils and so on. But in the nature of open source software we don't always know who's using it or why. So we know there are great stories out there, really interesting human interest stories with the ways that people are using our software often in ways that we hadn't anticipated ourselves but we don't always know about them. Then we have a massive diversity of audiences I think we're talking to a real diverse set of people with different motivations, different levels of understanding so it's hard to know exactly how to pitch those stories. Are you talking to the citizens that you hope are going to be using your software or your services? Are you talking to the government? You know we've set up these things you can send your reports into government to your local council perhaps we have to make them understand exactly why we're doing that and then at the same time we're talking to funders to make sure that they understand why we're doing what we're doing and why they should grant us money to do it. And then finally and I think that this is pretty much what everybody was hinting at as well it's a lack of resource so so many civic tech groups are just like my society we started really small and when I first took this job on there weren't many people that were not developers you know the main stay of the organisation were people who were making the product that's the important stuff we had never put resource into trying to talk to the outside world whether that's the press or general public and you know from then on there I was a single person trying to represent a spread of six or seven different services that we were offering and and point it to all of the audience that I've mentioned so you know one person is a social media manager a commercial marketing manager a press officer a copywriter doing all the internet communications and internal stuff and you can do all of those things you can keep them going but what you ideally want is to do all of those things really well and that's not always possible when it's just one person yeah excellent thanks and thanks for all the last speakers for those really helpful and sort of introductory scene setters and what we're going to do now is take three minutes and we'll have a timer on the screen very shortly three minutes to go to the paddle at board for everybody to populate their thoughts on the challenges that you're facing when it comes to storytelling and reach do feel free to post the link to the padlet again and do feel free to add things to the chat if you're unable to access the padlet and after those three minutes are done and I'll ask if any of our discussants have any quick reflections on other things that people have raised and again if you'd really love to speak do let us know and let me do so so three minutes on the clock populate padlet and contribute to the chat off we go and let's see what we've got on our padlet I think a lot of common themes from the padlet and from what our speakers were saying as well so we've got head versus heart we believe in most of our projects despite the fact about it if people really demanding them time and somebody says they're the single person researcher and when they use social media they get an upturn in new users but we don't have the time to be a comms person as well as a researcher there's I think going to be quite a lot about language so harmonizing the language and overlapping concepts we've got strategic planning so finding enough time with capacity for publishing something we don't always talk to a diverse audience who can be hard to reach and challenges include that it's a wonky scene of subject without immediate impact at a time when protests and more dramatic action gets all the attention institutional stretches not conducive to scaling up resource resource resource we could always be doing so much more if we had more capacity as a comms manager the challenge is often persuading technical colleagues of just how much language needs to be simplified in public messaging connecting the value of open data and source to use cases with significant societal democratic and economic benefits talking to a tango of different audiences it's difficult to know it's a bit of a narrative again the range of stakeholders has come up from somebody else as well getting interest from media outlets to the interest in promoting open source projects public not aware of issues such as algorithmic harm and how it might affect them individually not always easy to track what people are doing with their with your open source software work is emerging complex structures not always easy to communicate and the civic tech community can feel like a bubble can be closed hence be often overlooked the essence of simplifying our stories without speaking in jargon we've also got maintaining a stable team has just come in as well because you can't pay market rates and resources again so resources and language and the two of the big things sort of coming through there and I wonder if any of our discussants and what's coming quickly reflecting on any of that or indeed if anyone else and in the audience has anything they'd like to add quickly to any of those thoughts Daniel yeah sure I think many of the comments focus on talking about civic tech and the difficulties of talking about civic tech and what we try to do basically is talk about the problem first and civic tech later I mean we never communicate saying like this is an open source solution for this is a solution for you know done with open source open data or whatever I think that's absolutely a key issue and eventually you get people to understand that part I don't know if this is your experience me if Attila Amy but you know like 10 years later we now say open data and we don't have to explain like a whole paragraph about what that is I still explain anyway but yeah time has a great effect doesn't it Attila do you want to come in there yeah I can relate to the to the resource part and with the strategic planning I think you can have a lot like like when you learn to let things go and you to contain your your ability capabilities and and that helps you a lot because like you wanting everything is a nice ideal thing but but you cannot do everything like you can you have to to cut the things often you had to to let things go and and find the things you can really do your best in it and and that's that's a long way of learning how to do that but but that will help a lot excellent thanks and Amy do you have anything you want to add to that sure I think I mean the head versus heart point really stood out in terms of framing I think that's a huge challenge around civic tech and data and it also really links back to what Daniel was saying about the entry point because I think ultimately you need to bring it back to what connects with people on a more emotional level you need to bring up some of these kind of big issues like big data and so on back to the everyday and what resonates with people and I think done well that's really effective but in practice as I'm sure we all grapple with that can be really difficult to do brilliant thank you and I think I will leave us on to the second question as the second question for us to discuss is what if anything have you done to try and address some of these challenges and I'll go and reverse all of its terms I'll go to mid first ten at here then Amy then Daniel so over to you yeah so just reflecting on what we were just talking about I think the temptation oh I've now got oh it's okay it's just a thing saying the meeting will carry on um yeah just reflecting on what we were saying I think the temptation is often to talk about it from the civic tech angle so you know oh we've got this amazing open source data rich tool those are not words that necessarily reflect with the average person so when we're talking about quite complicated stories I always feel like I had a great benefit because when I joined my society I was coming from a totally unrelated sector and I had very little knowledge of what exactly you know what exactly civic tech was and what its aims were and I've never forgotten that a lot of our readers will be at that same starting point so I think you can do a lot with words it's often a bit of a drip feed it's often just stopping and putting yourself in your readers shoes and just you know imagine that you are trying to explain at a party or to a relative who has absolutely no idea what you do in your job and writing very