 Welch chi'n gweithio i gael eu sefydliadau cyfnodol, mae'n gweithio'r sefydliadau cyfnodol. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithio ar 3. Mae'r gweithio'r cystafol yn Gweithio, Dawn McDougal yn George Biers, a Benjamin Siebel yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, ac mae'n gweithio'r 15 munud ar y gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Felly yw'r regif i fynd i gweithio'r Gweithio. Good evening. I will try to be brief on a very complicated issue actually, on civic-tech and government collaboration. It's also important when I'm introducing myself to say that I have, knives, the Google representative yesterday talking about different hands. I'm a boring lawyer. Frustrated, former public official, and very enthusiastic activists. This is a really good combination for talking on the topic, but also, if you are interested in the other things that we're doing, we're trying to make some researches on what's going on with a city tech, digital social innovation, In European Union, I have some copies of our report. We delivered quite recently within the consortium with other organisations. But, come back to the main topic. The context is simple and not simple at the same time. It's simple because the most, and I'm saying that as the former public official, the public officials everywhere are more or less the same. Because we are all humans, and this is also important in any kind of a collaboration to remember that we're working with humans, and we are humans ourselves. So we have our dreams, our expectations, our problems, and sometimes we have even our solutions that are coordinated with other people. But what is important in this presentation is I'm also telling you that, from the perspective of some people saying semi-authoritarian states, or as they describe themselves, the liberal democracies. So the way I'm kind of jealous sometimes that it's easy on the political level to work with the government is not the case in every country. So some tips on collaboration that I will just present to you in a moment are those models of collaboration that can work in countries such as Poland, Hungary, or other countries that is called themselves illiberal democracy. You see the title Let Our Powers Combined. Anyone know what it refers to? Do you know the quote? Captain Planet? Yeah, this is Captain Planet. This is one of my really favorite cartoons when I was a kid. And what I really like about it is that you have the people with different tolerance like the earth, water, wind, heart. And when their powers combine, you have this Captain Planet. He's a tough guy, and this is the last resort that's very successful. And I also see the collaboration in such a way as I was watching the Captain Planet cartoon because in a collaboration, you have a bunch of talented people with their own values and their knowledge and competences. But the true meaning of collaboration is when our power combines. So we have to think always in this way that also, not only within the team of our organization, but in between us and the public officials, that always an earth person or a wind person. And we have to find ourselves, we have to synchronize. And then there is a Captain Planet which can be also understood as a very successful city tech tool. So this is kind of an obvious thing why to collaborate because we want to have this Captain Planet successful civic tools. But also we have to be honest with each other. Is as a civic tech or as any other organization, we kind of doing a favor to the public officials. And we shouldn't feel ashamed of that. Sometimes we feel a bit worse because we are these crazy campaigners or activists. But in fact we bring in our knowledge and competences. And actually when I was a public official, I wish that someone would contact me and do me this favor and support me with my work. Because what we're talking about now very often and we can hear that through the whole conference here, we're talking about reformers within government. It's very unusual that we have the whole department, the whole ministry, the whole institution supporting what we believe in, which is a successful civic engagement on other stuff that we do under the civic tech activity. But we're doing a favor to the public officials. And as that we want to have something in return as a good reforms, as implementing good projects, as working with us in a very open way. So some general remarks now how the collaboration works also on the examples of the projects that we are conducting or being part of. So first of all, why we're talking also about the collaboration is the issue or topic that was discussed during this conference as well. We're talking about solution of products. Without the collaboration it's mostly products. So in the case of, for example, the Polish case would be the Ministry of Digital Affairs that is also responsible for delivering some anti-products is preparing a tool for the people to register for elections. And they did a great job, but they haven't collaborated with electoral committees and the municipalities which are responsible for that. So we had a great product, but the people actually couldn't find themselves on the lease because the municipalities had so too little time to prepare. So from the perspective of the citizen, it doesn't matter if the Ministry of Digital Affairs is doing a press conference and saying, we had a great product, everything worked. But from my perspective, no, because I couldn't vote. I couldn't find my name on the, I couldn't find my name on the lease. And if you're thinking about the solutions, then you have to also do something that is maybe less complicated for us as the civic tech or civic organization. But we very often forgetting about it. And this is to bring on or usual suspects, actually the people that we use the product. I mean, how many of you had people or users at the hackathons? That usually we have tech people, policy people, activists, but we're doing it for someone. So it's really good to engage with the people that we wanted them to see how does they look not only put them as numbers in metrics. Because very often what we say is, yeah, we're having 10K users, but these are the real people. So it's really interesting on one hand, but I guess very important to get these people in the room and just ask them, how do you like my idea? What do you expect from this product solution, I should say? And this is the example of the thing that we, it's not very on digital democracy, but this is interesting stuff that we do now thanks to the cooperation with our German friends from Rufidaten Info, which is the air sensors that do DAY air sensors, which is not really complicated unless you are kind of knowledgeable about technology. But what we're trying to do also, organizing the workshops, we invited the public officials and citizens to show them how does it really work? So it's not only that they can read on our website and box the set, but also we try to find out is it really simple for them to make the products? Because otherwise they will not use it. So this is one of the examples of the very seniors from one of the municipalities trying to set this air pollution sensor. The fellowship is good when you have this open collaboration, which