 I might get us started properly, I think, although I know other people will be joining us. So hello, everyone, and a very good afternoon from a very sunny North London. Good morning, afternoon, or evening to you, wherever you may be, and whatever the weather may be like. Welcome to the fifth tic-tac civic tech surgery organized by my society and supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. Today's event focuses on learning from climate action, how can civic tech drive impact for the societal change? I'm Gavin Frigard, a freelance consultant working with my society on the tic-tac labs program. Among other things, I'm also an associate at the Institute for Government Think Tank and a special advisor at the Open Beta Institute here in the UK, and I am your chair, facilitator, and host for today's event. Do tell us who you are and why you're here in the chat. If you'd like to introduce yourselves, it's wonderful to have you all with us. Over the next couple of hours, we're going to discuss some of the opportunities, challenges, and dilemmas we face as a global civic tech community when it comes to climate action. My society has started doing a lot more work in this area over the last few years. In fact, in September, we'll be holding another event showcasing projects that are using data and digital technology to tackle climate change at a local level. We're looking for speakers for that. Details will appear in the chat at some point if you'd like to get involved. But as for today's event, for these first 10 minutes or so, I'm going to outline how it's all going to work and give you a bit more background on what we're hoping to achieve with the TechTec Labs program of which this event is part. We'll explore some questions about civic tech and climate action with the help of some fantastic speakers and with all of you having the 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 with a view to commissioning a solution. Some quick housekeeping first. Today's event is on the record. It's being recorded and will be published online afterwards along with minutes of today's event. You should be able to access a live transcript here on Zoom. Please let us know in the chat if you can't. You're very welcome to share details of the event on social media should it be working. I understand that certain websites might currently be down. It's hashtag TechTec if they are up and running again. And if you'd like to contribute today's discussion, you can use the chat here on Zoom and you can use the padlet board that you soon get a link to if you've not had it already. If you've not used padlets before, you'll see it has the questions we're going to discuss and space for you to add your thoughts and comments by clicking on the plus signs. Feel free to populate that 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 quick introduction to the TechTec Labs program which is run by my society with support from the National Endowment for Democracy. The aim is to discuss and tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the global civic tech and digital democracy sector who want to grow the civic tech evidence base, address some key issues and enhance the effectiveness and potential impact of civic tech projects. TechTec, 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. But in the meantime, we've converted it into this year-round TechTec Labs program. Our steering group, you can see them on the right, identified six big challenges common to civic tech around the world. You can see those on the left. As well as today's subject, climate action, we've so far covered subjects including accessibility, quality information and storytelling. And we have one more event in September on civic tech in hostile environments. For each of those six topics, we have organized or will organize a civic tech surgery like today's to delve further into some common challenges and possible solutions. After each surgery, there'll be an action round. A small working group of around six people will commission a piece of work to help solve one of the challenges that we raise. If you're interested in getting involved in that, we'll tell you how to do so at the end of today's event. So by the end of the program in 2023, we hope we'll have six pieces of commissioned work as well as increased connections and learning across the global civic tech community. This is our fifth civic tech surgery. We've commissioned some work on public-private partnerships from the first one and accessibility and inclusivity from the second. We currently have a live call for proposals for developing resources around access and quality information on our website from the third and our fourth action lab on storytelling and reach will be meeting in the next few weeks. You can find much more information on all of that on the TicTac Labs website. So today we are focusing on civic tech and climate action and in particular this big overarching question. How can civic tech enable people to coordinate action so that it's greater than some of its parts? So how can we build something bigger than individual interventions? Underneath that big question, our objectives for today are to discuss the opportunities and challenges in using civic tech to encourage people to change their behavior to help combat climate change and its effects, to think about possible solutions to the challenges that we raise and last but definitely not least to explore how the TicTac Action Lab that will come together after this surgery can help address one of the common challenges by commissioning a relevant piece of work. This is how we're going to do that. First, we'll go to our excellent speakers who I'll introduce shortly and begin with the opportunities, specifically asking them about the projects they've been working on. There'll then be some time for all of you joining us to do some silent working on the tablet board and tell us what you've been working on as well. We'll then ask our speakers to reflect on that and there may be a chance to unmute your microphone during that bit. We'll then follow the same format, going to our speakers, then some silent tablet working, then some reflections when looking at what challenges we've seen or experienced when it comes to driving impact or change using civic technology. We'll then do the same thing again, speakers have looked at reflection for thinking about how we or others have tried to tackle those challenges and dilemmas and then we'll move on to the final part of today's event. We have up to $3,760 to commission a solution to some of the challenges we've identified. So we'll be thinking about what work it could be used for to commission. Again, we'll start with some silent working on the tablet 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 decide what to commission the fields on all of those ideas. That's very nearly it for me. It's now time to introduce our brilliant speakers who are going to share their experiences and kickstart our discussions today. You can hopefully see pictures of them on your screen now. They are Laura Brown, the Chief Marketing Officer of IC Change, a climate platform that's enabling individuals to take action against climate change. After 12 years working on strategy for some of the world's biggest publishers, such as Lowly Planet, Politico and Economist, Laura committed to shifting her work towards fighting climate change after Tornado hit her neighborhood in East Nashville just before the pandemic locked down. We also have Jacopo Otaviani, an award-winning computer scientist and data scientist who manages code for Africa's data portfolio, including its Data Academy as Chief Data Officer. His data journalism projects have been published by Thompson Reuters Foundation, DeSpiegel, El Pais, Al Jazeera and Internacionale, among others, and include a drone mapping and water sensors project in Nigeria, which won the Sigma Award and the lungs of the Earth and the mess of journey across the rainforests of the world. And we also have Lauren Spotsen, Head of Technology at SUBAC an accelerator that helps find and scale organizations and individuals who are saving the planet. He's been at the intersection of climate tech and policy for 10 years, co-founding data science consultants in future energy associates and working at Carbon Tracker, Ember and the UK Parliament. 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've got any questions at any point, please pop them in the chat. If you've got any thoughts as we go, do share them in the chat as well or under the appropriate question on the Padlet Board. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen now so that it relates to all of you. And as we're going to embark on the first section of today's event, which is then starting with our speakers and asking the question, what civic tech climate action projects are you working on or have you worked on? That relates to column one of the Padlet for those of you that have that as the open. And I'll ask each of our speakers to share their thoughts around five minutes each. Then we'll have five minutes of silent working to add ideas to the Padlet or to the chat. And then we'll have a further five minutes or so to reflect and discuss. So what's a big tech climate action project that you're working on or have you worked on? I'll now go to Laura for our first contribution. Laura, hi everyone. It's great to be here. So I'm Laura at work with IC Change. We're a platform based in the United States that's connecting cities and residents on climate impacts. Cities, engineers and utilities use our software to connect with their communities, validate climate models and build infrastructure. IC Change is helping to develop a climate response plan that is in the right places designed to the right sizes and built for the right reasons. And please ignore the two cats that will pop into the screen at various times. It's unstoppable. I can't do anything about it. Okay, so decisions that we make in the next five years are gonna impact everyone for the next 50 years. We're in this really crucial time where decisions need to be made on how and where to make these large investments for cities to increase their resiliency and their response to