 So hello everyone and a good afternoon from North London and a good morning afternoon or evening to you wherever you may be. I think we've got attendees from 49 different countries signed up today. Welcome to the second tic-tac civic tech surgery focusing today on insurance civic tech is accessible. How can we lead and popularize best practice. I'm Gavin free God. I'm a freelance consultant working with my society on tic-tac labs. And among other things, I'm also an associate at the Institute for government and a special advisor at the open data Institute here in the UK. Many of you might know that Rebecca Rumble who hosted the last one of these civic tech surgeries as my society's head of research. She's now moved on to lead the Rust Foundation after all her brilliant work here. So I'm afraid you're now stuck with me instead. Over the next couple of hours, we're going to discuss some challenges and dilemmas and making civic tech accessible and inclusive and hopefully move towards some solutions aided by some fantastic speakers. For these first 10 minutes or so I'm just going to outline how it will work today and give you a bit more background to what we're hoping to achieve with tic-tac labs which this event is a part. Let's start with some housekeeping. Today's event is being recorded and it will be published online and minutes of today's event will also be published as well. You should be able to access a live transcript here on zoom do say in the chat if you're having difficulty accessing that. You're very welcome to share details of this event on social media to use hashtag tic-tac. And if you'd like to contribute to today's discussion, you can use the chat here on zoom which lots of you are already using to introduce yourselves which is great. And the padlet board and that will soon put link to in the chat if you're not there already. If you've not used padlet before it will look something like this and that should look an awful lot like this. You'll see the various questions that will be covering today on that and if you want to add something, you can just click on the plus signs, lots of people have already added things even before we started today, which is great. So what is this tic-tac labs program all about. It's run by my society would support from the National Endowment for Democracy, and the aim is to discuss and tackle some of the biggest challenges facing the global civic tech and digital democracy sector. We want to grow the civic tech evidence base address that some of the key issues and enhance the effectiveness and potential impact of civic tech projects. We also want to keep tic-tacs great work alive while we can't meet as a global community in person, like we used to, because as some of you may know that's how tic-tac used to work. And it's evolved over the years it began as an annual global conference back in 2015 into London Barcelona Florence to my name is Paris. Before of course, the big thing happened in 2020, which is fine parts of us to our home offices. We do hope to do another in person tic-tac conference again in 2023, but for now, and we've turned it into a year round program with activities and events called tic-tac labs. Over the course of the tic-tac labs program, we're going to be focusing on six topics which have been identified by the tic-tac lab steering group, you can see them on the right hand side of your screen. Things that they've identified as civic tech's biggest challenges. So as well as the topic of the discussion today which is ensuring civic tech is accessible. The six topics are public private collaborations, accessing quality information, scaling and replicates with civic tech, tackling the climate crisis with civic tech and storytelling and reach. Now for each of those six topics, we're going to organize a civic tech surgery, like today's, to delve further into the challenges and start thinking about some possible solutions. After each surgery, there will then be an action lab or a small working group who'll work together to commission a piece of work to help solve some of the challenges raised. And if you're interested in getting involved in the action lab for this topic, we'll tell you how to do that at the end of the event. So by the end of the program in 2023, we hope to have six pieces of commissioned work, as well as increased connections and learnings across the global civic tech community. So for the second civic tech surgery, we've already had a surgery and an action lab meeting on the first of our six topics, which was public private collaborations. So today we're focusing on ensuring civic tech tools are accessible and inclusive, and the big overarching question for everything that we discussed today is what would help the global civic tech community to address common accessibility challenges. Underneath that big question, our objectives for today are the ones that you can see on the screen. So we'll discuss some of the challenges and insurance and tech tools are accessible and establish which the most common challenges across the whole global community. We'll share some thoughts on how those challenges being addressed. We'll discuss what might help tackle those common challenges. We're going to try to share any existing projects or resources that we're aware of that might help us in our work to tackle those challenges, and we'll explore how the subsequent tech tech action lab can help address these challenges by commissioning a relevant piece of work. This is going to be the format for today. We're going to start with this introduction. Let's get into a discussion of the dilemmas, challenges and barriers that people face in making civic tech accessible. We'll start by turning to our excellent discussants, and I'll introduce you to shortly. Once we've done that we'll give everyone five minutes of silent working to add thoughts to the chat and contribute to the Padlet Board, and then we'll see if our discussions have any reflections on everything that's come up. In that section we'll relate to question one on our Padlet Board, what dilemmas have you faced or are you facing when working to ensure your civic tech projects are accessible. Once we've thought about the dilemmas, challenges and barriers will use the same format. That's our discussants, five minutes to work silently and then any final reflections to ask what people have done already to try and address those issues that is question two for those of you looking at the Padlet Board. Once we've done that, we'll use the same format again, discussants, chat and Padlet and reflections to consider what might help in tackling those challenges. Those are questions three and four on the Padlet Board. What do you think might help you further address these issues? Are there any evidence or resource gaps? What do you think the top research questions we've answered are what kinds of data and evidence would help civic tech practitioners improve the accessibility tools. Well, through those big three chunky sections, we'll have 20 to 30 minutes to consider two big final subjects. First, whether we're aware of existing evidence and research that could help us tackle some of the dilemmas and challenges that we've discussed. And second, given that the Action Lab that follows this surgery will be able to commission some work, what project ideas we think we could fund to solve those problems. And then we'll have some time to add things in the chat and on Padlet and then we'll have some proper time for us to discuss. Right at the end, I'll then summarize what happens next in terms of taking this forward to an Action Lab, and this will be the slide that I put up at the end just to give you a sneak preview of that. So there's lots of exciting discussion ahead of us and to help us. As I said, we're going to have some fantastic discussions. We'll be sharing their experiences. They are going to be Mark Ranger, Project Manager at Code for Africa. Laura Nelson Hamilton, who's Principal Consultant at Public Digital. And Ani Binde and Carolyn Aninta from Budget Nigeria. And Benita Nyamwire, the Research Manager at Policy, and we're incredibly grateful to all of them for joining us today. At this point, I'm going to stop sharing my screen. Hopefully that all makes sense as a plan for today. Lots of interesting discussion ahead of us, lots to get through. So we're going to move on to the first section of today's event, which is to address the questions, what dilemmas have you faced or are you facing when working to ensure your civic tech projects are accessible? What have been the barriers, if any, to addressing these issues that relates to column one on the Padlet, if you have that open. Well, I'm going to send to our discussants and ask them for three minutes or so to tell us what they think about that question. And I'll start with Mark for the first question. Yes, hi, hi, bro. And it's great, it's great to be here. Thank you all for joining. So I guess I think