simply it's a skill and you can develop it so one of the things that I've done during my time here is develop a style guide that makes all of these points really clear you know hey guys you're a developer I know you want to talk about the code behind this tool but actually that will mean nothing to the people who just want to know how it's going to help them in their everyday life. I talked a bit about keeping track of who has installed our open source software and how hard it can be to find the stories that we know are out there and one way that my societies tackle this is through the creation of communities just like tic-tac so tic-tac is obviously one community where we find out a lot about what other people are doing not just with our software but all across the civic tech world we have well to a differing degree with more success and less success we have communities that are specific to our different code bases so we've got google groups if somebody's asking us a question how how can I install fix my street for my country we try to point them towards the google group because hey there's a whole load of people there who have been through the same issues they've tried to install it themselves come up with the same problems and some solutions and then you can all sort of cross communicate and learn from one another and when funds allow we've been able to have conferences and that has been really gratifying and a great way of bringing people together alavatelecon brought together people who run freedom of information websites all around the world and my goodness you could not stop them from talking to each other and the conversation in the bar afterwards was of the sort that only freedom of information enthusiasts would have enjoyed but for those people you know it was so golden it was really valuable um when i was talking about trying to talk to a number of different audiences it's been interesting actually we've been more kind of systematic about this than ever before on our work with the climate action plan so really early on in fact i think as part of our funding bid we sat down and we figured out who it was that we wanted to reach and this was all based on the kind of impact that we hoped that we would be able to make on carbon emissions at a local level so um you know we came up with a distinct audience of campaigners people who are already very into climate and more likely to take action council staff we're going to be key journalists to help us amplify researchers to use the data and then finally we wanted people all around the world in the normal my society way to pick up the code perhaps or to get inspiration from our project and once you have those audiences in mind that is a starting point that's very easy to start thinking about how what is your communications plan how are you going to reach these people and what words are you going to use what are their motivations that will really get them using that stuff um and then finally on lack of resource well you know it's a prioritization thing i think so as i said for years and years my society's biggest focus was on getting the software right and rightly so you know we couldn't be spending time and money on telling people about it um at that point but i think every organization reaches a point where they realize that communications are a really important part of the puzzle um and once you do that and once you've got you've been established a bit you can work it into your funding bids as a line in every grant application we're also just beginning to look more seriously at what volunteers can do for us um we're looking at what do they know particularly you know could a volunteer be looking through recent freedom of information requests to see if there's a real good story there with real human interest and writing them up for us and that is valuable for the volunteer and it's really valuable for us um and then you know what what about if we were encouraging our users to seek their own publicity as well so whatever transaction they've just taken you know they've just submitted a freedom of information request or they've just um made a report about a dreadful pothole in their local area that's bigger than anyone they've ever seen before could we be giving a little nudge that if it's worthy of a sort of local news story um here's some advice on how to contact the press yeah so just a few ideas there excellent thanks mith a great start to answering this question about what we try to do to address the challenges um i'll go to Attila next thank you gavin i think you you you mentioned a lot of things and and we have a lot to learn from you like uh like we we all try to to to challenge to answer these challenges but but yes we are only five six people it's it just can't afford to have a communication manager at this time and uh and and to have proper uh communication plans for every project as we have i don't know 10 15 projects in a year so that would take a lot of uh our capacities so it's always like how how you can do it more more efficiently and and i think or uh as i mentioned it's it's very important at the beginning to to find that momentum uh but you but you will really focus on and and what you are not focusing on like for example we had a project called hotel oligarch it's it's to develop a web based website where we put um hotels and restaurants of politically exposed people and at the beginning it was like a lot of ideas all together like what kind of database we should build and how to connect it to different other databases and and very great ideas but it was like just a fun project what like without any funding just to work with uh with volunteer developers and it was like oh come on we cannot do this all we have to curtail it down and uh and at the end we developed a very simple app with a very simple database it looks nice it's just a map with pins on it and and the people loved it so so if you if you can find a really good idea to develop to work on it just do it and and and hope it it's it's gonna work out like if you if you plan like the target audience how they what they accept but just ask people as as that's another very important thing that as as a group working for participation it's it's always important to to ask people like how how how they what they want what what they expect from us and and and sometimes it's just very simple things what what people could be happy for and another example for for finding those those small subjects that people can can relate to is is another map based application from us it's a it's a child-based experience map where where the the young moms could could review how what kind of health care services they they received from the hospital and and that was a tool for for collecting data of of the health health care system and and that was like data wise not a smart move to put put a free text box at the end because it's it's really difficult to to analyze the data but people just type there but on the on the other hand and like in a communication way it was really really a good idea because like people could could share their experience and like people it made the whole portal personal and and people loved it people shared it and and that's why it it went went kind of weird so so that's another point to to find or or to to try to to localize that those those topics or or or small subjects where people feel the connection like it's it's difficult to talk about transparency and corruption it's always really difficult to find pictures for our materials because you can put money on the pictures and that's corruption and but but you it's it's very difficult to make it visual but that's the important part where where you can where you you explain people that it's their life it's it it affects their life and and if you can can find these these points in in certain projects that that was the project actually that will that will make it useful for the people. Excellent thank you and we'll go to Amy and then to Daniel and then we'll have a bit of silent working again but just a reminder that you can add things to the Padlet or as Miv is doing to the chat as we go along as well so Amy over to you. Thanks and so many rich insights from if Matilda are ready to build on and someone mentioned on the Padlet the challenge of that tangle of different audiences and I think something we've really found again and again is the power of working with and through your partners to extend your reach