climate change. Some things that IC Change is doing in Miami in South Florida, the city is fighting really hard against sea level rise. The cities like slowly kind of falling into the sea. Flood events are increasing every year. We are working directly with the city to deploy before and during flood events so that residents are able to report storm drains that have been clogged for flooding in particular areas so that the city is able to deploy resources. We're also working with the Ocean Conservancy to help residents report pollution. The thing that happens when city flood is all of the litter that accumulates on the side of the road, it floods, it flows out to the ocean, that causes a whole bunch of different issues. So we're working on several different fronts in Miami. In New Orleans, which is in Louisiana, again, another city that's really, really susceptible to flooding and sea level rise. We're working with local community organizations and NGOs to make sure that the city has the resources it needs to deploy in more low-income neighborhoods. We helped generate over $25 million in storm infrastructure to low-income neighborhoods that would have not necessarily gotten it otherwise. So we're really focused on helping cities communicate with the residents on climate impacts that are on a daily basis during major storm events impacting their lives. And we are helping to make sure that the cities have the information and the data they need to distribute the funds that they're getting in a more equitable manner and in a way that is enhancing community trust around the issue. Excellent. Thank you, Laura. Plenty, plenty for you to be getting on with there. Thank you for sharing that with us. Let's go to Jaffa Boat next. Okay, thank you. Thank you for having me. Jacopo here from Italy. Thanks for introducing me. I think you were very nice to me with your words. I'm a computer scientist who works at Code for Africa. So I'm one of the few Europeans working in this no-profit organization based in South Africa. And I work specifically on data journalism initiatives. We focus on training and mentoring and making grants for journalists from several African countries. More specifically, we're working on an initiative called Lungs of the Earth, which wants to aims to train and mentor central African journalists. So journalists who are based in the Congo-based region that includes Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Cameroon, also BRC, and a few other countries where there is a very, very large rainforest, one of the three largest rainforests in the world, and which is unfortunately quite underreported on the news, but it's facing issues like deforestation and other climate change related issues, wildfires, environmental exploitation, extractive industries, illegal mining, and many other problems affect the Congo basin. So Code for Africa set an objective that is let's use data and satellite images to report on illegal deforestation in Central Africa, but let's do it in cooperation with local journalists. So how to do that? We have three main ingredients in our recite, which is basically data journalism trainings, how to clean data, how to visualize data, how to include data into journalism stories, specifically on climate change and deforestation. Second, we offer one-on-one mentorship sessions for journalists who want to improve their methodology, using, for example, research data, academic data. So we connect journalists with researchers from universities globally and who can kind of learn the scientific aspect of the issues that affect their daily lives or their communities. And number three, we make grants. So we offer financial support for journalists who want to spend a few months on a story, but don't have the means to do that for any reason. So Lungs of the Earth is still ongoing. We created the first iteration of stories in between 2020 and 2021. And I'm gonna share a list of stories that kind of emerged from this project. The journalists all work with local newspapers, radio stations, TV stations. So basically they raise awareness around climate change that we believe in their communities, but they also publish online. So people from everywhere can read their stories. And it's very interesting to read these stories from an African perspective, rather than the usual stories that we can read, for example, on European media or the BBC, the CNN and all the media, we know very well. It's super interesting to see how this problem is perceived by African journalists and give them the tools to kind of improve their methodologies and to use data. Maybe it's worth mentioning the main supporters of this initiative. One is Global Forest Watch, which is an online database made by the World Resources Institute. It's online, so if you Google Global Forest Watch, you can actually explore on an interactive map the forest station in real time. And also wildfires in real time or near real time. And we wanted these journalists to use this database to tell new stories and connect the data with human stories. That there was another sub objective or project. So it's very interesting to read the data, but it's also interesting to meet the human beings who are affected by the issues that are represented by the data. So the only way or one of the few ways to do this is to work with local journalists who can meet with real human beings in their countries. And I think I have five seconds left. I see the timer there. But we can continue chatting about it. I'll drop the link. Fantastic. Thank you, Yacobay. Again, a huge amount of work and also really interesting with different approaches that you and Laura have talked about, Pacific Tech being able to do something about all of this. Lauren, it's your turn to brave the five minute timer. Thanks, Gavin. Hi, everyone. Yeah, very pleased to be here. I think I've worked for about four different not-for-profit groups focused around different climate issues and sort of mostly with the sort of data and tech and tool building hat on. And that's my role at SUBAC, which is an accelerator for not-for-profit organizations that are mostly sort of data and technology driven. And the idea with SUBAC is to learn from what's happened in the sort of startup world about sort of massive growth and how that happens within organizations. And then obviously what we want to see is huge climate impacts. So we don't necessarily want to see huge revenue growth, but we do want organizations to set out to have ambitious goals and then to work out what they need to do to get there. So the program that we run, we were on our second cohort. We've had 11 organizations go through it. We try and skill them up and raise their sort of capability levels and give them the coaching or help they need across a range of different issues from use of data and technology to building products to sort of having their house in order from an organizational point of view. We also have an individuals program for fellows where people can apply for a 10,000 pound grant to work on open climate data projects that we hope will sort of augment this. And we are also looking to think about where there are sort of systemic issues in the space and we started by saying we think data is maybe poorly used. There's a lot of duplication of efforts. There isn't a huge embrace of openness and the sort of open source that's worked so well in the private sector. There's a lot of people sort of feeling very protective about their data. And so we really wanted to sort of see if we could start a cultural shift about that. So we started by building a data portal, a traditional data portal called the Climate Data Catalog. And we have various other ideas about to improve sort of service design and have that be the thin end of the wedge that allows organizations to open up. But it's also about how innovators and change makers which can include like anybody, you know, any citizen how they find the right data and how they answer the questions that's relevant to them. So it's a curated portal. We want to say what do people need to answer the questions and to have an impact and then to try and ensure that their needs are being met or they have a mechanism to find the answers that they need. So that's too bad. And I'll just very quickly mention two other projects that I've worked on because I think they have different lessons for this whole talk. Going backwards in time, one was called Score the European Parliament which was around helping citizens choose who to vote for for MEPs. And there isn't a huge amount of coverage about MEPs. And there's a huge amount of votes. So we wanted to say how is an ordinary citizen meant to know who they should pick? So the idea was that we would highlight specific votes chosen by experts and then present that in a dashboard for people. So I'll drop the links in a second. So that was kind of an interesting different one. And then going even further back, Louise Crow is on the call, who's chief executive of my society, but she used to be the developer with an org called Sandbag. And I then took over from her as she went back to my society. And Sandbag did a lot of things, but it was trying to reform the European carbon market. And they had built a system whereby any individual could buy a carbon permit and retire it and sort of cancel a ton of carbon that would otherwise have been emitted by a European steel plant. And there was various reasons why that was complicated, but it would also be symbolic because we would also campaign and ask for a change. So we'd say, look, all these people have canceled one ton, can't you as European policymakers also do your bit and reform the entire system? Let me just pop those in. So yeah, the school EP website is still there, but it's a bit of an artifact because it's not updated. And the Sandbag canceled permits is now no longer existing, that organization has moved on. But it's sort of interesting to see it come back around with this huge amount of discussion around voluntary carbon markets and carbon offsets and that there is this huge appetite for people to find ways where they can turn money into carbon reductions. And of course, the premise is so attractive. It's so easy that anyone, whatever