means that you have a good context with the public institution and you can set up the rules, and it's really important from this perspective to set up these rules. Sometimes there is a big disappointment about expectations on each of the party. We have a code for Pakistan somewhere there. We talked a lot about fellowships yesterday, and this is an ongoing process, but this is again something that is a good example of doing a favor to the public institution and also expecting something in return like sustainable policy and open data on reducing the civic tech tools, etc. The other challenge with working with governments, which is a general challenge, is that as I told you, we have sometimes this image of the crazy campaigners, like NGO people are nice people generally, they have good heart, but they're not professional. And very often we have to sell ourselves as a business-like organization, because this is a very set statement, but in most of the cases, the public institution wants to propose a certain product, not necessarily thinking about increasing democracy, participation, etc. So I don't want to use that word, but I will use that word. We have to fake a bit. So we have to try to show that we are less NGO, and more business-like. I don't want to say fake that we are more professional, because I do believe that we are far, far, far more professional than businesses in this terms, but we have to sell the products. And one of the examples of our work is that we, based on our experiences, we pay as a central repository of data, so like Open Data Golf UK or Open Data Golf style product for the Polish government several years ago. And we just kind of pretend that we are more IT organization, the civic tech organization. And with IT organization it's like not every public official understands how IT works, so they are kind of afraid of asking questions sometimes. So you have this authority as an IT person. But thanks to that we have a really successful and civic oriented product in Poland. But, so these are like general remarks on that, but how we engage in collaboration in a liberal democracy, but I guess this can work also in other cases. A good shaming, but someone told me the shaming is not a great word, so you can translate it as healthy competition. This is the case of the website, of official website of the Polish parliament, which was really, really bad. So the official website of the parliament in 2009 when we started, I don't see this well, but it was just text and really hard to understand. Some PDFs, the font was like from 19th century western movie, and no one really used that, including members of the parliament themselves. So what we thought at the moment, why not to try to build kind of a mirror site, but really do it with engaging of some citizens, with engaging of maybe not citizens, but activists that are really interested in the parliament, and some MPs also, because MPs came to us and said like, I don't have really good access to the documents. I mean, I get the hard copies. It's easy to get for me, but it's hard to work when I want to look for something like what happened two weeks ago or something. I don't have the whole library with me. So we built a product based on that, and you know what happened only two years after that while the parliament exchanged their website based on what we actually did, and the pleasure is all ours. So it's also the part, I believe it's also the part of a collaboration because we had this healthy competition with them and the people started to use our site more willingly than they site, and they could refer to the social media, they were at that time already, or on other occasions that, why can't you do the website like the guys from advice for foundation did? So they feel ashamed and they did, and it's a good practice. This is an interesting product also of ours, and this is especially important in this context of illiberal democracy. Very briefly, one of the things that we are kind of attacking our government is that they are fighting with independence of judiciary, and the Ministry of Justice is responsible for that. At the same time, the Ministry of Justice has a database of all companies of the company register, and the company register, as you well know, is a really important tool when it comes to transparency, connect political and business connections, etc. And it's open, but like semi open, you have to know the name of the organisation or the company, you have to put the capture, so it's like record by record. You can't do the connections like we do in here, for example, this is an example of a net of connections between the people that are responsible for businesses. And the problem is that we tried, also with the former government, we tried to say to them that maybe they will be more open and like we don't really need to do this thing. Like it's easy, we can show them how to do it, let's make it available for everyone. They did not find it very attractive, and they found many reasons not to do it, including some legal concerns. But we have IT guys working for us, and they have IT guys in the Ministry of Justice. And IT guys are really cool. They are really like our tool. We have more than 500k unique users every month, and they appreciate it. So this is our talent, is that we know how to do it. And this is a silent collaboration because we are working directly and non-formally with the IT department, that they say, if you're strapping the data between 1pm and 5pm, where everyone is going into our register, it's hard for our service because it's like the movement is too big. So please don't scrub between these hours. I'm saying yes, okay. We will not do that during the day, but can you help us with putting some documents on in PDFs in a bulk form, et cetera? Okay, possible. This doesn't have to be consulted with the Ministry of Justice, of course. So we having this good product that I believe also is profitable for citizens and for businesses in Poland, but we don't cooperate directly with the Ministry. Open Data Conspiracy, this is something, again, we are quite active on this political thing, like in terms of how political you can be as an NGO, but we are. And for law of public officials and for institutions, when they hear our name, they prefer not to openly collaborate because they are afraid of the central government and what would be their reaction, et cetera. So what we did with the cool guys from one of the departments in the Ministry of Digital Affairs that are these true reformers is that we asked them, can we write the guidelines on opening data in public administration, but we'll not use our name. Your name as the Ministry of Digital Affairs will be there. And this is what we did. So we wrote the guidelines of really, I mean, I do believe that, really cool opening data practices, good practices and the whole policies in the public institutions, but it has been delivered by the Ministry itself. So a lot of public institutions can learn how to do it and also we use that opportunity to connect some of the public officials from different institutions to work together to know what are the true challenges. So we were quite well prepared for doing it. We treated public officials, again, as humans, we asked them, I know you