and so one example of this is we're really proud to be part of the global partnership part of the data values project which is a policy consultation and advocacy campaign really aimed at building that consensus around what a fair data future could look like and then thinking very practically about the steps to move towards that we're just over a year into that and there's constant lessons and constant evolving and iterating as there's always way with these kind of campaigns but activating our established community to then move beyond that through other partners has been absolutely central to success so far and one thing that is really important the data values project is young people and engaging young people but traditionally the global partnerships network hasn't focused that much on youth and so we've been working with restless development which is such a fantastic youth focused organization to really bring in that lens and we've now got a youth focus group who are really important engine for thinking and ideas and so on that we're feeding in but that's the constituency that is kind of far beyond our kind of usual reach and network and second which you know in both myth and the teller of touch upon is moving beyond the kind of technical language of data and numbers to bring people into the frame and that really brings these issues to life and I think when used right data and tech is essential in telling stories of the past and the present and the future and how might that future look but really to do that you have to kind of bring in that more human centered lens language can do that really effectively and trying to kind of boil down language misspoke that a lot and then until I mentioned the importance of visuals and particularly on kind of tech focused areas you have to make things visual we share the challenges sometimes around the use of photos and what we found works really effectively sometimes is then illustrations and animations and so to give an example we're currently working with various partners on a data science fellowship and I think we'll all agree that data sciences often seen as one of the driest of most technical areas but we've managed to tell the story of that project and the fellows involved in that project by working with a young Nigerian illustrator called MJ to really bring to life the fellows world and it's been fantastic and there's just these really colorful and fantastic images that have really injected life into this and it's been really effective and then finally if you're kind of trying to do global engagement which is at the center of our work then what's absolutely essential is being multilingual and we're trying to really focus on doing this more and more and I think what's essential there is that not being seen as a bolt-on but really absolutely fundamental to the design of any projects and campaigns so thinking through you know dissemination strategies in different languages and thinking through kind of advocates which can speak you know different languages and all the resources being multilingual and so on. A theme throughout this discussion obviously so far has been limits around resources and so that is just a challenge I think because I think often we are all united in a belief that there needs to be more multilingual content but very practically that can be a real challenge in terms of actually having the resources to make that happen and thanks. Thanks Amy and before we go to be silent working for three minutes Daniel. Okay so many ideas to pick up okay let's try to get this into three minutes we have a slight advantage in our team because we are a small team also like Attila's but two out of five have come from communications so this is something that we really care about and I think it has been a huge differential in our work through all those years but this has led us to a conception of trying to streamline projects and communications both as much as possible we basically design projects to be as easy to maintain and as easy to communicate as possible this is something that makes a lot of difference and for instance we are very grateful users of my society tools and one of the things that we notice is that not all the administration of tools assumes you have people that are on those like 24 seven or you know full time whatever. This is something that we learned that we had to change when we created our own tools we have to we can't offer services that needs us to be present there the whole time so that has been our you know motto for development especially and we try to also plan for updates and improvements in parallel with new partners or new funding opportunities we realized somewhere along the way we didn't plan for this that every three years or so we were motivated to find a new partner and have that as an excuse to update a project you know but we have to have like this sprints we work on a project Attila also talked about that we work on a project we focus on it for six months a year whatever and then we can have a let it just be there work on its own we can't keep giving it attention because we have other things to do and maybe in a few years we'll go back and improve it or whatever and that's the way we found this like I don't know bipolar where we focus our attention on one side or the other way of working has been the way that has for us this is also a lot to do with how we work with partners and Amy actually talked about this we have to in our case partners are very invested in projects because we co-create projects with them they care about what the project does but they don't always have this buy-in throughout their organizations so maybe they care a lot in a technical sense but the communications people actually don't even know the project exists that's a huge problem and we also have to try to get this buy-in in the communities around projects that that helps a lot with you know getting it out there but it's also a challenge because many times when you engage with communities and please let me be clear you have to do that they also expect from you all kinds of answers that you don't really have I mean we have to engage for instance with the environmental community through our app that deals with recycling but we don't have the answers to the questions they ask us we don't know we are not experts on sustainability or recycling in that case for instance our partner is and that's the way we found to reach the communities and give a proper response going back to the point of entry as Amy so eloquently put it and we came to the conclusion that we don't only not we not only don't have to necessarily start our conversations saying well this is open data open source or open government or whatever but somehow even with some shame I must say that we came to the conclusion that we the people don't really necessarily need to know about that our partners yes government yes decision makers absolutely but you know the guy or girl or whatever that's using our tool not not really important uh we we just we put all the information there on the website basically we have this very thought-out new like footer that we created where you can really go deep and learn about absolutely everything related to open government open data at our organization but we are very very aware that 95 percent of people won't even get there on the website so that's something you know just we just let go and have to make peace with I believe um and with the audiences something that also Attila and Mith brought out before you don't always have a clear audience and that's a challenge uh you know we work on health recycling uh or freelance information none of those have clear audiences basically everyone cares about those issues so um that's very hard you can't always find like this is my target audience and this is the places where I can find them sometimes you your actual target audience is everyone which I know it's a sin in communications but that's the truth um and the funding for that I think Mith brought a very important point when you have to you know present projects for grants or whatever most people won't there to put communications into the budget that's a huge huge huge problem and I think that's a very systemic problem that we have brought up with many of our funders and we don't see a clear path to a solution right there um maybe like huge and very mature organizations like my society can actually present you know a 30 percent of our budget is for