company or individual, you can just spend some money and you will have an impact. And it's a nice concept, but of course there's a huge amount of subtlety and nuance and a whole industry developing about how we measure and verify and sort of educate and make people care at the sort of point of purchase. But as I said, the climate data catalog is my main thing at the moment. So very keen to get feedback. And so really, thanks for your feedback as well. So I know some of you have already looked at this, but I'll stop there for now. Brilliant, thank you Lawrence. Again, huge diversity in the different approaches, civic tech approaches to tackling some of these problems. What we're going to do now is give you around three minutes of silent working on the Padlet, particularly the first column. So you've got an opportunity to tell us about some of the projects you're involved in. There are some really interesting ones that are already from people on this call and who couldn't make this call today. After those three minutes, I'll then go back to our speakers for some reflections on what they've heard and what else they've seen. Again, feel free to put some questions in the chat if you'd like to. And if you'd like to sort of come in and unmute your mic in that section as well. Once we've worked on the Padlet, do say so in the chat as well. Great to hear from you and some of the other things that you're doing. But we're going to start with that three minutes of silent working, I say, and time's up. So if we look at the Padlet, we've got some work from my society on prototyping what's worth on next. We've got Climewatch from Germany. We've got the Seabath Climate Data Catalog which we've heard about already. We've got the Climate Action Plans Explorer which is climate emergency UK and my society helping you define what local councils are doing. We've then got Vocalize, who are a platform sort of organizing ideas and being able to crowdsource those and even manage participatory budgets to fund them. We've got Productive Online Democratic Discourse from NSIF. We've got an Eco event in the box. So crowdsource tips and ideas if you want to run an event locally. And we've got the Cambridge Carbon Map which is in development combining emissions disclosure by local organisations and their sustainability initiatives to inspire and inform their peers and encourage collaboration. Excellent. So again, quite a sort of broad sweep of different approaches there. And I'm going to go back to our speakers shortly. I'll go in the order Laura, Jacopo, and then Lawrence to reflect on what they've seen and anything else that they've thought about in the interim. Again, if you've got any questions for them or if you would like to come up and you can tell us a bit more about what you're working on please do say in the chat or use the raise hand tool and I'll bring you in as well. So Laura, what do you think about everything we've heard so far and seen on the tablet? Yeah, I think this is great. It seems like there are quite a lot of people working on this challenge sort of broadly. And so I'm really excited to continue this conversation and see what solutions everyone can come up with. Excellent. Jacopo, how about you? I'm really learning the list. I feel like some of these tools or approaches can be replicated in the global South, for example in Africa, but not only. Also in Southeast Asia, for example, or in Latin America. So I think that's the power of civic tech especially when it's open source. So I see, for example, productive online democratic discourse is an open source software which could be definitely useful in some of the insight work. Yeah, loving these links. Excellent, and if people think of others during the course of the event, do feel free to keep adding them to the tablet as well. Lawrence, how about you? Yeah, I mean, really awesome projects. I'm struck by that there's a very strong like place-based theme, which I think is like, which I've heard from various other groups, sort of environmental groups creating tools for climate action. I think Friends of the Earth has a really nice one in the UK about local action. And I guess I've always come from like a sort of policy wonk, sort of top-down kind of thing about saying, what about system change and how do we change policies? And so what it makes me wonder is how do we join, maybe they shouldn't be joined, but like we have these local level, which is so meaningful, which are very validating for people, they can see a tangible impact, they can see a problem, they can work with their communities. And then we have this, okay, we need to vote for someone or we need to change a policy at a higher level. Like, should we try and connect these things? Is it better to have them divorced and have different people focus on it? I'm really interested to sort of hear how people think those two things should fit together. Brilliant, thank you. That's a fantastic question. I don't know if anyone joining us today wants to come in on that or has anything else they'd like to say, Louise? Yes. Yeah, I just wanted to come in on that. My instinct is yes, we've got to connect the two. I think it's still an open problem, how to do that. And Laura, you may have thoughts coming very much from that local world, but I think Lawrence, I agree with everything you say about the tangibleness as life gets more complex. These are complex, wicked problems. In your local area, it starts to feel very crunchy, very real. You might even know the local politicians. You can certainly talk about very concrete projects, but I think in the UK, and I suspect elsewhere, the big levers still belong to a higher level of government. And so you've got to kind of, I don't think we have any solutions, but I think that is one of the big problems to chip away at as a kind of a loose group of organisations who are really interested in making significant change. Thanks, Louise. Does anyone else have any views on that particular question or indeed anything to do with the sort of projects that you're working on, or you've heard other people talk about already? Feel free to raise your hand, using the raise hand to actually be down the bottom of your screen or say in the chat that you'd like to come in with a point or two out. David Newman has made a very good point in the chat, which is obviously we have a, we essentially have a contest at the moment to be the next Prime Minister of the UK here at the Conservative Party in Britain. So some way of connecting with those candidates and setting with examinations and what they would do around climate change in that zero. Hopefully Tory party members and our media will try and push them to the next level. Excellent. So I think let's move on to the next section and the next questions. We've looked at what everyone's doing and that's mostly some of the opportunities around civic tech and climate action. Our next question is what challenges do you see or what challenges have you already experienced when it comes to driving impactful change using civic technology? Again, I'm going to go to our speakers first. We'll have the assignment work and then we'll have a bit of discussion. So this time the challenges that we've seen or experienced, I'm going to go first to Jacoby. Oh, fantastic. Okay. I was already kind of thinking of, you know, how to summarize all the challenges that we had during our project. And I think we had to deal with a number of problems. First off, very concrete problems, like for example, poor connectivity in certain areas in Central Africa. So the journalists we were working with had issues with their internet and access to the resources and webinars and online training sessions that we wanted to run. So we came up with a solution which is basically WhatsApp-based training sessions which makes it possible because you can kind of send asynchronous material, learning material on WhatsApp. It can be a short video with a kind of showcase session on how to use the data visualization tool, for example. It can be a list of resources that can be explored whenever they have access to the internet. But we need to kind of keep in mind that some of our beneficiaries and partners are based in areas where the internet is still not very strong. Number two, do you want me to list all the challenges now or do you want to kind of rotate? Gay rights, pretty interesting. I'll go, yeah, okay. Yeah, the next one I have in mind is financial stability of newsrooms in Central Africa. Some of these radio stations or newspapers or TV stations have real problems in terms of business model and financial sustainability. So I feel like we haven't really solved this really complex problem but I feel like it would be super useful to brainstorm and work together with the partners on their business models to make them more sustainable so they don't rely only on grants. I think grants can be very useful but I think they should also come up with diversified revenue streams to make their work more sustainable. And then last but not least, I think that sort of the diversity of our pool of journalists made our trainings more challenging because some journalists had a little bit of data literacy, others didn't. So we had to come up with different kind of levels of complexity in our trainings and sometimes very basic data literacy trainings can be super useful in certain communities where they've never used Excel, for example, before. So yeah, we need to tailor the training programs obviously on the basis of the kind of level of literacy of the beneficiaries. And it's very difficult to do that trans-nationally because every single country that we work in is a different work and there is not just one way to do it. So yeah, sometimes we need to kind of control our ambition as well and not to be over ambitious. Yes. Excellent, thank you. Feels like a lot of those issues have come up with various other civic tech surgeries as well in terms of that sort of access to internet and how sort of business models work and the skills. And again, to what extent you can replicate as much as what we're doing. There's a lot of keenness for open source, rightly, to what extent you need to tailor things to particular settings as well. So