I'll start by saying that, you know, one of the one of the biggest issues that I personally faced was that there wasn't really an organizational structure to ensure accessibility throughout our projects. And so, as somebody who is disabled, I initially approached it as just doing things on an individual basis, you know, in the scope of work that I have. And the issue with that is that you can't really carry out systemic change as an individual, you do need like buy in from the entire organization. And so, you know, that was a really big problem that that I experienced. And so, you know, one, one thing that that I did was, I did some research and put together this really simple guide, an accessibility guide called the Universal Access Guide that basically is a list of best practices for designing websites for publishing multimedia for hosting online events that prioritized accessibility. And, and then the next step was kind of get buying from, you know, the key decision makers so that it can be adopted as a as a policy for the entire organization so you know that's kind of both sides of the point that the issue that that I initially experienced as well as how how we as an organization then changed our practices to to be accessibility. Fantastic mark. Thank you very much. Laura, I'll come to you next dilemmas that you faced and the barriers if any to addressing those issues. Yeah, so I think for me, I should say, part of joining public digital I was working in public service in Canada. And then primarily had a policy background and then was working in digital so I think some of how I'm thinking about accessibility comes from those experiences in particular which is why I'm sharing one with the outside. But for me, when I was looking at, you know, I'm looking at digital delivery and solution development and things of that nature so things like, you know, civic technology is well positioned to help with solutioning. My understanding or the dilemmas that I often faced were around wanting to ensure that the solutions we're delivering are really making improvement. It's two people's lives and I think in a, in a public service sort of context that's around understanding, you know, if a service is operating in a way that's that's helping people achieve their goals or achieve what they find what they need. I mean, in an easy, in an easier way. And so some of what I observed through that work was that I think, you know, we were doing when we thought about accessibility it was around the digital product itself. And so what I was trying to think about was, well, how does something like understanding, to me I think the dilemma I faced was around the need to better understand those service journeys and be working in a in an inclusive way to ensure that the solutions were coming from the experiences of people going through that journey that we were going digital in ways that that made sense that made those pathways easier. I mean, I think, I think that's still, it's still quite challenging I think for many good reasons it's very hard to think in systems it's very it's a quite a great deal of work to, to really understand what are often very complex service journeys and people's experiences within them. But to me in thinking about accessibility it's about having access to the identification of what a solution even is as a starting point. And, you know, working then with with technologists and to ensure that as we develop that solution we're continuing to ensure that that it's accessible I think in the ways that that are maybe how we how we conceive of accessibility, in terms of you know use of something of that nature so. So things that I tried to do to address that were primarily around you know the approaches that we took inside of government and trying to make some changes for instance to how we think about the development of technology. To ensure that you know we have that clarity around the problems we're solving that we've done you know due diligence and really understand that problem and we're understanding that through diversity of experiences, prior to really committing to a solution. But of course, you know I think anyone who's worked in government knows it's quite challenging we know that that solutions come from from many directions and are developed for many reasons and so I think the other dilemmas is striking that balance between, you know, taking that fully inclusive, you know, wanting wanting to really drive that that vision of how design and delivery can occur and reconciling that with. So, basically needing to reconcile that with you know finding those opportunities to influence and make those changes where they're possible where the conditions are present. Partly to be able to demonstrate the difference that it makes to work in those ways, and be able to share those stories and continue to really inspire change across an organization as well. Great, thank you Laura, and I'll soon let's come to you next. I think you're on mute at the moment. Yeah, brilliant. All right, so I was saying that I think so much apologize I think it's a mute. So, I would say the dilemmas we face out here to things one has to do with issue of volume and depth. Sometimes as you're trying to build a civic tech idea you're constantly checking in. Do you need to go for volume or do you need to just go for a few people and just deep down on that. You make me make you realize that what exactly what the exact distribution or what is exact people I mean what number of people do you need to affect the change that you want to see. Do you want to go much more like a national scale or like an engage the entire community, or you just want to stay with a few influencers that have the influence and the energy to really influence to really make change up within communities. And also you know that for some mass mass distribution of civic tech you need a lot of resources to make that much more very very possible. So, in a way I think that that always starts about how do we test, do we test our ideas on the massive population, or do we just say a small sample group and just make sure that they are influential they are loud enough to be able to pull up the kind of change we have. So now leads us to dilemmas around channels, what channel is always right what channel is always a prop to be able to get to and it's also sustainable, because you might talk about radio is great or maybe print is great, or maybe community channels community meetings are great, but in some sort of way that becomes extremely inadequate for you to be to be sustainable in the long run so you're looking at channel sustainability, and also you're also trying to balance that would impact what is impactful and was also sustainable. And I think that leads you a lot of dilemmas to say, what's the best way for you to be able to build your civic tech product and be able to ensure that you get the kind of results that you really really want. And for example, when we were doing we have a product called tracking budgets, and we started by having those we call project tracking officers, who are based in every state in the country to track public projects and give us reports. But we did that and we they were they were technically volunteers paid volunteers for our organization, but that was not effective as we go along the way because they love places to visit their love projects to track. Now we also be careful about people misinforming us and giving us wrong information around the current state of projecting their local community, some of them just to confirm their political biases. And that is also really when they without that how do we expand the scope to some bit of trusted group of people within local communities. So I think those doubts always a challenge for us and dilemmas volume and depth. I mean, when what's the best place to start when you're testing the civic tech idea. And also when you're also trying to think about channels we're thinking clearly. This channel is very impactful. But when we look at sustainability along the way is this effective way for us to do this. I will just stop at that point. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. That's very helpful. And finally, on this of our sort of discussant spot dilemmas. Have you faced what have been the barriers. Thank you, Gavin. I hope you can hear me clearly. And so I agree with my fellow discussants about what they have said, I will also reiterate what the current that the other speaker had the who has just was just speaking has said about the channels. We also at times struggle with channels where to share, for instance, information that we have collected, you know, reports that we have gathered from our, our research projects on civic technology and digital technology. So, because we want this information to go as far as the last person, you know, as, as far as the target population where we collected the data, for instance, but which channels do we use where they can easily access these. Should we use social media platforms? Is it Facebook where they will easily access? We have a Facebook account there's policy. Is it Twitter that they will easily access? Is it our website? So we also keep struggling with the channels, but we try to use what we have. And, and so if you some, at least a big proportion of people tend to access our resources. But I know that the biggest number do not, you know, the ones that we want to access them they don't. So the other thing, apart from channels that we also struggle with is the language. The language of sharing most of these resources is English. Yet most of our people do not speak English or they speak, but they may not easily understand what we produced in our reports in our work in our innovations, which is mostly in English. So we want to see that we can be able to share these in the different languages, but how do we do it? There is a cost of cost definitely attached to all those things. We are trying to explore. So what we have done as policy, there is a game that we developed, which tries to equip women and girls with skills on how to be safe online. The game is called digital safety, digital safety. It is on our website. At least we've tried to put it in English language in Uganda, which is a local language spoken in Uganda, but mainly in the urban areas. And then we also, we've also tried to put it in Swahili, which is an East African also language used in Kenya, Tanzania, somehow in Rwanda, in Uganda, so that we can cover at least some people can be able to access information on that game. So, but we want to explore. We want to explore because with more languages and we see that people can be able globally to access our materials in all languages. So that is one other thing that we are struggling with. How can we ensure that, you know, we look at the different channels of sharing this, how can we ensure that there are different languages to ensure that this accessibility for everyone we are inclusive in those areas. I'll stop at that for the meantime. Perfect. Thank you very much, Bonita. So we've had four really insightful contributions already on on those questions. We're now going to give all of you to five minutes or so to add any thoughts that you've got to either the Padlet Board, or to the chat here on zoom. So the questions again are what dilemmas have you faced or are you facing when working to ensure your civic tech projects are accessible. What have been the barriers, if any, to addressing these issues so five minutes or so to add things to the chat, add things to the Padlet Board it's column one on Padlet, and you can see that Gemma has just put a link in the chapters one I think we've even got a timer and possibly even some music to accompany us for our five minutes which is very exciting. So we'll come back in five minutes or so, and see what we've come up with in the chat and on Padlet. And time is up. Fantastic. Thank you everyone for all those contributions. It's really valuable to see the sort of challenges that everyone's facing globally and this will help us inform the most common challenges that we might be able to commission a solution towards. So a quick look at what we've got in the chat here on zoom we've had Danny from Delib talking about interactive mapping participation tool and quite difficult for people who can't see and they've also then put in a solution to that which was bringing in a web accessibility consultancy. And we've also got mapped talking about costs for hiring software developers to make an unfunded project accessible. We've got Philippe as well lack of infrastructure and digital skills to promote the civic tech. And then I think on Padlet we've got lots of contributions so multiple areas of accessibility. It's not just sight impaired can be language class how do we know what all those areas are with the pandemic so much tech has been introduced and screen time use which stressed our communities, got lack of access to basic infrastructure geographical barriers, language which we've already heard here to come up a little bit already and learn about working Nigeria and our civic tech fellowships there's a link there that might be useful for everyone and accessible language can we limit technical terms and jargon don't know who our users are with accessible needs and how to prioritize without knowing what those needs are. As a data organization how do we provide an alternative to data visualizations visually impaired users when creating web pages from PDFs how do you ensure that diagrams are accessible. The general motivation to participate online when face to face engagement is preferred lack of skills in the team, especially if you have a small team. So what language should we work in which communications channels should be used and we've talked a bit about channels already for volunteer projects the cost of developer time, which again I think came up in the zoom chat. And for volume of users or see more targeted and not knowing if the service provided is broadly accessible or not. We've then got small changes to working methods that would help disabled people access our services aren't adhered to as standard, the people who need our services most might not be online power dynamics can overcome the true purpose of civic tech costs again has come up. The fear of negative personal consequences as a result of public engagement on civic matters engagement by those who are struggling to use the service can be misinterpreted as misuse or abuse that's an interesting one. We have users lacking literacy in terms of basic reading and writing but also in terms of basic computer and website use, and also not understanding the structure of government they're trying to engage with accessibility is not a priority for decision makers, even in the UK. Lots of people have a 7.1 million people have difficulty reading that everything that is text based. And I think that brings an end to all contributions on padlet and technology equipment and computers, as we've also just had in the chat. Lots to think about there and some common themes definitely emerging as well. I wonder if any of our discussants in the five minutes or so we've got left for this section wonder if our discussants having your reflections on any of those things that have come up. Oh, Laura. I'm off until next. Yeah, lots of. Yeah, so many. You could go in so many directions. Can you I mean some that sit out to me. I think in my experience in government, certainly around skill sets on teams. Around what really drives what really drives delivery in particular directions and I think that piece that stood out to me was around, you know, for some of that, that work. Political will is required and an understanding among decision makers as well around around really, you know what good decisions, but what. Can I frame this, they have a very large role to play, I suppose in shaping and delivering solutions and I think a couple of thoughts on those are, you know, for me, in my experience where I saw really promising kind of approaches to design it was when teams worked together we know we talked about multi disciplinary teams and having digital skill sets and I think that's, you know, that's important. And it's where those teams were broadened out as well to include service providers people engaged in direct service delivery, and where they were also engaging with, with persons accessing services as well and I think there was one initiative in particular that really was surfacing some surprising solutions and to me that was exciting because I think that that's a really positive sign that a real discovery is occurring. You know that that we're actually looking into things and we're listening, we're engaging people who can see things from different angles. But I think they're, you know, particularly. So it's very situated in government but you know of course we need when we get to the point of determining what the digital solution needs to look like that's where you do need persons with those, you know those tech, far more technical expertise. And there's a lot of work leading up to that where, you know, we do have more capacity internally inside of government that we might realize. It's just about directing that capacity, and some slightly different ways to ask some different questions and have conversations that are going to be new for, for some folks but, but yeah I think, you know, so of course there are all these challenges that I think, you know the real trick of it is, is being able to also bring decision makers along as well and be sharing work back in a way that helps them understand the important role that they play in in really ensuring that that services get delivered in a particular way that really truly helps people. Excellent, thanks Laura. And I think Mark, I think he wants to come in as well. Yeah, sure. So three things really stood out for me from the feedback