communications and someone on the other side might not like tell you to get the hell out of here but on our case at least especially working in Latin America which involves you know very maybe a little bit of racism a little bit of other things but you don't get like significant budgets for communications um on visuals uh I just wanted to bring up a little problem that we had for I think 10 15 years we haven't even agreed on a logo or an image or an icon for open data uh so yeah we do have an issue with visuals that this has been like a nightmare of mine for the last 10 years and this is a big problem to communicate those like contextual issues like open data civic tech open software and stuff like that and we are not helping ourselves not having this solve yet and finally with the multilingual thing um in cases like ours where we work with an audience with just one language the biggest problem is that you have to take some of your resources and use them to translate or at least create materials about your projects so you can reach a global audience and that that global audience is not users it's just other people like you that we need to partner with and work with but it's definitely like taking from a place where you need to invest resources to another place that it's also important but doesn't get your results or impact Brilliant thank you Daniel and some great chats going on in the chat I think we're already heading towards some of the possible solutions that we might be thinking about later but what we're going to do for the next three minutes and we'll get the timer up very shortly for the next three minutes it's time for silent working use the chat use the padlet to put your answers to the question what have you been trying to do to overcome some of the challenges that we discussed so three minutes silent working padlet and chat and go for it so let's see what we've got on the padlet what if anything have you done to try and address these challenges we've got motivate and stimulate oh sorry that one across as I was speaking and address the licensing of copyrighted comms materials making a case for reuse collaborate with people who've done the same things put comms in as a budget line that's something we've been talking about a bit create partnerships with local media organizations promote through community Facebook groups and other online groups and think about your audiences before you launch read before you start coding open democratic organizing where this process is slow and takes much more time with the current projects create communities including online spaces where people can chat together and share stories promoting a local open source project by the digital public goods registry keep the language simple goes back to a point we've made quite a lot already today and you've got to consider comms to be an essential as essential as any other project not an add-on that you consider after launch and motivate stimulate users of your data and platform to promote or explain their work and in their work how they've used a tool or open a data set it's going lots of really good constructive and solutions to some of those challenges and I don't know do any of our speakers want to add anything quickly until at least and then yeah just a quick comment on keep the language simple that that's a very very simple idea I really like it that if we are about to develop a project I always tell about it to my mom and and if she can understand if she she can relate to it then then it can go through so that that's a good test for for how simple the language or the the idea is and I just wanted to to comment on another the the put the comms in in in as a budget the main problem I think for us is that we don't have a communication officer or communication manager so this task is is just sorted out in between us like I also do some communication I do the mainstream and I write blog posts but there's another guy who who's better in it but there's no no dedicated person and I think we cannot afford at this point so it's it's really difficult even if we have a budget to to find the the place or to find the the proper person who's who's actually gonna take care of of of the communication and and who's not totally a UFO from from another organization or from another company so that's that's the main challenge for us excellent thanks Amy then this has already kind of been a theme of the discussion but something I was struck by is the comms not as a bolt on I'm sure we all really grapple with that and kind of working with others on that and I think that and the kind of budget line and so on just speaks the point of you know sometimes as much about that kind of internal advocacy and building buy-in within your organization or you know Daniel spoke to kind of building buying with kind of partners or those communities to then build the foundations to let you scale and do all the work externally and that takes time and energy and I think something I've seen in lots of different contexts is kind of actually not a recognition of the importance of that and giving people the bandwidth to do that I think because again a kind of core theme here is challenges around resources and I think that you know that is a big challenge not one that's overcome easily but collaboration and crowdsourcing and sharing of resources and knowledge I think is just so fantastic like even on this session today we've already had people share kind of image libraries and so on I think something I found time and time again there's for example today somebody might be part of the kind of digital slack charities kind of slack space in the UK there's always been resources shared there so I think the more we can do and obviously kind of my side in this session is already fantastic to build those structures to enable crowdsourcing ideas and sharing of resources the better because that is just really beneficial for everyone. Thanks Amy. Yeah just listening to Tilla speak it reminds me very much of my society's much earlier days I feel like it's a teabing problem that every organisation goes through where your ambitions exceed your capacity and one thing I've put in the chat actually was the one really hard thing my society had to do a few years back was look at the vast spread of all of our different projects and just think no we've got to close some of these down because we just haven't got the capacity to be not only talking about all of them but you know monitoring all of them making sure that the code's up to date making sure that all the bugs are squashed and all the rest of it um but actually going back to what Amy was saying yeah there are some sort of self um you know things that just keep the momentum going on their own which I think civic tech organisations are quite good at thinking through so for example when you complete an action on one of our services it will quite often flag up another service so you've written to your MP maybe at the end of that it says well well done doing that now are there any problems in your local area that you want to report to your council or are you having problems getting this pot hole filled perhaps you'd like to put in a freedom of information request to find out more about the background there so those things don't cost very much um but they do have a bit of a an impact brilliant thank you and Daniel yeah actually Matthew just made me remember we this this footer I was talking about where we also have this information about open source and open data and our government the main reason that we started working on that is that we realised that none of our projects mentioned the other project so we had all this cutting audience and we were just letting it go and it has a lot of information but the main thing the main reason that we made it is because we have the little logos of every other single project that we have and from that we can get at least some traffic or some recognition excellent thank you very much and we're now going to move on to our third question of the session which is what have been successful ways you've seen to get civic tech successes and projects into mainstream channels and I suppose as well any useful resources research et cetera that you've seen and so what others have done that you thought was really well the good in terms of getting civic tech into mainstream channels and this time I'll go in the order Amy then Daniel then me and Latina so Amy let's start with you this time