have the true problem with opening the data. What is your problem? I mean, just honestly tell me, no one is watching, just tell me what is your true problem. And we have really good stories in the guidelines because of them. I know it's one minute. And the last project I want to show you, this is the one also thanks to the Code for All Network that we are part of. There's a huge problem with the Polish Electoral Commission in the terms they don't have capacity. There's like few people, they don't have funds for truly checking what's going on on election day when it comes to the potential irregularities. So we scaled a tool from our friends from Code for Romania and we did a tool that we had the results of any irregularities in with the help, of course, of more than 100 volunteers at the end of the election day. And the Electoral Commission that saw the data, they were really happy about it because they could use that for making their own statements the very night. So the questions for you that I want to leave you with that and just like think about it would be in the context, how do you know it was worth to do it is what are you best in? I mean, Ed, is find your talent what you think is the best suitable way of being active in the field because we are the best at what we are best at, which means that I do feel with my heart that I prefer this kind of a silent collaboration, for example, because I don't want to make arrangements for two years to meet with the minister, find your own way and be self-confident about your talents, basically. And what is the most important stuff I think also in Captain Planet it was this hard guy. And even though I'm a boring lawyer, I think in what we're doing and even we've collaborated with boring, frustrated public officials, sometimes frustrated. It is my story again is that we are human beings and we have to feel ourselves a bit. Thank you. Sorry for it all. APPLAUSE Thanks, Crystal. We hand over now to Dawn and Jill and I will bring up their presentation. I'm sure we just want to spooch this down and then I'll stand on this side. I will do whatever you want me to do. Yep, we're good. OK, I think we're great. OK, as long as we're cool here. I'm going to stand right here. Oh, wow. OK, wait now, how do I turn it on? It should be on. Oh, it's on? Yeah, it's on. Cool. Wonderful. Well, thank you all for being here. I know it's late in the day after Alwan, a couple of days of fun that we've all been having. So thank you for taking the time to be with us today. And thank you to TicTac for having us. It's been really great to have some incredible conversations and learn a lot from everyone who's been here. So we talked a little bit about who we are. We sit on the National Advisory Council for Code for America. And Joe also is leading up a local chapter in Charlotte called Open Charlotte. And I for a few years was writing Code for Philly in Philadelphia in the US. So I want to talk to you about today some of the things that we've learned from our time in doing volunteerism within civic technology. Some of the lessons that we've gained, also some of the approaches that we've seen from just working closely with probably hundreds of captains personally, but also things that we've seen from thousands of people in different terms that they've made. And then we'll talk a little bit about how civic tech in the volunteer context can have practical applications and scalable impacts. So a little bit more about why we want to talk about this, why talk about volunteering in civic tech in particular. There's a lot of energy around this movement, right? There's a lot of energy around civic tech generally. We've heard a lot of really interesting efforts that are happening both in terms of private companies, nonprofits, activists, networks, all kinds of stuff. And as it matures and grows, volunteering is going to be part of that. So we want to think about how do these things continue on. I should give you our little picture of Code for America. And so we'll be solidifying what the replicable strategies are for volunteering. And there's a lot of focus on engagement of end users, right? Talking about building with, not for, making sure that we're engaging citizens and residents so that they can be part of the design process and make a collaborative and co-create solutions together. And volunteering in this context is really empowering people at the grassroots of this, right? People who are in communities are the ones who could be organizing those communities and self-organized communities are also going to be more effective and more sustainable than just having people who are in positions of structured efforts. So we also want to talk about volunteering being unique because it is really going to be pushing forward. It's organizing around shared ideals and that's pushing forward this idea of civic tech as a social movement. And Code for America at the network level has been talking more and more about how we see this as a movement and how this work and support that. So some of the other pieces here is just making the volunteers more structured and making it so that we can scale it because as we become more structured and focused, then we're able to really leverage what volunteers can do in terms of adding capacity to things that already exist, especially for when we're talking about government efforts who are under-resourced or non-profits who need support, having highly skilled volunteers is going to be very helpful and impactful. A little bit more about Code for America for anyone who doesn't know in the brigade network. Code for America was started in 2009 and began a fellowship program in 2011 and the second cohort was 2012. The idea with those fellowships was actually putting in a technologist in city government to push forward on some of these changes of what are the cultural changes that we can make? What is possible? How can we rapidly iterate and prototype? And we, from that, organically grew brigades because we wanted to continue that work. The fellowships only lasted a year and how do we continue that forward? Having people at the local level who wanted to continue this work was going to be pretty much the way that this continues on and it just organically grew from there. And in six years, we now are at 75 chapters across the country and over 25,000 highly skilled volunteers of designers, people who are a data scientist, obviously developers, but a wide variety of people who are volunteering for the effort that we're putting forward. And there are a lot of things that we will cover. I'm going to go ahead and pass the mic over to Jill just to talk more about some of the methods that we've seen and some of the strategies that we hope to continue when we start showing. Thanks. Okay, fair enough. Hi, everyone. Okay, so. So we have four different methods of engagement that we want to talk to you today about. Applications, advocacy, community building and as a technical consultant. So applications. Obviously this one's a given, right? This is a traditional form of ways for volunteers to engage. It's an easy opportunity to participate, especially for our tech driven community and it can build like network sharing really well because code is easy to share. So as an example of this, we've