that's a brilliant set of points to kick us off with. Thank you. Lawrence, how about, oh, actually, Lawrence, I've just temporarily gone away from his, no, he's back, excellent. If we come to you next, Lawrence, in terms of the challenges that you've faced. Just heard the foregoing. Yeah, I mean, one of the key ones that we grappled with from hearing from our community was around data and datasets and how one asks questions and sort of grappling with the idea that there is a vast amount of stuff out there, but a lot of it is behind payrolls or is sort of expensive when people are trying to explore potential solutions. And then just saying, okay, well, you know, what's the sort of fundamentals here? Like what's the truth? Or, you know, where are the renewables in the UK? What's the transmission? All this sort of base level stuff. How do you help people get to the solution, especially around cross-demand? So again, this is sort of interesting in the for-profit versus the campaigning space, versus again, like academia or in government, people within a domain know where to look, but they don't necessarily know how to access it when it's sort of in a group that isn't close to them. And then there's also again, this sort of expert knowledge that even when you get some data or you get some stuff, it might be really difficult to then make sense of it and to really understand how to use it properly or how to connect to it, or maybe there's lots of specific jargon. And the best way normally is to find someone who is an expert and say, right, could you give me a running start here and give me an hour? But if you don't have that connection, what do you do? And I think that's this even more stark probably on the, I'm thinking mainly around sort of professionals working in sort of campaigning organizations. Again, it's sort of the same again for smaller like community energy groups or even just for this general public. Again, how are you able to sort of disentangle all the things you need to know to make a decision? And again, I'm sort of, I really like the MySatis Climate Action Plan stuff, which again just brings the data out and just says, here's the data. And then I think the challenge is, okay, well, how should you respond to that data? You say, my local council is not doing very well, so I should go and write to my counselor and say, what? Say, please do better. How can we, what's the next step there? And obviously, if they have a professional campaigner, then they'll probably have some suggestions. And it's kind of, if you just sort of dump someone in and give recommendations, like I really like that with the Climate Action Plan Explorer, it just sort of presents stuff. It's fairly sort of factual because I think when you're presented with a load of just recommendations, it's sort of disempowering because then you're taking all the agency away from any kind of community and the place post stuff. You're just saying, right, we've got the answer, which is one, yeah, not only like disempowering, but also not necessarily the right thing because there is a huge amount of local context. So it doesn't, it's not even the best recommendation. So that's something I'm definitely really interested in, like how you can sort of blend those two angles. Brilliant, thank you. So again, a longstanding thing about the availability of data, also how you bring the domain knowledge to it and how people do something and that's a core connection, a core connection that comes out of it. Thank you. So let's go to Laura. Sure, I'm off you, great. I have a list of kind of broad challenges and some of these are focused to the United States, which has a very unique situation, I would say at the moment, but I think it's sort of relevant to this conversation. So the first real challenge is just general trust in government. Americans in particular are really mistrustful of our government and the higher into the government you go, the more distrust there is, but politics and climate change are local. Local impacts are an easy way for people to see how climate change is gonna impact them. They're an easy way for people to get involved with climate impacts, particularly in places like New Orleans that have this long history of an inequitable distribution of resources. People kind of have this general vibe of exasperation. They've seen money come in and be distributed inequitably and just have this frustrating experience with the government time and time again. Working with NGOs and local groups is often really time consuming and you see a lot of infighting over resources. And it's really hard to coordinate people in groups when they're feeling so competitive over like limited amounts of resources. But trust is really, really important here. Study after study after study has shown that mutual trust between a government and its citizens is really, really crucial to building healthy communities and actually solving problems. Second and again, another piece of this is equity in climate investment. The United States just passed about a trillion dollars in infrastructure investment. A huge chunk of that is intended to go towards climate resiliency. And our current government is focused on distributing that money more equitably so that it goes to communities that need it. But that's normally just way easier said than done, particularly with really ingrained procurement processes that have been in place for a long time but have not necessarily been focused on equity when distributing money. So that's a huge challenge, I think, for companies that are seeking grant money and for the government that's distributing it. The third major challenge is just people have really short attention spans. It makes it really hard to communicate and engage people on issues like climate that have a really long-term horizon. People love instant gratification. Climate change is a long-term problem that is very slowly creeping up on us and has long-term solutions that will need to slowly be implemented and slowly have a fix. And that's not just on the layperson and how they impact climate. This is the business community too. Business investment, venture capital firms, other types of startup investment aren't really calibrated for long-term projects that have long-term runways and time horizons. It takes up to two years to run through a procurement process for a city. That's a hard sell to a venture capital firm or some sort of other investment that wants profitability much, much quicker. And so figuring out a way for us to have these long-scale investments in businesses that have a longer-term sales cycle, I think it's also really crucial. Ooh, excuse me. And the next is like communication strategy around climate, just kind of generally speaking. I've met a lot of engineers and a lot of really cool entrepreneurs working on this problem who get really into the weeds on technical details but don't have a great sense of how to sort of take a step back and broadly communicate those things to the people that it impacts and the communities that they're talking to. So figuring out how to engage on sort of a more personal level with people, all of these really cool tech solutions that people in businesses are coming up with around this problem, I think it's really crucial. Thanks, Laura, some really valuable points then. I can see in the chat that they're resonating as well that point about attention spans and timelines in particular, but also that's the point about the role of experts. Tony in the chat is just saying that expert contributions can sometimes create non-optimal solutions. So how can you coordinate them properly? And as you say, how do you then take that step back to be able to communicate properly which is its own challenge? So lots of things for us to think about there. We're now going to give you three minutes of silent working on the panel again. So this is on the second column, the question about the challenges and difficulties that you may have faced in this field and three minutes to fill that in. And then again, we'll go back to our panel and to all of you for any further reflections and discussion on that. So three minutes on the Padlet, second column challenges that you've faced. Excellent, thank you very much everyone. And again, looking through the Padlet, I can see some common themes coming through. So we start with somebody saying the complexity of federal administration which they think may be a German speciality with people trying to shift the response towards to other levels. I suspect that's a problem elsewhere as well. The feeling that citizen action can only go so far that those leading higher up in government needs to lead the way. Identifying connecting with climate officials working on the topic internationally, interesting. Persuading people to have to make hard decisions as things come up in my society's prototyping work and people accepting short-term inconvenience or risk for long-term and often non-individual return. The theory of change. Too many projects haven't been thought about it or don't have a robust or well-evidenced one. Data availability, which you've heard about already today. It's difficult to find reliable data for many areas. Also, it can be very difficult to measure impact. Apathy and the difficulty in reaching people. People think they've heard it all before. Don't believe this sound will be any different. They also don't think their small local changes can make enough of a difference. We've got, I suppose, a related point about citizen perceptions of the future and disconnect between local discussions with big changes that are coming and the lack of futures techniques like games that might help us understand what that looks like. The for-profit practice of social and mass media companies, which can lead to division and people paying money to try to quash a lot of the solutions that have been suggested. A lack of collaboration and coordination. Lots of people out there doing work but there's often a lot of dedicated effort. And again, it might be easy to build a technical solution, but publicizing it and getting people on board that comms bit is often very difficult as well. We've also got change focus from healthcare technology. Our