so two very different examples um the first kind of builds on that point of really the power of building in engagement and communications as a core pillar of the strategic kind of outreach from the very start so we worked with Welcome and an organisation called Afghan Voices on a project tackling antimicrobial resistance in Kenya which is kind of one of the biggest public health challenges but there's a real kind of lack of understanding and awareness around it it's one of the less tangible public health issues and so this project worked around an SMS campaign and a campaign with local radio stations in three counties to really try and drive more of a public conversation around what am I look like day to day what could be done and what kind of in your everyday life you could be doing to play a role in kind of tackling it and the purpose of that was twofold so first it was that point around building knowledge and awareness and more of a conversation but there was also an exercise around data collection because this project was all about generating and using citizen generated data as a complementary data set alongside official data which when it comes to AMR is pretty patchy and it was incredibly effective and I think for a number of reasons so there was a really strong focus on bringing the kind of human dimension into it so on a lot of radio shows you'd have people vets there was a mum with her baby just speaking very practically to how that kind of had looked in the context of their day to day lives and there was also widespread engagement across at the kind of county level with doctors and nurses and practitioners and that was really really essential and then there was really tailoring it in different contexts so all of these radio shows and SMS campaigns were conducted in local dialects and the project saw kind of a lot of buying from government it saw policy shifts but I think yeah from the very beginning there was real clarity around audiences rather than talking about data this is something that kind of Daniel spoken to they were talking about the public health issue so data was not the entry point even though actually it was a data collection exercise so I think that's a really interesting example and then the other example which is very different and not related to the work that we do is around censuses because I was thinking about okay what is kind of data text stuff that is really in the mainstream and in most countries you have the census as a kind of pillar that most people are aware of it happens relatively kind of regularly that drum beat of the census and people understand it as that kind of information gathering exercise but how do you use the census to drive that broader conversation around data as a core tool to understand our societies and our present and our future and I think in the UK the 2021 sentence did that fantastically and the UK office for national statistics did some really incredible campaign work around that but one thing really stood out to me and that was the work of the historian professor David Olashoga and his work really talking about the history of the UK and the census and its role and there's tons of amazing stuff he did so I recommend a Google but one particularly exciting thing to me was some really interesting work around data literacy in the context of school kids so he ran an interactive lesson to over one and a half million school kids I think it was on representation, equality and the census that really walked through how the census fitted into national identity, how the questions have changed and so on and that to me was really inspiring in building a different conversation around the role of the census in our societies and then also just a really interesting case study and how you build data literacy and with young people which is so essential so yeah that's two examples from me. Fantastic thanks Amy I'm going to be checking some of those out after this event let's go to Daniel next. Okay so the first thing I believe is partner buy-in if you don't have partner buy-in you are really in deep trouble basically and the best example that we have at the very least but it's an interesting one is that what we have achieved to do with Don de Reciclo which means where do I recycle which is our app for recycling as you might imagine our partner is an NGO that comes from the chamber of industry so they have deep connections with industry and what we do is of interest to many big producers of you know consumer products because they have this law that makes them responsible for the waste they produce so through that we found a way for them to have a direct interest in our project and that allowed us to sort of hack our way into their own communications they we allow them to become partners of the app not only you know supporting and like paying for the logo to be in the app but giving them incentives to use the logo of the app in their own communications so miraculously our little app ended up on TV you know radio and you know outdoors and everywhere I'm talking like a hundred hundreds of thousands of dollars of advertising with our logo over there that we could have never paid for and then you have other stakeholders buy in we have this other project at the service you or at your service which deals with health service providers indicators like key performance indicators and this was by chance not by strategy but since the project had a lot of construction the health service writers ended up caring a lot about how they were seen there and they ended up doing in this one case advertising that they were ranked first in the satisfaction index or whatever that we showed so they ended up using us as part of their communications materials then you have press buy-in and this was brought up in the padlet I do agree that you need to create these long-term relationships with press you end up being a source at least for us we know that you know press leases like good old press leases are the easiest way to get free minutes of free communications because many journalists just find it a very nice and easy way to have an article with a lot of work so you do the work and they publish the article basically but you also need to have to manage expectations we have these partnerships we had these partnerships like for long term especially trying to push data journalism and we ended up doing a lot of free work because they didn't have the capacity and they ended up like using us it's not in that such a bad sense as an external and free provider of data associations and stuff like that and finally on storytelling it's one of those terms that it's you know a buzzword and everybody's talking about story telling and it is important I don't want to challenge that but what I see with a lot of you know online courses about storytelling and capacity building seminars and whatever is that everybody's focusing on one kind of storytelling that's basically you know a world down version of a TED talk like I have this was the problem and this is my personal story and why do I care and how I solved it and how the world is better because I did this and that works of course but that can't be the only way to tell stories like please this is more of me begging everyone than any other thing there are many other ways of tell stories and they are relevant personal stories are not relevant in this sort of thing I have been asked for instance to make stories about our projects personal and I mean I'm not you know recyclable waste so I can't talk to you in a personal sense about that and people shouldn't care who I am if they shouldn't care of what open data is much less they should care of who I am or why I'm doing this so storytelling yes but which one excellent really interesting thanks Daniel Mith next thank you I've just remembered actually a couple of times Fix My Street has appeared unexpectedly on primetime TV like somebody's just mentioned it and where upon many many more people than we would expect suddenly flood onto the website and you know thanks to our developers it does seem to withstand that sort of influx but often goes a lot slower so I suppose a bit of a warning to be prepared for when one of your one of your comms for us is actually successful against all expectations and so I hope you don't mind but in a very comms manager sort of way I've actually prepared some slides so do you mind if I share some visuals is it giving you the option to share all right yes it does yeah