got Corpbot. Corpbot was started in 2014 in Atlanta and the city of Atlanta annually issues about 200,000 traffic citations. So Corpbot is a text system that texts you a reminder of when your corp date is. Super simple. It turns out that 200,000 citations issued about 20% of those people forget to show up for their date. Well, if you don't in the US if you don't show up for your corp date it's you issued a benchmark and arrested the next time you're pulled over for anything. Once they issued that once in the first year of implementation of this they saw a 15% decline in benchmarks issue which means people are actually remembering to show up because we've sent them a reminder. Seeing the success, Cofer Tiltsa wanted to bring Corpbot to their city so what they did was they redeployed the original app improved the code, made it easier for other cities to deploy it as well set up some processes, documented it well and then write a pilot. Well, they had similar results. So next up is Anchorage, Alaska. And they've done it and had similar results. Within this year you're going to see it deployed in Savannah and Charlotte as well. So it's a great example of not only the easy access points of technology but also how smaller organizations can share with each other. The struggle with applications is if you don't have a large tech base and you don't have a lot of developers it's really hard to maintain these applications even if you do get them built. And that can minimize your network sharing ideas. Another one is advocacy. So this is a little bit newer for us because as we're maturing as a volunteer group we're moving more into an idea that this is a movement not just a network of individual organizations. And it also kind of changes the way we use tech. It makes tech the tool and not the solution which is what makes tech have a lasting change. An example of this is Chai Hacknight in Chicago's Pet Coke project. So if you don't know what pet coke is because I didn't eat until I checked it out it's petroleum coke. It's a byproduct of refining oil. It looks like a great dirt and apparently is just stored outside in piles. Well Chicago's nicknamed the Windy City for a reason and as the wind would blow over these exposed piles of pet coke it picks up a really fine dust and spreads it for miles. Well that dust when it's inhaled gets stuck in the filters in your lungs and causes serious health problems. So when Chai Hacknight found out about this problem that there was an act of group that was doing advocacy around it they decided to use some tech to help. They built this, it's an alert system again using text messages to alert people when the conditions around the stations that had these exposed piles was dangerous. Not only were they able to warn citizens but they collected that data and in a six month period had 92 days of high risk took that data to city council and got an ordinance passed changing the way that pet coke is stored in the city of Chicago. So now we can see this lasting change happen because we use tech as the tool and not as the solution. So this policy when we were able to bring this policy forward it also provides a social justice aspect that we're actually working in a social movement. Another way that we engage with government is as a community builder. These are very easy relationships because we're used to building relationships with government. So we just build them with a community as well. It promotes diversity, we actually live up to our deals of build with not for when we have the community members in the room during the design process. So one of these projects that gives a great example of this is Code for Asheville. They wanted to have their users front and center through the design process and in order to develop a relationship that would get those users in the room they worked with a community group called Beluffed that is already doing really great impactful work in Asheville around supporting their homeless community. So they built this relationship they had a lot of conversations they figured out what the community actually needs from the community and then helped them. What that ended up doing on the short term is they built a computer lab inside one of the community centers that they support. They are there to provide technical help for the members using it when they need help accessing something and help with digital literacy. This year they're planning on doing some digital literacy classes as well to support this type of a project. It has been so successful but because we're living up to that idea of build with and not for that it's creating a stronger connection between the technology and the community and the users and better conversations. Again this is also being packaged and redeployed around the network as a community ambassorship program. So our last one is a tech consultant. This is the most unique way that we can interact with government and admittedly not all governments are going to be open to this. It's extremely new but basically the idea is that we are available to have a jargon-free conversation about technology. Not all departments inside government are tech savvy. Oftentimes the ID departments are stretched thin. We have time to sit in on every vendor meeting that the city has. So in Charlotte we do this type of consulting with our local government. Kind of how it started is that one of our projects one of our volunteers wanted to do a redo our adopt a street program. So basically the adopt a street is you are assigned a one-mile range of a street, of city street and you agree to go and clean it once a month. You pick up the trash, you pick up the litter, you report back that you did it, they put up a sign, it's a great way to get your residents to invest in the city and feel like they own the state of the city. So however the tech that surrounds it is bad. It's not user-friendly, it's hard to use, it's hard to report, it's not mobile-friendly even though you're out on the street it would be the easiest time to report back that you did it. So we had one of our volunteers wanted to rebound it. After having conversations with the city we figured out very very quickly that what the city needed was a way larger scope than what volunteers were able to produce. So we flipped peers and instead of actually building the tech we helped them write an RFP that involved their users, involved good tech and let them explain how the tech should work so that they could explain to us what they wanted it to do. But this diff was we created an RFP that ended up coming in on time, under budget and the adoption rate has been about 90%. So it's improving. So it's an unusual way to interact though. But this has built a really interesting relationship between our organization and the government because they don't see us as free labor, they see us as a technical partner. Somebody who can come in and explain what jargon is can explain what tech is and what agenda is to make the tech better and to make them more efficient. So we get better technology, they spend less money, it works for everybody, right? And procurement is broken, so it helps fix little bits of it at least. So the biggest thing with these methods and the one reason why I wanted to go over four of them is because no