that everyone has given. And I'm going to start with the second thing in a minute. By the way, I live next to the noisiest person in my building so apologies if you can't hear music in the background it's not me. So, just piggybacking on what Laura said about, you know, accessibility and decision makers, and somebody did say that accessibility is not a priority for decision makers. And it's the last thing that gets attention I think, you know, part of it like I said, in my opening remarks is that, you know, you do kind of need to institute it's like systemic change. Getting buy-in from everyone in the organization and that includes the key decision makers at the top. And I thought or I used to think that at least in the nonprofit sector we're all kind of too good as we want to make the world better. So it could be kind of easier to like persuade people to restart like accessibility. And with Code for Africa we've been really lucky in terms of just getting buy-in from like the very highest level of management. But I would say that, you know, one way to kind of get buy-in from everyone is, and there's this viral tweet that I use in my presentations on accessibility and I'm just going to read it for a bit. It says that accessibility isn't more work, you were just cutting corners before the work was incomplete. And that kind of is a really great way of framing the issue by saying that, you know, by not having stuff that is universally accessible to people with disabilities and without, you're basically putting out incomplete projects, you're putting out incomplete work. So how can you get from, you know, making stuff that's incomplete that's not accessible to making stuff that is complete and that's why one of the reasons that I named our accessibility guide the universal access guide, is the whole idea to universal access, it's access for everyone. And so I think, you know, hopefully, you know, for all the folks for joining and who are part of this session, that can be one of the ways that you can kind of sell this vision and this direction to the key decision makers in your organization to do what they want and to do it as well is by saying that, you know, we want the stuff that we build as much as we feel that it's doing good to be accessible to everyone and that's how you can kind of argue for funding and just get everyone on board. So, you know, I hope that helps. And just quickly to conclude, somebody also said that, you know, we don't know who our users are who have accessibility. So it's kind of hard, you know, when you're conceptualizing and then carrying out a project, you know, to know, you know, who are the audiences that we're catering with that have specific needs. And again, this feeds back into the point that I made earlier, which is, you know, by just embracing the idea of designing for everyone and building stuff for everyone. And it's, it's much easier to rather than agonizing during the discovery stage of, oh, you know, do we know how many users will be blind doing how many users are dyslexic or autistic or, you know, have mobility issues, you know, by just embracing the whole universal design and universal access philosophy. It might actually be easier to kind of break down those barriers and get stuff done. Brilliant. Thank you. And I think that actually takes us really nicely into the sort of next section. So having discussed the dilemmas, and first of all, our sort of next question, which relates to column two on our padlet, is what, if anything, have you done to try and address these issues? And again, we'll start with our discussions. I'll go in reverse order this time. So I'll start with Benita, then Olasun, then Laura, then Mark. So what, if anything, have you done to try and address these issues? Benita, have you got any thoughts on that? Thank you, Gavin. So, like I earlier said that we've tried in different ways as policy. One we've tried to explore because we looked at language and we could see that there are many people there in the audience, the users of our information, those who want to access it, those who have heard about what we do, they want to access our information, they want to see what we have done, they want to learn from it, but one of the barriers has been language. We also want them to get it. So, like I earlier said, we have tried with one of the games to see how far can we go when we have this game in the different languages, not only English. And at least, although I do not have the statistics off head, but I know that many people have been able to play that game in Uganda, in English, in Swahili. And very soon we'll add another language from Nigeria to see that people in West Africa can be able to access. So that one I know that we are achieving a lot with that game, having it in those very few different languages, not only English. Then the other one that we have tried as policy is the user-centered design. We work with the users. When we know that this is the population we are targeting on this project, for instance, we try as much to involve them in the project so that they are able to access most of what we are doing. We involve them in the planning. We involve them on most of the stages of the project so that they are with us. They are understanding what we are producing. They understand the language. We also try, so that actually helps us to avoid using the jargon. You know, someone talked about jargon, because when we are with them, we are creating with them. What we are creating is for them. So they will tell us, this we don't understand. What does this mean? What does this imply? So we are able to remove even the jargon. It also helps us to design something that they will be able to work with. So we are using the user-centered design in most of our project. We have done this with the project on persons with disabilities. We have done this with our projects on women, on young girls, on the youth, on creatives in Uganda. So that one has also helped us working with using the user-centered design. Then the other one is also what we usually do is to remove a lot of text and use a lot of visuals, because visuals are easy for people to interpret information. So if you look at most of the work we do as policy, most of the work we produce, be it a small blog, be it anything, a policy brief, they have visuals. Visuals make it easy for people to be able to understand what you're talking about. To relate, many people relate with the visuals that we use. The colors are beautiful and we try as much to see that the colors we use also resonate with colors that really people can make. That will not be shouting, but very calm, silent, I should say. So those are some of the things that we have tried to do as policy. And we do all this by doing discussions within us as a team, we discuss, then we discuss with our users, and so on. So that's what I can say for now. Thank you. And it's a fascinating question between the sort of text and visuals as well. I know that one of the padlet entries has exactly that debate going on about when one is more accessible than the other. Thank you. And I'll assume. Yeah, I mean the question is how do we address this? What's our way out of this? And I mentioned no one about impact measurements is always a problem, especially now you also approach the delivery of your civic tech idea. But the most important thing is to first think about that the community engagement or active listening has to be the cornerstone of our work. That's something that we always put as the priority to whatever we're trying to build in terms of community engagement. So we're not trying to sit on our own pedestal and build for people who want to build with people. So in some sort of way, and we know when we have in this conversation, we put technology behind, we put contextual analysis behind, we put everything and we just want to listen first to people and ensure that this is relating to what exactly the people want. And I think if we make adjustment in this angle, we were able to be, it's going to be much more effective in what we're trying to do. So the goal is that people have competing demands for their time and their attention, and to put out a layer of bonding around civic tech if it doesn't flow well with their intention or their expectation. It becomes a body that they are not ready to bear. So it's always, I think one of the key things is to do pay much more attention to them and use that to now build and test on the gradual scale and now grow from that. Like what the previous speaker said around literacy is always still a challenge. So we could do much more with simplification and to ensure that we make, we break things down in those step by step for people. And when we are building simplification, two things always comes to our mind. One is personalization, how much more can we personalize the story to this person, so that it's fit or intersects with their own personal interest. I mean, we agree