so if I just do that and then that can everybody see yes great okay so yeah so I've just got a few examples this was a fairly recent one we worked together with Climate Emergency UK another organisation to gather together all of these climate action plans of all of the local councils and then Climate Emergency UK themselves put in an absolutely colossal amount of effort going through all the different councils action plans and scoring them so at the end of this project they had this huge amount of data which they just knew was going to be a great exclusive for a newspaper and in that case it was strong enough it was a strong enough story that hey we are going to put out this data that basically says which councils have done really well and have a good plan in place and which ones are lacking that they actually just rang up The Guardian which is our national sort of left leaning newspaper spoke to a journalist and secured an exclusive so that went out before the story hit anywhere else it was on The Guardian front page for some hours actually it was like the most one of the most viewed stories and then after that it was on like the climate front page for a few days so that's one of the most successful recent attempts that I've seen the other thing on the back of that again it was man hours like putting in the time and we helped out with this at my society as well emailing every regional newspaper in the country with a dedicated you know this is what your council has scored in the scorecard so it had to be tailored to each each region one by one but of course once you've written the email you just need to be copying and pasting the data in each time and that's quite a my society way of doing things we quite often do things that take a long time but don't take lots of money so for good or ill that's how we often approach things this is one that we wrote about on our blog quite recently so Transparencia in Belgium that's an Alavatelli site running a Freedom of Information website they're quite proactive at just poking the authorities with pointed sticks and in this case this was about a piece of legislation that was asking councils to pre-publish agendas of council meetings so that citizens could see what was about to be discussed so the legislation was sort of pending I think it's just gone through just in the last week but in the time before it was going through some councils were getting ready some were doing very well and you can see here the green patches were councils who were already publishing this data yellow were the ones I think perhaps they were intending to or they were part way there and the red ones were the ones that hadn't done anything at all and Transparencia we'd written it all up on our blog Transparencia said that every time they published this data out it was the number one topic of conversation in councils because no council wanted to be shown up as one of the red areas and how they achieved this sort of coverage again they got it in two quite major newspapers was to pair up with journalists and teach those journalists how to use freedom of information requests in bulk right across the country so to put in a request to every council across the area and ask them how far along are you towards adhering to this legislation and then of course a bit of coding and data munging to actually get it into a nice map but really clever bit of you know like what's that saying about teacher man to fish so teacher journalists to use a freedom of information request and then they have a bit of ownership over that data and it's more likely to get into the papers and oh this is a nice one that we benefited from a couple of weeks ago so I don't know whether everybody around the world is as keyed in as we are to the fact that Boris Johnson our prime minister had a party during lockdown this is a real political hot potato in the UK and it has not dampened down over several weeks and what we noticed was that on our website right to them which allows citizens to contact their MPs there was a massive upturn in numbers so obviously we can't look at what people are writing to their MPs we don't know what the content is but we can very much say well you know on the day that this story hit the front page of all the newspapers whoa like numbers went up and we're pretty sure people were writing to their MPs to express their feelings about Boris Johnson having had a birthday cake and a little party um so that was a good one and that got picked up all we did was put out a tweet we didn't actually contact any journalists um but it did get picked up and the story the tweet was the story so you know you can't ask for more than that that's nice easy work for a comms manager um this one is from the Czech alavoteli site and they were lucky enough to win a competition that gave them some free billboard space and I'm always talking about getting billboards and obviously that is a funding issue and my society has never been in a position to purchase out of home space like that so this was really interesting for me to learn about um like what would you do with that space if you had it um and what they did was I think this says something like according to like 106 is that must be the their FOI act according to 106 I have the right to ask and then a number of posters would come up with ideas for things that you might like to ask and I think this one says um who picked the companies that imported face masks from China so this was a covid related thing that just sort of normalizes the concept of using freedom of information to find out the things that you might be wondering about every day and then finally um I love this organization they're not an alavoteli um site but they are a freedom of information site good friends of my society's fragment start they are so cheeky and they're not afraid to go into opposition with government with authorities to go to court they often crowdfund for the fees that they need to take people to court and in this case they had published the cancer risks of um how do you pronounce it glyphosate so the fertilizer that has um you know a number of different risks attached to it um and that has gone all the way to court and Fragden start have won their case that it was lawful to publish um so you know one way of getting stories out there perhaps is to just be reckless and naughty and take people on yeah I'll stop sharing now yeah brilliant thanks very fantastic examples there um Attila thank you I think you already mentioned a lot of great things what what you what can be useful for for getting into the mainstream media I really like the idea use the like I think all all or most of these are centered around creativity like how to how to replace the lack of capacity with creativity like you have to be creative because you like in Hungary the the state media channel has like a yearly budget of 250 billion euros like you you cannot compete with that like you cannot compete with the with the with the main media channels so you have to be creative and and I really like the idea to use billboards and I remember when when we we wanted to buy places from from the budapest transport company to advertise a cell phone app for for our corruption database like that's that's also a map based application where where people look for what kind of corruption related news located around them and and actually they refused to sell to us places because they said it's against their business policy as there was a corruption scandal of the of the transportation company on the on the map so we try to use but yeah so basically it's it's just creativity and and I really like that we talked a lot about media because that was the point that I wanted to to say at this question to use the media as a tool and not just a tool but as a partner like like here in our our our country or in in our society or our field of of of work like like mainly in budapest but also the the main news channels of the country are located in the capital and and it's not a big metropolis so so basically you know those people who you work with or or who are writing the news and and and and to maintain a good good relationship with them like also personal like I I used to go to the same university as some of the journalists now so so it's it's it's very very effective to use this this kind of relationship like sometimes I I ping them even before we publish a material or or even before I send out press releases to let them prepare and and