method fits all governments. No, so you can't expect to be able to deploy all four of these methods with any one government. But having a good toolkit allows you to interact with a local government the way they will invite you into the room and allows you to have better conversations about how you can participate, how you can help and how you can build that relationship. I'm going to hand it back to Dawn to tell you more. Some more things. It is like five o'clock on the last day. So I just wanted to quickly talk a little bit more about this. I think what's consistent here is that all of these approaches are high touch. They require quite a bit of context. Usually volunteers have been in government, they have a lot of familiarity. So that's great and we still want to keep that approach, right? That's going to continue to be really important to keep highly skilled volunteers. But if we don't want civic tech to be niche, we need to grow that base. By de-concloesing problems and making this something where I can come in and very quickly pick an issue off the backlog, write some code and submit and push, that's what's going to be important for this. So that's something that as we continue to mature from the volunteer perspective, we're continuing to add that structure that we were talking about in focus for volunteers so that we can have more of that and more tiers of leadership and all of that good stuff. I'm just going to open that. You need my fingerprints. Oh, do I? Okay, perfect. Wonderful. You didn't use these notes at all? I just write them. I don't use them. Wonderful. Okay, great. Let me do this. So just what Jill was saying, I think that we want to have a variety of different approaches so that we can be somewhat nimble. Now we spend a lot of time working with government and building relationships with them. That's not something that everyone can do. Oftentimes people aren't going to invite you to do technical consulting if you haven't spent probably two or three years building a relationship over time. We've gotten pretty good at that. There's a few things that I wanted to mention. Also, it doesn't make as much sense for volunteers. Some brigades are five volunteers and some are 5,000. So having a variety of tools that we share about the network makes it easier to say, Charlotte did this, what version of that can we do in Maine who only has five volunteers? Also, government can have a similar situation where you may have one really great champion or you may have somebody who has an entire digital services team, which is awesome. A variety of approaches makes it possible for us to act within the constraints and the resources that we have. It also means that we can be more inclusive of end users. The other piece for us is that being situated where we're at, we don't have a business interest. There's no agenda. We get to be situated in between government and actual community members and we just get to be part of that community and so it's more of a facilitation and that lack of an agenda I think is really helpful for us pushing forward on both sides. Again, so for us the technology is the tool and so making the focus of this more about the social change that we want to affect that is where we see bringing in these relationships and all the things that we've talked about this weekend but again actually putting them into practice it's pretty messy and we're kind of okay with that. That will probably evolve over time but sometimes being messy but having good collaboration is a higher priority. Your call to action is to get involved. There's a few different ways like working with people at Code for Poland or Code for Pakistan. There is an entire global movement that's happening not just in America but all across the world and so if you have a local chapter join it, if you don't have a local chapter start one and also some things that I would love to talk with people after the session or just in general how can we be better partners I think that what we can offer as volunteers and a lot of us is to add capacity to efforts that are already happening and I think any volunteer really wants to reinvent the wheel or start something brand new how can we help support something that's already existing and then a big thank you our contact info also a big thank you to Code for France who had a great soiree on Monday night was that right? Was that Monday night? But yeah, thank you again for your time and attention please reach out with any questions or thoughts or general feedback for us and hope you guys have a great rest of the tic-tac. Thank you. Thanks so much Dylan Dorn who will have some things So hello I have the honour of being the last speaker of this conference I guess thanks for staying with us till the end and thanks to my society for putting it together once again I had an amazing time My name is Benjamin I work at Technologie Stiftung Berlin we are a local non-profit from Berlin working mostly on digital transformation of government and I am directing a bunch of projects at Technologie Stiftung and the one I am going to talk about today is called Otis it's our closest cooperation with government so far and Otis is an attempt to support government in delivering quality data sets to its citizens it's a very hands-on approach meaning we are not so much working on a policy level with Otis but really doing a hands-on support team that will go into the administration with people on their computers and help them to release data So our first anniversary is coming up and I am thankful for the opportunity to share some of our experiences from the first year but I'd like to start by giving you a short run down of the story so far so Berlin moved quite early on the open data stage compared to other German cities it was one of the first in 2012 with an open data strategy and 2013 with an open data portal then between 2013 and 2016 not that much really happened I mean the portal was designed in a way that every public servant basically could upload data some did but there was also a lot of confusion on what open data actually is and in general the quality of the open data portal was not that good then in 2016 we passed the e-government law part of that also an open data law that turned the whole project from a voluntary into a mandatory exercise for public servants and after that still not much happened why so I think you see a classic example of the problems in digital governments that is the gap between strategies and laws on the one hand and delivery on the other most governments are quite good at strategies and laws they've been doing that for centuries e-government law is not that different from writing let's say a traffic law or a housing law but really delivering on these strategies is a whole different story and is uncharted territory for lots of public servants so while the top level executives see their job done once they have the nice strategy or the law the public servants that are really working on the ground left alone and also lost with actually putting it into practice so I wrote a study for Berlin's government two years ago evaluating the situation and one of my recommendations was to set up something like an open data help desk or support team inside of government for all these questions and