everybody has their interests, everybody has their, they have their incentives to act, their incentive to proper behavior. And we want to be able to really, really understand that so that whatever we're trying to build really fits with their own interests, fits with their incentive to take action and make sure that we are building in that kind of environment. And that's been something that's been helpful for us. And now we grow in the trajectory of our projects. I mean that would be a tracker, or we've built golfspan, or we've even built some budget analysis is we make sure that we do a lot of work on active listening. And we focus much strongly on community engagement and making sure that we're trying to bring people together to really understand what's best for them. We make sure that we intersect in our work and our thinking around their incentive to act, you know, making sure that we're blending our products with our own self and we'll save enlightened interest. You know, and most importantly also ensuring that whatever we're building we put technology we put everything about we just want to build for people and people are the center of whatever we're doing. Thank you. Thank you very much. Laura. Yeah, that was fabulous. Yeah, I mean the number one thing I did. Was, you know, was work with other people. I would say so, you know I was very lucky to be in an organization within government that was that was really trying to make a lot of changes to the ways that we approach design and really taking that user centered approach. So within that and working people doing a lot of different things around those topics. I would say something in particular that myself and a team that I was on tried to do is really think about how we could help help that change along by focusing on taking some new approaches to performance measurement and analytics. So, I should say like again all that work was very internal facing was working with other teams and government and, and I think the reason I can say, I can say anything about this is because your invitation was to say things that you had tried so unfortunately I can't tell you that like, we solved it and it was, but we did try a lot of different things and so much of what we were trying was about broadening our understanding of, of, again, how does a digital service fit within, you know, the broader broader service environment. So that meant of course you know we want to have, we want to have our web analytics setup and things like that. But we also want to see, you know it was about trying to help product teams be able to articulate how the thing that they were building was improving was improving an end users experience, not even necessarily only of the direct thing that they were building, but within, within that broader service environment and so what that looked like was, you know, helping them from the earliest stages of their design work so right, you know at the start of discovery of really taking that time to, to ensure that when they left they were very clear on what the problems were that that people were encountering, and how what they were designing was going to help solve those problems. And then the other things that we did. The other things that we did internally was also to be able to establish some metrics that were looking at work happening across government and see, you know, were we seeing changes. Were we able to see changes in the ways that design teams were put together so were they multidisciplinary were they bringing these different skill sets to help really design effectively. Okay, one of the, the biggest things that sounds as simple as you know the other thing that we were tracking was our people conducting user research, prior to delivering a solution it sounds so simple but I think you know based on where we were in our journey within trying the way that we worked inside of that government in particular. That was actually really powerful thing to be able to say you know are we are we really seeing changes in that and it also helped us just be be able to have conversations with people across government around even you know what is that what is service design, how does it help. It's kind of simple things like that, but, but I do think, you know, like I said, didn't perfect it, but I think those those efforts were important and we had so many conversations around it that you have to believe if it did nothing more than cause people to think for a moment about why they might do something differently than I think that that was a worthwhile use of time. Thanks Laura, and before we go to the silent working mark. So, there are three things that I feel have been critical in in how you know I personally have addressed, just the issue. The first goes back to the Universal Access Guide that I created, which, which kind of, you know, access as a guiding document for an entire organization and just informs how everyone within the organization thinks about accessibility and how they approach it. And that's kind of part of your strategy, you know, if you're somebody who's trying to make your organization more accessibility focused, it's a way that you can drive organizational change by just showing what's possible by showing that it doesn't cost a huge amount of money to just be accessible that you can do for free the stuff that you can do within literally 30 minutes to an hour just immediately the stuff that you can do over like a week long sprint. And then obviously there's the stuff that's more, more in depth and might require more resources but just by showing that you can start small, it's really really important for getting by it from everyone. And then there's something we also did at Code Traffickers, we did an internal survey, just to find out, because, you know, to change the stuff that you put out you kind of have to look in. And for us what we did was we did an internal survey just to figure out how many people on our side, it was all anonymous, how many people on our staff are disabled who have disabilities, and have issues with the internal tools that we use. It's critical for two reasons, one, because it shows you the gaps that you already have as an organization internally that you're not serving the needs of the people that actually work for you. And a caveat here is, you know, this only works if you actually employ disabled people, if everybody hires is able-bodied then this might not work, but like, it's a great way to know, you know, how many people internally within your teams to struggle with the tools that you already use and how can you change that. And then it shows that if you as an organization already are struggling to serve the people within that organization who have accessibility needs, then that shows how important it is, because this is a foreign concept. These aren't people that you'll never meet ever. These are people who actually work within your organization, their colleagues, their friends, you're on call to them every day. And so that kind of helps, you know, people just understand how important accessibility is and it could be a great way, you know, if you are an organization and you're struggling to get people to just take it seriously just by just run an anonymous survey for everyone and just ask people what what the accessibility needs are what they struggle with and that could really help. And then the other thing that has been really, really useful is that we kind of build accessibility into processes because like I mentioned earlier, you know, there's this tweet that said, you know, the work was incomplete. So how do you make sure the work isn't incomplete. And that's by having accessibility at every stage from the start during the process that it's not something that's tacked on at the end. So something that you're kind of hastily scrambling, oh, we built a website, but nothing has alt text and, you know, there's a stat. Let me just pull it up that one third of all online images don't have alt text, which just boggles the mind, you know, like think about how many billions of images are out on the Internet, and one third of them don't have any alternative. So it's, it's, it's how you build accessibility into the internal processes at work, making sure that you know if somebody is building a website, the alt text field is not optional, like you have to have alt text or you can't publish that asset. And the thing with accessibility is that so much of it is optional like if you treat a photo, you kind of have to delve into menus to find the alt text field so that you can add alt text that image, which shouldn't be the case like if you are a civic organization, you kind of need to build accessibility into the process that you do and that will make life so much simpler. And then finally, just make sure that accessibility is friendly. So somebody mentioned jargon like it's very technical sometimes just describing accessibility issues and processes. A great way to do this