and they are really grateful as as Daniel mentioned that that somebody is doing actually their job writing articles and and they are happy to publish these these materials most of the time and so yeah basically these these personal channels or personal relationships can can help a lot um yeah an example for for one of our campaigns I already mentioned the the healthcare childbirth data data mapping tool so at the beginning we run a campaign there is some 15 000 reviews which is quite good for us and and we were happy with that but then later on like one year after we wanted to run another campaign to have new data like what happened in the in the in the maternity care to see what happened in the maternity care in the last year and and as I mentioned it's always a challenge to to rerun a campaign or or to to have the same topic dropped in for for the second time and and we prepared different different media materials like we we we did a video report it's one of the one of the media outlets on the topic also also we had an article a series of articles in another mainstream media so to just to combine and and and yeah like combining the different media media services and being creative and and and and yeah that was already mentioned before at the last question to to make it personal that's another thing excellent thank you very much so we're going to put three minutes on the timer to give everyone three minutes of silent working on the padlet and in the chat it's column three on the padlet what have been successful ways you've seen to get civic tech successes or projects into mainstream channels any useful resources research and examples had some brilliant examples already and please do go to the padlet and put in the chat now your three minutes will begin any moment now let's see what we've got on the padlet we've got and we've got the glyphosate report and doing something about a current issue but optimizing a civic tech value to that story that others can't do join a media outlet as a partner into your project never waste a good crisis connected to your work and we've got the digital charities slack community we've got the letters to MPs from my society partnerships with local genus influencers and activists using not only national but local regional outlets funding from a funder who is willing to take a chance on project different from other projects transparency and the climate school cards and the guardians can lots of excellent examples there so thank you very much everyone for answering all the questions we put to you so far for a really brilliant discussion we thought about what the challenges are we've heard about how people try to overcome them and we've had some other wonderful examples of successful attempts to get civic tech projects into mainstream channels in the remaining time we're going to start thinking really practically about solutions to some of the problems that we have covered so as I said earlier the action lab or working group that will come together after today's civic tech surgery will have up to three thousand seven hundred and sixty US dollars available to commission a project that aims to solve one or some of the problems that we highlighted today so in the remaining time the question we're going to think about is what sort of things might help to address the common challenges discussed so far because we are going to start thinking about specific projects that we can commission that the action lab will consider so what sort of things might help to address the common challenges we've discussed so far again we're going to start with five minutes of silent working so you can add ideas to the tablet board I think it's going to be the fourth column of that and you can also add things to the chat and then we'll have some time to see what our discussants think of those ideas and again if anybody else wants to say something in that time of reflection please do say in the chat or raise your hand using the tool on the reactions button so five minutes for some silent working I think the time will start any moment now things people have suggested include promoting a civic commons framework so repurposed creative commons which would allow sort of things to be licensed within that framework and highlight exceptions partner with a media platform to show how civic tech could be applied for its own work develop a canvas for effective civic tech commons and give you concrete examples and successful stories media training for civic tech commons folk to get people outside the bubble a prize for a newsroom who can use data from one of the included organizations to craft a story that could actually use the money that we have to give a prize a civic tech media fellowship for local journalists so aimed at local training local journalists on best ways to report the impact of civic tech project in local news outlets collate civic tech and visual explainers so sort of signposting or a resource on something that explains what open source open data creative commons etc are a journalist and civic tech conference that could bring journalist specific tech people together or just bursary allowing civic tech people to go to journalism conferences as speakers this one came up earlier as well pay a photographer to photograph some of our many abstract needs as an open source photo library a local press fellowship building on an example from data for SDGs a civic tech store retailing competition against using policy and done a speculative fiction competition as an example and a portal that published case studies from a load of civic tech organizations in one place so journalists could subscribe to and easily ask for more details it would be a resource for journalists some excellent ideas in there and again if anyone in the audience has any reflections on any of that please do put your hand up or put your idea in the chat and otherwise we'll hear from our discussants so let's go to Daniel first okay so I believe the the big overarching issue is basically shared resources versus capacity building and strategic planning I think the focus and you can see it in the responses we have in the peddler the focus is mostly put on how we build capacity and how we teach organizations to be more strategic and more effective and whatever and besides the fact that I hate canvases I hate filling them in how many times you can learn something where you actually gain something from it I mean every time we get a big fund they make us go through this process of strategic planning and whatever and that's that's okay I mean it's bearing their whole rights and they care about the project the products on the projects but it gets to a point where you're just basically wasting most of the time you're doing that that sort of thing I think those resources should go to creating common resources common shared resources for the whole world to use that persists in time to put a few examples on this we essentially I think we should have something to help us out with the most technical part of communication which is not like thinking campaigns or strategic thinking but uh advertising like crude full advertising uh pauta we would say in Spanish like buying advertising a central online marketing have if you wish somebody that can negotiate prices and do bulk buys for facebook ads and twitter ads and whatever uh we use mostly digital resources for for communications and we are paying extremely ridiculous prices for something that could be negotiated much cheaply if we all are buying together something like that could be actually financed through small commissions in the the the advertising everybody else is buying so it's actually really easy to contain and I think I think this is the sort of challenge that one funding organization could take on and really help us all a lot we don't have the knowledge to for online advertising and we don't have the specific knowledge of you know tracking campaigns and clicks and conversions and stuff like that that's very complicated believe me I tried to learn it I couldn't so that that's the sort of thing you know the image bank that we were talking a while ago we could even have you know a common matrix server I don't know if anybody else is running away from slack and going to matrix or elements right now but uh having a show of stress wouldn't only be like a good policy you know on privacy and encryption and whatever but it will also be a place where it's much easier to have exchanges