goal, the real thing is to speak to the cold face and listen carefully to their answers. And yeah, terminology. So again, people not understanding the words, climate communication should be localized and be able to understand and get involved in the fight. So lots of things to think about there. I'll go to each of our speakers for some quick reflections on all of that. And again, if you would like to come in, please do use the raise your hand tool or say in the chat, but I'll go to that first. Any reactions to all of that? Well, I completely agree with most of these points. I think when working in the intersection between journalism and technology and civic technology in particular, it's quite challenging to measure the impact of the stories. So what happens next once we have our data journalism projects on climate change in Africa published by 10 media partners in the Congo Basin? Is that really affecting the behavior of the readers? Probably, but it's very difficult to measure. So I think that kind of challenge is super important. I think what's sometimes missing in the type of journalism projects I've been working on is the data use focus. So once we publish the stories and we open up databases and we make them more accessible, how do we make sure that, you know, key stakeholders use the data and the stories that we're publishing? They really put attention into it. It's very difficult to do that. I think it's important to invest a little bit of the funds and a little bit of energy into data use, which is missing in probably in the project I worked on, but also in many other projects I could see around me. So that's a very cool point. I'm gonna drop a like into that. And then also I absolutely agree with the duplication challenge. I can see a lot of similar but different solutions. That's so true. I don't know how to fix that, but I think there will be organizations that try to map out what's out there and try to connect the dots and let people join forces rather than, you know, waste energy with individual fragmented projects that have not much impact, but they would have much more impact if they joined forces. So they pull inputs from the audience, I would say. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. And you've got just over an hour to think about how to solve all the base things as far as to do something about it. Lawrence. Yeah, I mean, a huge variety of such a huge variety of challenges then a lot of it, a lot of it rings true. And I can think of various examples in my career. I mean, one thing that I am sort of struck by is when we talk about civic tech, it's often very broad in scope. I we're considering sort of all citizens as a sort of homogeneous blob. And they're all kind of saying, a lot of the challenges come like sort of activating them and asking people to make sacrifices. A very small minority will say, yes, I'm there. You know, I'm ready. And the rest will say, no, I'm ambivalent. And so I do wonder if a way to think about negotiating these challenges is not to sort of butt up against things where there's no chance to just slice down and to find the champions, you know, and that's the way that you can then have the change or that's a better way to catalyse the change. And there's that quote about small group and determined people and so on. But I wonder if that works in quite a lot of the domains that we're talking about because there's the data tribe and then there's the campaigning tribe and there's the people who are really prepared to make deep sacrifices. And, you know, there are groups that are really into or part of the solution to each of these challenges. But when you look at everybody, they're quite diluted. So that's my sort of one reflection from looking at the chat. Fantastic. Thanks. And Laura. Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that really strikes me about sort of the list that we've come up with here is first of all, like climate, climate is this long scale horizon thing and it's easy for our leadership to displace it by more acute urgent needs. Pandemic is like a great example. Just like a real world example of that is like we went from, you know, leaving behind single use plastic as a priority to suddenly the pandemic comes in and single use plastic is like the safer way to handle the virus, right? So it's really difficult to weigh the priorities of climate with all of the other things that people in political and leadership positions have to weigh in their decision making when you're competing with all of these other things that are happening around the world. And so I think broadly speaking, that's a huge challenge here. Great, thank you. Amanda in the chat, following on from Lauren's point, have you found any techniques that really help you identify or advocate directly to those champions? I've seen many organizations struggle to find or connect with those people among the masses. It's a really good question. If anyone has an answer to that, they'd like to venture or again, any other reflections on what we've just been talking about, please do raise your hand or use the chat. Louise. I don't have an answer, but I would point up the work of climate outreach in this area in, I take Lauren's point, I think in order to have a good chance of impact, you do need to be quite specific about what you're trying to do, who you're trying to reach, what change you're trying to make. And I think climate outreach have produced some very good guidance in terms of how people feel about climate that helps kind of do that orientation in the early stages of the project. Who are you trying to reach? Is it people who are already converted but want stuff to do? Is it people who are skeptical for particular reasons? What's your kind of your audience? Which I think can be something helpful. Yeah, thanks Louise and Lauren's, yeah. Yeah, so I'll come in again if I may, Gary. I mean, I just think, I'm following on what Laura said about the plastics. I mean, I think it's, do we put our attention on the high emitters or the people who are sort of modeling the actions that we want to see? And I think it's interesting thinking about veganism and plant-based, which has grown hugely in the last five years. And I think a lot of that has come from celebrity people or very visible people saying, I'm going plant-based and it's now acceptable and normal. And I think it's interesting with single waste plastics. There is a movement around zero waste and some people have blogs and things. But I would say mostly that hasn't broken through in the same way. And the focus is very much on everyone who isn't doing that. It's everybody who's got loads of plastic. And so we're just, but we don't do that. We don't go and find the people who are eating all the burgers all the time and say, you know, you need to stop. And so I do wonder, I mean, highly speculative, but if we had more of a focus on modeling people who are, you know, living the life of zero plastic or very low waste, maybe that would be a better way of engaging people. Great, thank you. Culture means a lot. It's a good policy when it changes, the ones I just put in the chat. So excellent set of points there. So let's move from the sort of what everyone's doing and the problems that we've encountered to starting to head towards some solutions to these massive, massive challenges. So the next question to our speaker, to our speakers is what, if anything, have you done to try and address some of the dilemmas and some of the challenges that we've already discussed? Again, I'll go to our speakers. I'll go to Lawrence, then Laura, then Yakapo. Then we'll have a bit of time to add to that. And then we'll have some time for the discussion and reflection. So Lawrence, what, if anything, have you done to try to address all the things that we've talked about so far? Yeah, so I think one challenge we may have is narrowing our focus, because I think there's quite a lot of things in scope. But I can say some things we've tried to do, I think around making experts more available or visible. And the Open Data Institute had a really nice project recently around data portals and how they fit into like a service design to solve people's climate data problems on their journey. And it was much more expansive than making a technology platform. And they proposed an idea around having data guides who are basically these people with sort of expert domain knowledge who are specifically funded or resourced. A lot of the time, the experts just do everything for free and you just send them a message on Twitter and ask for some of their time and help, which is fine. But they were sort of proposing, could we, and Subeck's in a good place to this, could we resource and grant and say to people, could you devote a certain amount of your time, just being in this guide signposting role where you have office hours or something like that, you allow people to drop in and you can then give them the benefit of your domain knowledge and expertise. And that can just be so much faster. And again, I can think of projects I've worked on where again, I've spent a long time, months researching something and trying, and then I have a conversation with someone who's particularly insightful and then I completely switch gear or switch approach. I think it really can't be understated how effective that sort of expert domain, because again, that's probably someone who's been working in that area for years and years and years and has all this knowledge. So data guides is interesting, distilling expert views and making them available. That again is sort of for organizations, but I do think there's a similar sort of principle which is kind of what journalism and what sort of think tanks are meant to do to synthesize like these complex things and then present to everybody else. I think the challenge then is to do that while ensuring that everyone's objectives are the same because then you have a lot of different alignments. But yeah, short version data guides could be an exciting way to do it. Brilliant, thank you. That's definitely something for us to think about. Laura, how about you? How have you tried to address some of the challenges that you've faced and that we've discussed? Sure, I