people in government like this idea but also told me it was impossible in a reasonable time frame to establish a new unit inside of government so what they asked was if we could set up a team for them they would fund it we as a non-profit foundation would provide the team and we tried to cooperate in that way so we did this is our team so an open data information centre that's the long name for Otis we picked a name that was just unsexy enough so government could relate to it but we called it Otis in short we are five people, these are my four dear colleagues, we built a very diverse team also with very diverse backgrounds that was important to us because we really wanted to combine the public policy and administration expertise with the technical delivery capacity so I'm really happy to have both on the team and also have for example a UX designer on the team who can make data look good these are things that can be important factors if you want to motivate orbit incentives for public servants let's see so what we do we do meetups just for knowledge sharing inside of government we also have government locate and evaluate data so we look at a lot of exercieds still the tool of choice for government when it comes to data we also offer courses and workshops where we teach basically data literacy the use of especially open source software to work with data and we also build demonstrators and prototypes that we try to to demonstrate the value inherent in these datasets but in many ways we are still in the process of figuring out what works, what resonates with government so we keep readjusting we readjusted a few times we basically started with a very naive assumption coming more from an activist background we thought government has all the data it just needs to be published they don't publish it right now because probably because they're ignorant or because they lack the digital skills so we will just educate them and then it will be fine once we really started to work behind the scenes and really went into government we realized that the situation is much more complex a lot of complex structures complex processes a lot of mixed motivations a lot of confusion and fear so nowadays we see ourselves rather as therapists than as activists in the beginning we would go into a meeting and show them our open data slides and hey there's a lot of value and data and it's really easy to do but now we just go into a meeting and are like okay guys where does it hurt the most to tell us and then we listen and then we try to take it from there right so our relation with government after these days do not that easy there are lots of public servants who appreciate what we do especially those that have worked with us in releasing data, really appreciate our help but there are lots of people in government who find us don't write annoying who have the opinion that outside you cannot really understand what's going on inside of government and it's a delicate balance because I think to some point we have to annoy if we wouldn't annoy anybody we would not be doing good work so because we always try also to challenge support on the one hand, challenge on the other so the main conflict is us saying guys you have to do better and them saying guys you have to understand better before you try to give us advice probably it's like a 50-50 distribution for the rights there are many cases where we have to understand more and learn more and I've collected now after almost one year of work, I've collected for lessons or main takeaways from now so I'd like to present you with four lessons lesson one lesson one is we really underestimated how hard it is to locate data in a government with about 100,000 employees crazy really so governments work with data for decades or for centuries but still are not really data driven organisations in many ways so the whole data management in Berlin is really not that good and I think many other cities are in the same situation so maybe to give an example just to make it more clear so a simple statistical request a member from parliament would maybe ask something like how many children in Berlin are in childcare in different facilities or have special needs and ask for the statistics at that point you would assume that maybe you just need to push a button to get this data out of the database in reality what happens is someone from the mayor's office would call someone from the department of youth and education who would then call all 12 districts in Berlin by a high degree of autonomy in doing childcare and ask every one of them like how many kids you have how many childcare centres you have then in every of the 12 departments someone would start hunting for this data call other people and then after a few days or weeks you would get replies from all districts some would maybe send an excel sheet some would send an export from a database some would send a PDF from 2014 because this is the last time they checked some would reply something like we don't know because the person is on parental leave or sick or we cannot reply and this is a standard procedure and it's also very domain specific means that if you would ask for data from different domain you basically have to start from zero my dear colleague Alexandra recently went hunting for data on drinking water wells in Berlin there should be about 2000 drinking water wells so for emergency situations drinking water and after two weeks of research she sent me this she still didn't find the data but she mapped out all systems that somehow have to do with this and she told me she keeps searching but the data is probably somewhere in here these are all different departments different IT systems and so on so it's really basically what you see in the beginning we had a very objectified view of data we just thought data is there it just has to be released but in reality it's a very complex web of practices in which data can crystallize at some point maybe and sometimes also not so while we started with the idea of we'll just help you to open data now we are more like let's look for the data together and maybe we'll find it a lesson two publishing data needs a purpose this is super important we learned at the beginning we as many other activists would just tell government just release the raw data there are enough people out there who will do interesting things with it governments employees never really got the why they should do it it's extra work for them and just the idea that somewhere somebody will make it was just not enough as an incentive for them so once we started to propose actual data driven projects like services that would be fueled through open data we got a much more response and much higher interest in actually working with data for example we completely rebuilt the data pipeline from the health departments where they measure water quality of the lakes in Berlin and rebuilt it in a way that we could put a front end here a citizen information service if you want to go swimming where can you do that is the water clear and so on the government had no interest in the beginning of releasing the data but once we showed them the design sketches of the front end they were really down and said this is a cool project and it wasn't really hard to do I mean