is just by making it as approachable to everyone as possible and a great resource for this is access guide.io, which is a resource built by Alex Chen which has taught me so so much about accessibility. It's so friendly, it's so approachable, anyone can read it and just know what to do. And it's not like this big long, like 30 page technical document it's a very simple website like cards and like illustrations that can really act as a very, very approachable access point for accessibility to everyone in your organization so I'd recommend people to check that out. Fantastic thank you very much indeed Mark. So now again we're going to give you five minutes to put your contributions into the chat and onto Padlet as well so it's column two. Again the question that we're going to give you five minutes on is what if anything have you done to try and address the issues dilemmas and challenges that you've faced. So five minutes, and then we shall reconvene. Time is up. So let's have a quick look at what we've got on the Padlet, what we've done to try and what we've done to try and address these issues we've got active learning so listening to communities. And interaction is anonymous at the front end to allow those with low confidence or ability to engage about fear of bullying when lacking basic connectivity try to connect the community with organizations that could support their needs. So listening for user feedback on accessibility, focusing on visuals where there are language issues that's a thing that has run through a lot of these responses and translated the fixed language on the site on request but it's only possible to do that with funding. We've got the code for Africa Universal Access Guide, use web tools for accessibility testing and do user testing, start by asking team members anonymously about the challenges they face themselves when using your tools. You can automatically categorize tech use and support based on if you engage with and keep everything simple. Again, we've got using tools to explore languages being used, use the learning and development budget. Excellent. Have external accessibility audits done. We've got funding specifically to improve the accessibility of services and we've got the example from the Joseph Rantry Charitable Trust here in the UK. Listen to and respond to feedback. Encourage and enable use of services anonymously or under pseudonyms. And this is an interesting one to finish on. Disability statistics are not well known, so try to educate your peers. I don't know if our discussants have any very quick thoughts in sort of two minutes that they have on any of that, otherwise we can move on to the next set of questions. Great. So, let's move on to the sort of next block of questions. We're starting to move now from identifying the challenges and thinking about some of the things that we've tried to do to overcome them to what would be useful more generally in overcoming the challenges. Welcome to our discussants in the original order shortlist. That's Mark, then Laura, then Olesin, then Benita. And the questions here are, what do you think might help further address the issues that we've been talking about? Are there particular evidence or resource gaps? I think you've identified quite a few already. One of the top research questions we need answered are, what kinds of data and evidence would help civic tech practitioners improve the accessibility of their tools? And we've also got that sort of column three on the padlet. And also column four, which is how can best practice in accessibility be popularized among the global civic tech community. We're starting to work out what might be useful to address all of those issues. And I'll come to you first, Mark. Yeah, sure. Thanks. So, what might help address these issues? So I think the first thing is just by, and this is like on an individual and organizational level just helping people grasp the scale of the problem. So the start that I mentioned earlier, one third of all images on the internet don't have alt-text. That should be something that makes somebody sit up and think, you know, this is a really big problem. And it can't be solved by me or Gavin just adding alt-text or tweets or for Instagram messages. It needs to be solved on a much larger scale. So just getting people to kind of understand the scale of the work and it can be disheartening just to know how much inaccessible stuff is out there. That kind of puts it in people's mind that there is a problem and it's real. It's not just people with disabilities whining. It's an actual problem that needs to be solved. And also just understanding that if you take everybody who has some kind of disability and put them together, it's 15% of the world's population, which isn't a negligible figure. It's a lot of people. And so, you know, when you are trying to get people to shift their mindset to take accessibility seriously and to implement it at an organizational level. It kind of helps to drive home the fact that, you know, somebody who's disabled isn't necessarily somebody who's in a wheelchair. It could be somebody who looks, you know, able-bodied, quotes. But, you know, might have, you know, certain disabilities that aren't immediately noticeable and they're literally everywhere. We, I should say we, because the iPads, but like, you know, we're like, we're your friends, we're your neighbors, we're your colleagues. And so just by helping humanize the fact that this is something that needs, like, all of us to take it seriously and just to, because the people who will benefit are people that we know. That's, that's a really great way to just get people to take it seriously. And then just finally, they're also like additional benefits to embracing accessibility, which might also help if you're trying to sell this to a decision maker and I think the one that I think somebody, there's a disability activist called Chauncey Fleet, who said this and she said that, you know, like having alt text in images has actually has benefits to stuff like machine learning and artificial intelligence because that kind of helps platforms know like what's in images what they look like. And if you ever uploaded a full point to Facebook, you know that it's really good at recognizing faces. So it's stuff like that that actually helps the wider tech ecosystem become better. And, and those are accessibility features that for now, like, are optional. Whereas, like if though a mandatory, if everybody took accessibility seriously, you know, would have like so much growth and development, not just within the civic tech industry but like with digital services and if we serve as better. So, um, yeah, that's, that's basically what I have. Fantastic Mark. Thank you, Laura. I think, yeah, I think probably what I'm going to share builds on on that a fair bit. And so, to me, and it's very bold, but of course and I'm sure a lot of people agree. But truly, I think the thing that needs to happen is, is for our, for the approach at least that I'm familiar with. For policy approaches to change and for the practice of policy, particularly as its practice inside of governments to change I think the reason I say that is because I think what occurs is, there's a lot of familiarity with with stakeholder points of perspective and perspectives and there's a, there's an approach to design that occurs through, you know, basically being responsive to what people ask for the, the flip we need and I think it, this is why I think it builds on what the previous shared is that what we don't seem to understand very well are people's experiences. And, and better design doesn't come through people telling us what they want. It comes through understanding what, what is happening in their lives what their experiences within a particular service area, just generally I think a lot of people, you know, encounter government services in a variety of ways and it's piecemeal and, and I think that you know what I observed inside of government as well is that there isn't a very firm and internally on how what is a service how do these various things actually fit together. And so, to me the reason why I call policy out in that is because I think that that policy has a very important role to play in that early space around, around influencing how we understand problems and how we determine which problems will be solved. And so, again, I think it may not, you know, mean, I think there are probably parts of policy that that will need to remain consistent but to me there's this very important piece that is around needing to have a much better understanding of experience. Because I don't know how really how we saw some of these, you know the problems that have been mentioned by panelists today without just a fundamental interest in understanding experience and commitment to improving those experiences in the variety of ways that they that they stand to be improved. Thank you very much Laura policy. So