mean, I agree with the sentiment that these are some really, really big challenges that I don't think any one person or any one organization is gonna be able to step in and be able to solve unless someone comes up with a way to have infinite money and resources. IC changes theory of the case is to focus on hyper-local impacts to make sure that residents are communicated with directly on impacts on green investments so they can see the difference that they're making in their communities. We're trying to make sure that local climate investment is more hyper-local and more equitably distributed that residents have a directed voice to their government, a direct connection to help decide where to spend the money that is handed down from the federal government and on what and then communicating when that investment is made. One example of this that we've done in Miami, that city has invested just tons and tons of money into climate resiliency infrastructure. Again, it's slowly falling into the sea. So when a resident reports flooding, one thing that we're able to do on our platform is help the city communicate like exactly where in those neighborhoods the money that is being invested is being spent and what it's being spent on and how it is gonna help solve some of these flooding challenges that arise. There's also a lot of really cool innovation happening in just the way that business models are approaching this challenge. There's a company I really like in the United States called Clearloop that is using carbon offset models to help our utilities funds large scale renewable energy arrays. So, all of these companies that have net zero targets or sustainable development goals can help direct some of that money into large scale community solar projects that help these low income communities that are highly dependent on coal or at least dirty energy sources clean up their energy grid. And I really like the way that that is actually making a tangible difference to people in communities that have otherwise been overlooked. I think the other thing is like overcoming this sort of apathy and making hard decisions challenge. You know, I honestly, I feel like we're in kind of a new era with climate and I say that as someone whose life has been dramatically impacted by climate change. A tornado hit my neighborhood and wiped out the whole thing. It happened less than a week before COVID lockdowns and I essentially was a climate refugee. I had to find a new place to live in a time that people were not being particularly welcoming to having other people around, right? Because the pandemic had everyone kind of scared way back in the beginning. Climate change is upon us and is increasingly going to cause problems. I think arguably the pandemic is a climate impact. Not only that, there have been, there are an increasing number of severe weather events all around the world. The time of climate impacts being far away and impacting other people. And so I myself can be apathetic about it. I think it's increasingly over. The truth of the matter is these issues, water scarcity, famine, the ability of crops to grow, like all sorts of these issues are going to be increasingly problematic for large portions of the population. And so I think as those impacts start to exponentially increase, apathy and the ability to make hard decisions is going to naturally decrease, right? Because I mean, just like the severity of the things happening around us require a more severe response. As to sort of the social media problem, man, I could wax poetic about this for a while. I think what Europe is doing on data protection is the thing that needs to happen to keep social media networks in line. You guys have the GDPR that's helping to protect the way that your data is used. That in and of itself is holding these social media companies accountable in ways that they haven't before. I'm a huge advocate of having those types of regulations sort of worldwide, particularly in the United States. I think that would go a long way towards helping make sure that social media is more lifting all of us up instead of tearing all of us down. Excellent, thanks Doris. Really powerful examples and experiences there. Thank you. I can see in the chat as well, we've got some really interesting, especially going from Andreas Lons and Louise around that point about data guides. They also be reference statuses, how do you get both the technical side and the human side of that sort of data experience? Right, and yes, Louise, I think we seem to have forgotten that there were people that did this for a very long time called librarians that we may seem to have been forgotten about. Jacopo. Yeah, I would like to talk about data humanisation because I think it's one of the points that journalists can help fix. So how do you make sure that data is not just received as a very distant, remote, abstract resource? Something that it's in a piece of paper or a website but doesn't really have any kind of relationship with our daily lives. I think journalists can, or more specifically, data journalists, journalists who connect datasets with human stories can help fix that. So I can think of some of the stories we published as part of Lands of the Earth that try to humanise the data around the forest station in the Congo basin, but I can also think of other global examples like, for example, the work made by Vox.com in the US which is particularly good at kind of connecting videos with data. So they kind of create animated data visualisations and kind of incorporate them into their reportage on video which I think they are very effective and can help make data more accessible and more human. So I invite everyone to check Vox.com on YouTube and search some of their videos because they kind of, they found a new way to visualise data into documentaries and they are usually quite short. So this also fixes the problem of attention span. So it's not like an endless video but it's more like 10 minutes sort of short documentary on any key topic they believe they should cover. And they made some really good ones on climate change and environmental security around the world. They made a series called Vox Borders which is absolutely incredible. It's not about environmental issues but it's about borders or critical borders between countries and the author who's an American guy called Jonny Harris is one of the top experts in these kind of animated data visualisations. And he made some tutorials online on how to replicate that. So I think animating data is a way to make it more accessible especially in the age of TikTok and Instagram where people expect videos. So I think we should try to break into that world and not be snobbish as kind of old fashioned journalists who don't want to use TikTok. I think we should find a way to use the platforms that are used by the people and do it in a clever way. So how can we make TikTok a source of robust and useful information? How do we visualise data on climate change on TikTok? And how do we relate it to kind of daily problems? I think that's where we are kind of aiming towards at the moment as code for Africa. We're trying to experiment with these new formats and approaches. I see some people are dropping comments on the chat. Yeah, I'll share some links to the resources that I'm mentioning. I'll do that on the chat and on the board online. So yeah. And before, in the previous round, I mentioned WhatsApp as a channel to share asynchronous climate change but also non-climate change related learning material. I think we should again move into the platforms that are used by the people instead of trying to push more traditional channels like top-down lectures. I think we should try to exploit WhatsApp to build communities. And this is particularly useful in some African regions I've been working into. And I'm sure it's useful in probably all over the world these days. Yeah. I'll drop the links now. Thank you. And thank you. And thank you to Laura as well for bringing some links in around all of that. Yeah, find where the people are. I suppose there's less than there. So we're going to give you three minutes again for the silent working. This time it is about what, if anything, you've done to try and address some of the dilemmas and challenges that we've been talking about. It's the third column of the padlock. And we've got three minutes and then we'll go back to reflection and discussion again. So what, if anything, have you done to try and address the dilemmas and challenges that we've discussed out to column three of the padlocks? Great. So the sorts of things that people have said are around what, if anything, have you done to try and address the above dilemmas? We've got collaborations across country. We've got a particular example from Germany about working with local environmental and protection departments. We've got our data guides or our data librarians. We've got hyper-local, online environmental info webinars. Invited local experts who communities may be familiar with to talk about e-bikes, community bikes if they're the local cycling club, and then have an open session where we could interact, share and learn. It's a really interesting approach. What have you done? Everything we can think of, says somebody. We're using a digital tool and blended approach to try and reach the communities we're working with. So again, multiple places, just trying to get to where people are. And what, if anything, have you tried or have you done to try and address the dilemmas? Not enough. For most people who are volunteering in their spare time in civic tech, there aren't enough hours in the day, both to develop a solution and promote it effectively. Winning elections is something that somebody else has put in. The Green Party here in the UK have gone from two to 20 elected councillors in Oxford during the last four years, for example. They've got lots of excellent ideas there. And again, a few more links going in the chat as well. Lawrence, let's go to you first. Any reflections on everything else that you've put? Well, I really like what Titus is coming, which I think he or someone else has just added it. Around this road shows that you have one product, so you have one thing or