our designer could do this in a day or two and then also it's a very simple web app but it made government really happy it also made some press and it got quite a lot of users and this was a similar thing with public funding data we built an information tool for citizens that now is mostly used by government themselves because they like it so much to analyse whatever they spend but in both cases open data was published along the way it wasn't the end goal it just happened at some point because we built these services so basically we moved from the just publish some data to let's build something cool together lesson three is a civic tech textbook classic as forgiveness not permission we learned that this is also very true if you work inside of government government is of course very rule driven and for a good reason but it also has this mindset of everything that is not explicitly allowed is probably forbidden and we try to turn this around and by saying everything that is not forbidden is probably allowed so let's just try and do it and the main example is that government employees are not allowed to install software on the computer of course and they have very old and shitty software but they have one like super power tool on their computer that is the web browser ever since they changed to Mozilla's Firefox from internet explorer it's even better and what we did also with the way that javascript and web ecosystem has developed we built lots of small tools that run on our own servers and government people can access them through that browser without asking anyone for permission so the official IT department from government probably doesn't know that the tools are running and we are able to build a complete ecosystem of small tools and web apps around the very bad software that is on public service computers and you know this is not illegal it's perfectly fine it's a great area that is not really regulated because most of the rules come from a time when no one would actually do that so in the beginning we would often ask before we do such things and now we just do them and see if anyone would try to stop us and in most ways we just get it on with it lesson 4 already sums up my talk and this is really something from my experience I talk I speak with government employees on a weekly basis I met someone who was intrinsically motivated to be more open they're not against being open but it's really nothing that really drives them or give their job purpose but really there is a sincere and honest drive to offer better services this is where public servants really can find their purpose and where they are also willing to walk the extra mile and put on some extra work because they are not against digital transformation digital is the new normal and they all use smartphones and they all are frustrated that government is not able to offer good digital services so once you you manage to show them that making things open can also make things better this was one of the main claims from the British GDS as well they will be down to work with you to work with you on that and I know it's a bit a controversial topic because you could also say as a civil society activist you could say transparency is right it shouldn't be a question if the government wants to do this or not they have to do it but from the inside perspective where we are working the question of motivation and incentives is really important because if they have no motivation they'll find ways not to do it what the legal situation is with something that is so confusing as open data you can always find excuses why this data cannot be published so if this is true that making things open will also make things better and I really think that it is then I think now is the time to show it and now I'm able to close the circle to Rebecca's opening keynote because I think civil society can really play or actors like us can really play an important role in that and also showing because we proposed it for a long time we said make things open it makes things better but we have to ask ourselves did we really deliver on that promise so far because the public servants that followed us in the early phase and released data are still waiting for that value to realize that we promised that we should also look critically at ourselves and look how we can make the things better and of course at the same time rethink what government can be and rethink government in a more inclusive and participatory way well thank you, I think I'm early that's interesting thanks a lot applause thank you Benjamin and all our speakers I'd like to open up the floor to questions whilst you're thinking of your questions I'll abuse my position by asking the first one in the back of my mind as you were all talking I think it came up maybe obliquely in all your presentations I was thinking about money and I wonder what your experiences are I really like the description of the relationship between civic tech and government as it's complicated what's your experience around what happens when a financial element comes in has that been necessary has it been something you've avoided particularly in the context of lots of volunteer effort I'd be interested to hear what your experiences have been I can talk about I think that will work for all three of us that's amazing so it is complicated with the city of Charlotte of Charlotte's primary funder we do a couple of projects that they give us a decent amount of money to maintain and we charge them to do a beginning project we have a we sign a volunteer we call it a skilled volunteer engagement it basically says we're volunteers we're not giving you a timeline but in order to support volunteer work it is a cost it's very hard to get people to come and work in the evening if you don't feed them there is a cost and so you're going to support that I have found that when they have to shell it even if it's like $1,500 for a project it's so much easier to get a meeting it's easier to get it on their radar it becomes a priority for them and then I'm not sitting around waiting for months for them to come up with that piece of data I asked for so it is complicated Government works better in contracts and that's why we created we adopted and modified another non-profits contract that they use with companies because government likes to have definition around relationships that's just kind of how they operate so it's complicated but we don't feel beholden to them because of it I think we might be lucky on that front I think we are in a very privileged situation as far as Government is funding our project and we are even growing because after a few months another department came and asked can we also sponsor you and hire another person so we are really growing I think we are actually quite cheap in a way for them because we offer some return and they are used to spend a lot of money on IT and right now they have the money and they have the pressure and sometimes at the feeling they don't really know what to do with the money and for them it's very hard to hire their own people it's a very complicated process and no one wants to work in Government and we had this discussion before we can offer a work environment that for younger people is inspiring you know we have Mac books