my own and what we can do more is to invest long term in some sort of way because it looks like we want to invest our fruits before it blooms, most of the way we approach civic tech work. We just don't. And you would see that people, if you look at all that, you know, tech industry category like framework and auto tech or, you know, whatever we have a logistics that there is a bit of patience for people to build and to be for the for civic day we want to projectize it or running in a programmatic with the same way we run most doing organizations I mean, which is we give them money in a 12 months period and we're expecting that people will reach a million people and the impact which just, you know, bleeds through like that. There is a need for us to be able to, you know, do much more work around listening and research and testing and scaling and reflecting and doing that kind of work that we can use the typical approach that we should not do no model to run a civic type of solutions, if we really want to see scale, and you want to see impact, because one of these very evident is that it takes time before we can get kind of results and we can now say, we can, we can, we can say, okay, can we even replicate this, or can we look at the contextual environments in that space, and trying to build this and try and transmit this product attack kind of environment is extremely critical. And I feel strongly about, it's also the fact that we need to invest also much more in, in, in, in, in emerging technologies as civic tech these days, and I see don't see our place in the, you know, in the web three the crypto in the machine learning, it looks like, well, it looks like we're sticking the, we're not even trying to be part of that conversation is in any way. And I'm not saying that we need buzzwords or nice looking and I know those times we just through buzzwords around. But to say those, those technologies can, can be what we're looking for, when we're trying to define transparency, or it could be what we would need, we will when we're trying to look into an a stack of data, maybe to be able to even pull our corruption elements in there. So I don't mean what we're using to build engagement with the public, we can make our work much more easier. And I think someone mentioned around skills, you know, being, being a problem. I think we need more practitioners more tech leaders and I guess, it was a time one of the foundation I think maybe it was Ford Foundation had this technology embeds in organization and things like that. Yeah, we need to also attract the big skilled tech people into our civic tech space. We can continue to, because the way tech lens has been priced now, it looks that that is out of reach or whatever civic tech idea we're building in some sort of way, but we need to find a way to keep the top talent in within the space. That's one of the key things I feel I feel we need to have patient capital to be able to scale investment and to be able to test properly, and we need to find a way to apply imagine and new technologies to make our work much more easier, and to give us much more better insights than what we're doing. And most importantly is to make sure that the talent space, which is a huge challenge for most organizations and most ideas needs to be well well managed and we need to build an incentive with that environment. At the end of the day, the channel is always still going to be a problem and I think I've seen that effectively about how and I think that for us to be able to look at the right channel to be able to pass our message and the right message and the right structure is always going to be and if we're going to ever get that right it means we'll be patient to quietly build and test and learn before we can now say it's time to accelerate. I will just stop at that point. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. And Puneeta. Thank you, Gavin. So I agree with everyone on the scene. Rangia Laura, and I'll just add a little on what they have already said. So for me, I see any assessment is very important to understand the user's accessibility needs. We need to understand that and understand what do they need in terms of accessibility. Like Laura said, they share, we need to listen to their experiences. We need to listen to their opinions. And then we use what we are getting from that needs assessment to create something that they are able to work with, but also what we create, can we prototype it, can we test it, we test, then we modify. Similarly, we have something that they want that works for them, not for us. So that is one. And again, like all the same said, we need patients while we go through all these processes. Civic Tech is not something that you will do like today and then tomorrow you have the solution, and it is already working. No, it is long term. It needs patients. It needs a lot of innovation. It needs skills. We need different expertise, people from different areas with different skills, expertise and so on and so forth. So we need all that, why we do the needs assessment, why we do the prototyping, why we do the modification of the prototype so that we can finally come out with what the users want to have. And then the other one is, can we also as stakeholders who are involved in Civic Tech, begin injecting funds and resources into accessibility issues, because we are majorly looking at producing work we are writing we are doing innovations we produce we produce we put it out there. We don't care about accessibility. We don't care to know who is accessing it, perhaps we try a little bit and we see, we check on how many people are following us on Twitter, how many likes do we have here and there, but to what extent did they go in depth to utilize what we have shared you to use it to gain knowledge from it to gain skills from it. So if as stakeholders in Civic Tech, we can inject more resources into accessibility. I think it would be good like how we are doing in other projects. I think I will stop there for now. Thank you. So we're going to give you another five minutes to add your thoughts to the chat and to the Padlet. And the key things here are what we think could help address the issues that we've been discussing so gaps that we'd like to fill research questions we'd like to ask and ideally answer data and evidence that we would ideally like to have. And so those are sort of columns that sort of column three on the Padlet and also column four on the Padlet which asks what ways could best practice and accessibility be popularized amongst the global Civic Tech community. So we'll give you five minutes on that and then we'll come back and the sort of last half an hour or so we'll think even more practically and specifically about how we can make some of those things happen. So over to you for the next five minutes. And again Gemma has put the link and the questions in the chat as well. Brilliant. Thank you very much everyone. Let's quickly summarize what we've got. So I'll see now here in the chat, talking about training on how to use equipment or school for everyone and access for all. So as we go over to the Padlet, we have got toolkit with guidance and access to subsidize services to assist with improving accessibility smaller organizations or not profits do not have the capacity or funds for a dedicated service internally. Let's talk about the difficulties of accessing civic tech tools from people themselves, give that human element, make it easy to play a role in addressing the issues, guidance on how best to describe or provide old text from maps and visualizations, inspirational stories I think we've got a link there to some examples address things on a technical level and so to require images to have both texts you wouldn't actually be able to publish we've heard a little bit about that already. So to understand the scale of the problem how much inaccessible stuff is out there, make language translation tools more accessible grants to include money for accessibility or somebody's commented are conditional on that resources to actually run services on a day to day basis and provide support and assistance and similar theme I think funders appear to like supporting new things rather than sustaining and maintaining them. And then we've got more experiments with audio based access to information. We've also got a few things have been added to how to popularize this best practice and accessibility across the global civic tech community. And so there's a link to accessible as necessary, not as an extra so useful article there. Look at what the adoption strategies are that are voting countries like India where there is a huge digital divide and the general fear of making mistakes while using online payments of services. And then we've got another link and to learn about some work going on in Nigeria with a civic tech fellowship. There's a nice range of solutions and ideas there. I don't know if any of our