between us and create specific groups and work on projects and stuff like that we have like a million slack servers or whatever around the world and everybody saying like join my slack server I don't think that's the way we should go forward um you know that's basically yeah I mean there are other examples of things that we all need and we could share but I think you'll get it fantastic thank you Daniel we've got just under 10 minutes left uh Amy you're next I mean what an incredible set of suggestions and ideas and it's just so energizing and exciting to read through the wall um building on what Daniel was saying as he says there's this kind of common theme around knowledge sharing and kind of upskilling and so on so I think alongside a kind of shared space whether that be with images or like templates and so on uh an accompanying thing there that could be so useful is a series of kind of comms workshops on some there's been some kind of common threads here right media engagement digital skills and tools and so on so perhaps a series of uh workshops geared towards anyone working on these issues because obviously a lot of smaller organizations might not have comms people or teams but it really has a civic tech lens um because I think even in this session today there was just so much expertise and ideas that's coming through uh that can be built upon um and then just the other thing that I think really came through is how do you kind of crowdsource creative ideas and inspiration and I really love that idea of um you know storytelling competition or something similar um I thought that was great brilliant thanks Amy and Attila thank you very much um I think this this all what you said it's around uh like experience sharing and learning from each other and I really think that this is very important like like this is the way how how we can how we can go after the mainstream media or or even even in front of the mainstream media or how we can get our issues into the into the media and reach broader audience so so this is a really hard question like I was thinking a lot about about this issue because one one sum of uh of of money just just won't solve all these problems so the main challenge or the main problem for us like in general for for our organization like how how to uh be how to keep keep a stable budget for not just for the next year but for the next 10 years so to find those points where where you can find the um reliable resource for for longer time and and I would go into this direction in this this communication knowledge sharing field as well to build something which lasts for for for longer time like either it can be uh a common website or a website with with common information of useful tricks and tips or or or or relationship between like personal relationship between between organizations or or people who work in organizations so so I would mention here like I really like conferences as well like those kind of conferences where where you can really share your your your experiences your negative thoughts your your positive energies and and I feel like a bit like that now as as I heard about your stories too so it is really nice to to to feel that the point that there's something very similar struggle in Uruguay for example as as we have here so these like enthusiastic like like emotional um sort of things are are helping a lot to to to keep us in in in in the challenge and then yeah so I know it's it's not a very concrete answer but something excellent thank you very much and uh finally Miv yeah I completely agree with what Attila was saying and also Daniel that it's a tricky sum of money to do something that is going to have a long-term impact because yes you can skill up today's civic tech groups but then five ten years down the line will that all have completely disappeared obviously creation of something like a wiki or a website like Attila said youtube videos but you know things keep moving when you think how much social media has changed and the way that you can advertise on google or facebook has changed just in the last couple of years I fear that that sort of knowledge is going to be very quickly lost and one thing I do really like is this idea of a prize for journalists for a number of reasons um partly because every journalist loves a prize you know how nice to get an award um very tempting then to dig in and find out a little bit more but also because then they are publishing stories that presumably would have this little logo of the prize on it might encourage people to click back and find out more about it so it's sort of virtuous circle and a win-win and then finally just this idea of a photo library that came up in chat in real time during this meeting um answers a need that was expressed by a number of different people so I yeah again that's something that might have a nice long-lasting effect if we could get enough photographs that clearly help explain the sorts of projects that civic tech organizations are always struggling to find something nice and graphic fantastic thank you very much and Amy do you want to come back in there yeah just to add very quickly because as you say this photo library has I think captured the imagination of this uh group alongside that what could be really helpful is a kind of photo guidance and imagery guidelines for civic tech um because I think in the past I've seen some really fantastic guides around you know capturing images with smartphones and so on but actually some kind of creative ideas about what photos you could use if you are on projects could be a really fantastic companion uh to a kind of library of images to help organizations gather their own content even if it is with kind of smart phones and without professional photographers excellent thank you and Daniel it's very great uh beyond photo libraries and especially not the it's not necessary to create something new we have a bunch of shared resources already that we already use we give me the comments font awesome uh is one of the most used icon libraries in the world and maybe you know the community can spend $10,000 that is the demand they charge for a new icon and have an open data icon that is like everywhere the novel project there's a bunch of places where people already are looking for materials and I think that's where we need to go first excellent thank you um I'm going to start bringing us to a close now and hopefully you can see a slide on the screen which gives you a sense of what's going to happen next can everybody see big thing which says action lab form yes excellent thank you so um thank you all for a really useful discussion uh today uh this will end up going somewhere which is uh after this event there will be an action lab aka a working group that will convene um there'll be around six people uh on that they will work together looking back at what we discussed today what's on the tablet what's in the chat what's in the in the discussion um to commission some work to help address some of the challenges that we've raised um anyone can apply to join that action lab so please do sign up to the tick tech mailing list you'll find a link on the website and possibly in the chat as well um so you'll find out when the applications are open do apply and then they will make the funding available through a call for proposals uh to get somebody to do some work which will hopefully solve some of the problems that we talked about today not all of them because there are a lot as we've been discussing but hopefully we'll be able to get a really practical solution that will help civic tech across the world based on what we discussed today so all that remains for me to say um huge thank you to our brilliant speakers a huge thank you to all of you in the audience for coming there's lots of really useful contributions in the chat and on the tablet as well and a big thank you to National Endowment for Democracy for funding this work as well we'll be back in a couple of months for the next Global Civic Tech surgery in the meantime keep an eye out for that opening of the action lab applications and also keep an eye out for the calls for proposals around accessibility and inclusive to the civic tech and access and quality information to the civic tech success as well so um yes do sign up to the mailing list hopefully see you again in a couple of months for the next uh civic tech surgery if not before and thank you very much again enjoy the rest of your days thank you