and we have free drinks and what not so we had no problem finding very talented people and for Government especially since we offer the full package not only data but also a front end at the web app and we are a non-profit we just charge our personal costs we do not make a profit from it in the end it's very cheap for Government and a project like this we're just doing it with our basic personal so I think it's a very good deal for them and there we lost that I would say of course I don't know what works with that it's complicated again and it's at different angles the first one is that in general which is maybe good for public finances sometimes public officials and public institutions are very strict with money so that's a general problem with not a agile public procurement because this is the most opportunities for getting funds from the Government is coming from the public procurement but the very important thing which is an ethical question at some point also for us is whether we really want to got money from the Government that our civic part of civic tech is monitoring so in several cases but we actually took the money we propose really dumping prices because then we just said this is important we want to do that but we don't want anyone to say later that they did it for money we almost like we did really like it was symbolically so that's a big struggle and maybe that's a discussion that also might be the part of the civic tech movement like how you cooperate with the Government and it doesn't matter if it's liberal democracy or liberal democracy and to try to arrange that in the same way that you are independent because at the end of the day what really drives us as well is a freedom and this is also like for me personally one of the reasons I left the public office is that I couldn't breath and it was hard and I completely when Benjamin was talking I was just remembering myself from this time and this is something that is problematic in the way but optimistically I hope that it's also will change and there are more and more reformers also within the Government itself so I believe the system reformers but the whole system will change because again technology in a agile approach is exactly what everyone needs in the contemporary governance. Any questions from other people? Thanks that was really interesting I guess my question is most of the code for America folks that might be applicable and wondering it sounds like you've had a couple successes of spitting something and others and I'm just wondering how you go about making that happen and do you have any processes in place and I think more broadly for everybody is how you take successes and spread them to other places whether it's within a larger national government or within the city government. Do you want to go? Yeah great question so in terms of what makes the redeployment successful is a lot of networking between these four gates probably more than anything something that resonated a lot with your talk actually it was just this idea that everyone wants better government but knowing how to do it is not as straight forward and so having something that you can literally pull down with code and kind of build off of that is a huge step forward so there's some like just awareness issues of like making sure that I know what Charlotte's doing and being able to ping that person directly and then say what did you actually have to do help me figure out the steps and then there's some tooling right so like having something like github and having some shared I think we have some shared standards that we follow for certain you know forget how it's like set up but we have some Code for America has a variety of like different things that are set up to kind of create the ease of use for that so that's like a tooling perspective I guess and then in terms of how do you I think that something that's on our minds a lot is how do you get people to do that directed fashion so like people wanting to do it because it fits their use case in that context that's great but what we want to do is be able to say you know is this thing the most replicable and is this thing the most value for somebody's time because that's kind of the currency of volunteering is like time right so it's like if I you know have a nice like app that shows me where my bus is that's great and we have like 10 of those so we don't need anymore verses oh this helps reduce your this helps reduce institutionalized racism because you don't have a bench warrant because now you can go to work because now you don't have a bench warrant and now you're not getting stock like those differences are huge so I think sort of where we're thinking about is how do we focus that energy so that it's helping in those larger intractable issues I think I would only have one other thing documentation documentation like all of the documentation so it's the thing that nobody ever likes to do nobody likes to document how you do something but one of the really important things with corbot is it's not just the code that's documented it's the process and the relationship so they documented what department you need to go talk to to get to get the data to put in you know on the text messages like it and they get like depending on what city sometimes that changes a little bit but like there are generally three you know in the US are generally three different departments you would go to ideally most of the time it's held in the public defenders office so go make a friend in the public defenders office and the documentation for that specific project isn't just the code it's the relationship you have to build and the code and I think that's a really important piece on like sharing between a network that relationships not always going to translate especially talking country to country but it often times I think it sparks that idea like you're like oh you know like if you know that it's the public defender for us I'm like well okay that gives me a starting point right and then I can go figure out where that's at yeah documentation is especially important in terms of scaling the things from country to country but also we do a code for all network as the example of this boat monitoring cup and plus you have this language linguistic problem so this is also important from the perspective of ID people to have a good code documentation in that regard but also what we doing in different networks but code for all is a great example is we just having some kind of fellowships between together also we gathering like last year for example we gather with free organizations from South Africa, Poland and Romania just like for two weeks and we discuss how to open up the legislation and you have different legal cultures so you have different perspectives and actually you are also coming out from your own routine and some good ideas just happened even though at the first side you think it's like what's the point of talking with people from South Africa, the legal system is completely different but I believe something nice were born from that Actually I don't have anything to do I agree with you guys Just remains to thank all our speakers again for a really fabulous end to TicTec and thank you all for joining us we hope you do again in the future