collection of people that's really tight and well-organised and clear. And then you take it to all the places and you have a sort of best of both. You have the consistency and you have the sort of alignment around the message and you have something that is well-thought-out and you have a sort of centralisation if you're going to collect emails or details or coordinate. But then you also have the local experience and you have a voice. People can then engage and share and come together in the community. So, and I do wonder if that is something that is under, like my experience is that doesn't happen that much. And so I do quite like that idea. Yeah, winning elections as well is great. I mean, again, I think it's very, I think a lot of civil society feels also, you know, sort of disempowers itself in a sense and says, you know, will that stay in the civic bucket? You know, politics is there and we're here and we'll stay in our lane. But it's like, yeah, the great thing is that you can go and get elected and actually get involved. And maybe we should be encouraging people to do more of that, to do more, you know, to standards candidates. And certainly, you know, I definitely very much support the Green Party in terms of highlighting climate issues. Yeah. And thank you. How about you, Laura? Any reflections on all of that? Yeah, I mean, I really like the focus, sort of universally in this list on keeping high for local impacts. I strongly believe that local politics is where people have the most sway. And, you know, you kind of start from the bottom and trickle it up. Now, there's, you know, a whole discussion about how power works. But I think connecting with people in their communities is a really effective way to get a handle on this problem. Fantastic, thanks. And yeah. Well, I completely agree with the idea that we need sort of bridge people like the data guides or the data librarians. I think that from my perspective, having somebody who connects scientists with journalists and journalists with people. And as a consequence of that, then scientists with people is absolutely fundamental to take on climate change and especially to fight disinformation and misinformation around climate change. This is not just in Africa, but I think also in Europe. So how do we facilitate the connection between data and then also the scientists behind the data, those who know how to interpret the data and the people? How do we kind of create a bridge between them? Something that I think civic technologies and civic organizations can help do. And I think it's a very important tool to combat disinformation around climate change and climate denialism. That's another way to put it. People who deny climate change, there are a lot of them and they get viral on social media. So we're in the middle of an information war and climate change is one of the topics that kind of is affected by this information war. Yeah, so we need to be aware of that. Yeah, I agree with you, not to derail the conversation, but I think you see all of these misinformation campaigns around the world, I think the people who have built them got their sea legs on climate denialism in the 90s and early 2000s. You see a lot of similar tactics between the climate denial movement and misinformation campaigns all around the world. So I agree, that's a huge problem. Excellent, thank you. Does anyone else on the call have any views on any of that? Again, do you feel free to raise your hand using the raise hand tilt or jumping in the chat as well if you've got any thoughts about any of that? And I see Susan's put some contact details in the chat as well around the environmental info we recognize as you get in touch with her if you're interested in that. Lawrence. I think someone made a comment about open source and open code as a way of reducing duplication. And I do think to go back to what we said before about how do you connect the hyperlocal to the large scale ask? And I do think as much maybe one way to do that is when groups do this work, they do think about it doing it in a way that is open and scalable or that they're making a template. So everything they do, they then publish and tidy up and say, right, now the next person to do this or the next spur or the next counselor or whatever it may be. But there's some idea that it could be for the benefit of beyond just that group. And I think there's lots of tools and handbooks about how to create these kinds of resources that are more accessible, that are slightly better documented with the idea that it isn't that much harder, but that then you're setting yourself up for, in the best case, you demonstrate a really impactful local intervention. And then the rest of the country says, oh wow, this has worked over here. Maybe this can be rolled out in a much bigger level. Yeah, I just guess following on from that idea, Laura, I'd be interested to hear you've got a very kind of tangible project that's working in America. Have you had people interested in picking up that approach or literally picking up the technology and trying it elsewhere? Do you have views on how easy or hard that would be? Yeah, we would love to talk to anyone who has any interest in deploying. We're trying to turn what we've done in these cities into a turnkey solution that scales to other places. And we're pretty close to that. So I think we'd love to have a discussion with anybody around the world on how we can help. Fantastic. Laurence, do you want to come back in? Well, yeah, there's actually, we are actually supporting someone who is trying to do an open data project called Helen Jackson, who's trying to use local news sources as a way of bringing visibility to all sorts of flooding impact that otherwise is very, very poorly reported and so trying to find technical ways to sort of scrape local news APIs and things. And like maybe even Twitter and things in the future where everyone does talk about these things, but they don't necessarily make the way up until like an environment agency or government data set. Which is, I think, has a huge sort of overlap with the kind of work you're doing, but very like techno, and it's just this one researcher, but I think that would be a really interesting link up. Great, well, thank you everyone for the really brilliant discussion so far, as we've considered what people are up to, some of the challenges that you've all faced and some of the solutions that you've tried to come up with, we're now going to be even further into that sort of solution space, which is thinking really practically about what we might be able to commission. So the Action Lab or Working Group that comes together after this civic tech surgery, and again, full details on how to apply to be part of that at the end of this meeting, the Action Lab or Working Group will have up to $3,760 US. We'll be able to commission a project for the important proposals, and that will be designed to help solve one or some of the problems that we've highlighted today. So in the remaining time that we've got left, we are going to address the question, what sort of things might help to address the common challenges that we've discussed so far? We've heard some really interesting ideas already, actually, and what we're going to do is to start with five minutes this time of silent working on the paddlers. So this is the fourth column, you can also of course use the Zoom chat as well. So think of practical ideas that we might be able to commission that help solve some of these problems. Fourth column of the Padlet Board, use the chat, and once we've had those five minutes, and again, I'll come back to our discussions, but also, and there'll be an opportunity for everybody on the call to share what you think about it as well. So five minutes, what could we commission? What are the practical solutions to what we've been discussing? Excellent, so I'll read through what we've got on the padlets, then I'll come back to our discussions. So Laura, then Yacopo, then Lawrence, for any reflections, and again, if you want to come in on anything, please do use the chat or do use the raise hand tool. So let's go to the padlets. We have, so results have a good model for mobilizing people to take action on an issue, which might be worth developing for climate. So that's results.org. We could create, publish and publicize a model example of responding to the Council's Climate Action Plan. We could commission a series of infographics on effective climate language persuasion, which would build on the work of climate outreach that we heard about earlier. This could be reused by journalists, the storytellers around the world, especially social media, social media-friendly, potentially viral, finding sustainable long-term support for data librarians, storytelling data journalists, which may not be within scope or budget. A project to recruit, train and support community climate champions based in research teams, policy units, universities, et cetera, would be really useful. The seed funding for an agency to pilot could be what we permission. Could support climate change data journalism, microgrants in underreported regions, some seed funding specifically to enable reuse of an approach technology or dataset, communications between climate champions and citizens. How can local authorities that have declared climate emergencies engage with their citizens? So there is mutual understanding that might involve a combination of engagement software using public consultation with local data. And sort of psychology used by climate outreach. And yes, that's quite a spread of possible solutions. Now that we've heard a few others during the course of today as well, let's go to our panel for their responses first. So Laura, what's your reflection on those possible solutions that we might commission? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a lot of really great ideas. I've been chewing on this question a bit on how do you take these smaller level grants and make the money go the longest or the furthest. One thing that I really, really love is working with college students. Gen Z is probably really annoying for people to manage, but I love them. They're so passionate about this issue specifically and they come at it from this really unique perspective that hasn't been warped by decades of inaction and decades of like all of these things that have been happening in climate communications. And I think one thing that I would do with the grant this size would be to go out and find college students that are studying like really niche climate solutions like climate communications or some of these other more niche problems and helping fund their research or funding them to do work for private organizations helps a little bit of money go a long way. Personally, I would love to see more research done on like how communication science can overcome climate denialism kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier or even like a contest where you have college students competing for grant money based on ideas to solve a particular challenge. I think those are really effective ways to spend a little bit of money too. Another thing that I have found to be relatively effective in the United States is we have a lot of protests that happen and they're not always climate related, although oftentimes they are with just a couple hundred bucks we have a team that started setting up just a table and everyone that goes to the protests we ask them to write a letter to the representative and then come Monday morning we mail it so that we're sort of bridging the gap between people who are in the streets and feeling passionate about an issue and actually taking that passion and having something tangible to send to our representatives. So that's been a really interesting thing that we've been doing too that can be done for like not a terribly expensive amount of money. So yeah, I mean, those are things are the two ways that I would go about it. Fantastic, thank you, thank you for us to add to the list there and I think you've identified one of the real challenges which is how can you make a small grant to go as far as possible so definitely something we're thinking about. Yes or no? I think some of the solutions that are being proposed here touch on data journalism as a potential way to raise awareness in an effective way around climate change and for example, there are at least three solutions that could be combined together. The infographics one, the data journalism micro grants one and also the one about kind of communication between climate champions and citizens. So I think these three could be combined together and the grant could be used to create a package of infographics or social media cards or social media stories, I would say, I would suggest, that are checked and kind of based on the climate champions ideas and data so that this could be used to fight climate change disinformation, for example, in a visual and accessible way. I would love to see one of these grants dedicated to this kind of purpose using these techniques that are being proposed. I think it might be very interesting to see what happens and I think if we do that, we should also come up with a strategy to make sure that these social media stories or social media cards or infographics will target specific audiences. For example, we could decide to do that with young people. Could be college students, for example, or others in specific areas and then get their feedback as well. Brilliant, thank you. And just on a point that both of you and Laura raised around research into climate comms and missing disinformation myths that are really useful, link into the chat, which gives a bit more information on all the facts. Lawrence, what are your reflections on the suggested fiscal commissions? Yeah, I think there's some really nice ideas in there, though some of them I think would definitely need a lot longer term and larger resource. This is something I've been reflecting on because we have these individual grants and I think it really is worth it, right at the beginning, just saying is this kind of thing that we're funding someone to do, is it gonna, to really succeed, is it gonna need long-term maintenance and is it gonna need long-term support or is it just a one-off or is it an expiration? And if it's long-term support, then is there going to be any because if there isn't, it probably isn't the right way to spend the money and the right thing for the person because they're gonna do the project and they're gonna leave and do something else. But I do think in terms of like generating content or generating experiments, like having some sort of like, I like that several sessions have lent on climate outreach to lean on already existing well-researched bodies of work that explain or suggest ways of communication and then say, okay, well, maybe we can test the delivery of those messages. Like we're leaning on some stuff. We know what to say, but maybe we should do some experiments on what medium we put this through or yeah, maybe through TikTok or social media or something else. And then it's like a little experiment, right? And it's sort of short, it's very clear what the aim is and what we're trying to achieve. Ideally, there's some sort of measurable outcome and then you publish it and say, we did this very discreet project and these were the outcomes. I like it with the micro journalism as well because I do think with this kind of grant, you are kind of looking for a good, where can the money have the most impact? And I think there's plenty of projects where this grant would just go into a massive pot and basically have no marginal impact. And so it's yeah, can we find people, maybe students who again, who we can give a, who a small grant, I would call this a small grant can have a big impact. And I think we found that with some of our fellowship grants where people said, you know, wow, this is like, I've really been able to devote a serious amount of time to this that I wouldn't have otherwise. And it's not, it's kind of rare to have those kinds of money grants. I mean, a lot of fellowships, opportunities, there's no money attached to a tool. So we shouldn't take it for granted at all, but I think, yeah, being very conscious of the scope I think is really important. That's it. Thank you. So does anyone else joining us today have any views on what we've heard? Any solutions that have suddenly come to mind that we haven't discussed or any perspectives on what we should be commissioning and how we should be thinking about commissioning as Lawrence was saying as well. Again, do use the raise hand too much to be at the bottom of your screen or use the chat as well. Any further reflections on what we should be thinking about commissioning to address some of the challenges that we must discuss? Lawrence? Yeah, I mean, there were one classic way of course to make the money go further is to do hack days or inducement prizes. You know, that needs a load of effort that someone has to go and administer that and run it and market it. But the idea is that you then gather in a whole load of people and then they all compete for ideas. And so, you know, instead of getting one little project, you end up with 10 small, and the thing with hack days and those kinds of things are, you know, you're not going to build something substantial. But again, if it's just about ideas and experimentation could be a way to get more for the... I can see it's sort of a pretty concept, isn't it? See what you might be able to do. Anyone else got anything, any thoughts that they want to share on any of them? In which case, I don't know if any of our speakers have any final thoughts on the entire thing that they want to share. Otherwise, I will tell you what happens next. Excellent. So, let me see if I can share my screen again. Thank you for all of your hard work today sharing what you've already been working on, sharing the challenges that you face, what you try to do with them, and then of course, thinking about what we might be able to commission, which is what happens next. We will be convening an Action Lab, a working group of around six people at some point after today's surgery. They will work together to commission something for article proposals, which will help address one of the common challenges that we've been talking about today. Anyone can apply to join that Action Lab. Details will be out first by the tic-tac mailing list, which you're probably on since you're here today. But if you're not, please do sign up for it. Again, we've got a link in the chat so you can sign up to the tic-tac mailing list. You'll hear when applications are open. And yeah, if you get onto the Action Lab, you'll have a meeting where we think about what exactly we will commission. And then at some point in the next few months, there will be a call for proposals that goes out on the My Society website. There will be up to $3,760 to do that work. And that will be taking applications. The Action Lab and our steering group will take a look at those various applications and some of you will get to do the work, which will hopefully be a small first step towards solving some of the things that we've been stressing today. As you can see from the links that Rachel's put in the chat, you can sign up to that newsletter. We will be publishing a recording in minutes from all of this as well, so you can revisit and think further. And we mentioned that other event in September at the beginning today, which is sort of a showcase of we're doing interesting things, data and digital technology around fighting climate change locally. Do take a look at that link and do get in touch with us if you're not interested in showing off what you've been doing. We'd also really love feedback on this session and there will be an email link to all of that as well. So unless anyone has anything else that has come to mind, all that remains to be to say is a very big thank you to all of our fantastic speakers who helped stir up such a brilliant discussion today. To all of you for joining us, to my society and National Democracy for supporting all of this work. And yeah, we've also got that sixth Civic Tech series coming up in September on Civic Tech and Hostile Environments to keep an eye out for that. Keep an eye out for all of the course proposals that will be going out and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you very much.