discussants want to come in on any of those briefly. Yeah, I can say something. I want to add on training on how to use the equipment. So, we are trying out that one actually as policy with women leaders and politicians in Uganda and in Tanzania. So we have a project which is named vote women project. It is aimed at in political positions, women in leadership to be able to use digital platforms to be able to use equipment, to technology equipment and some things like that. And this came from a study we did on assessing the amplified abuse online violence that women experienced during the 2021 general elections in Uganda. So from this study we found out that as much as women experienced online harassment, but they were also not using these platforms to do their campaigns and the campaigns were scientific. They were online, but they were not using them. So most of them were running away because of the virus, but a big number was because they do not know how to navigate these platforms. They do not know how to use them. So we are working doing this on our project of both women to equip them with skills we're developing a curriculum. We are developing the curriculum together with them. We have been with women leaders in both countries on this project right from the inception. We are working with them. We are now at the stage of developing the curriculum and then we begin the trainings. We still also as policy do trainings for ladies we have data ladies which we do every three months so ladies come together and then we talk about like issues we are talking about now of accessibility safety online how to use these tools, the digital technology language, removing the jargon and things like that. So we are doing those trainings but of course we need to scale up and go to more areas include more groups and something like that. Thank you. Thanks Benita. Unless any of our other discussions are desperate to come in on anything else to do with that. I think we can move on to the final section of today's civic tech surgery. So we've had a brilliant discussion so far on the challenges what people have previously tried to overcome those challenges, things we'd ideally like to be available to help us tackle those challenges in the future. The final section is where we think even more practically and specifically about what we could do and in specific particularly specifically what we could commission to solve some of the key common problems. So I mentioned earlier that after this civic tech surgery there will be an action lab a small working group that comes together, and they will have $2,500 to commission some sort of project that aims to solve one of the problems that we've highlighted today. So what we have to do in the time that remains is consider two things. The first, and this is column five on the Padlet, is what's already out there to help solve the problems that we've identified. Is there existing evidence. Are there existing resources that could help us tackle some of these dilemmas. So we're not duplicating. We can work out what it is that we might need to commission to fill the gap, but also be able to point people to what is already out of existing evidence and resources that people might be able to use that's Padlet column five. And the second thing, then, is what projects could we fund using that money that the action level have to help us with these dilemmas. So column six on the Padlet puts it, if there was one thing the tick tech action lab could commission to help you with accessibility challenges, what would it be. Of course, that project could be learning materials events training case studies research, etc. When we're not being prescriptive about what that is. So what we're going to do now is take 10 minutes. And just to look back through the Padlet look back through the chat, give you some time to read through all of that. And add your thoughts in the chat, add your thoughts in the Padlet about what's already there, evidence and resources that can help us which is column five. And what might we like, what might we want to commission what sort of project ideas would do you have things that might be able to fund to tackle some of these problems that's Padlet column six will take up to 10 minutes to do that. And then we'll come back to discuss all of that so really specific really practical. Let's see what everyone comes up. So if you have any room for your contributions. What we'll do is quickly run through what everyone has put down. I'll then go to our discussants first see if they've got any brief reflections on what we've seen and if anyone from the wider group that we've got on the call today would like to say anything about please do use the raise hand tool which I think should be under reactions and we'll see if we can hear from you as well and of course do feel free to contribute using the chat as well. And so seeing what we've had suggested and we've got from Elcina in the chat and teachers and learning how to teach people and how to learn to use these various tools and start from assuming that people don't know very much and all are slightly afraid of technology. So if you want to as you want to teach and learn at the same time and then work out and the rewards for teachers and learners equally and standard templates might be a never solution as well. And if we go to the Padlet and of course people have been sharing lots of resources throughout the civic tech surgery today which is great. So in the Padlet column number five we've got a report from Code for Africa on inaccessibility is everywhere, how we are tackling accessibility and civil tech. We've got those resources from policy as well opening doors to people with disabilities, and why inclusion is not just an add on. We've got a link to the tablet community or community tablet project. We've got some resources from catalyst on digital inclusion. We've got civic user testing inclusive usability testing as a model and various things there. We've got accessibility resources in the civic tech field guide collection. We've got some helpful resources for web AM. We've got another link to common technical accessibility issues with selected UK websites as well. And there's a link to a blog from gov.uk where they talk about accessibility. In fact, the Cabinet officer in the UK has published a review of accessibility public sector websites as well. And let's have a look at Padlet column six if there's one thing that take action that could commission to help you with accessibility challenges what would it be. I'm sure you'll be able to add to this through the rest of the day as well even when we're off the call, but let's see what we've got so far and testing approaches across diverse societies across the world focus on inclusivity across a wide spectrum. University outreach fellowship program or training targeting female students, a toolkit, including what accessibility means, top tips to make impactful changes, funders, coders you want to help, etc. I think that might summarize a few of the other things that we're about to see as well as we've got case studies showcasing how to become or build an accessible civic tech initiative. And the recognizes accessibility issues which could include success stories challenges, how an organization use specific tools to become accessible. I thought this one might come out how to get grantors to put accessibility in their grants. We've got learning for content writers and researchers to have how to communicate simply in multiple languages, guides, tools and resources and accessibility development for a short list of software devs with experience making the sites and tools accessible, higher and volunteers. Identify best practice other examples of civic tech projects which are accessible and broadly used whether that's inherent or accidental other examples which have made effective changes to what they're doing to make themselves more accessible. And can we review the state of civic education in schools which countries are doing this well is there a disconnect between what's taught and what happens in real life. Identify funding opportunities who wants to fund work in this area, some really good suggestions there. I wonder if any of our discussions want to add any reflections any comments any thoughts, or even any ideas to any of that. Put your hand up or otherwise, make yourselves known if so, we'll go to get a mark first. Sure. So I think those are really really solid ideas, and they do make a lot of sense. I'll just start by saying that it all begins with a conversation and I want to give like a mini case study with the work that I did for code for all which I'm sure is an organization that most of us are familiar with I saw Lauren in the chat earlier. I don't know if she's still around but she can she can confirm this. You know, we had a conversation on accessibility that was completely unrelated to the project that we ended up doing but it was just a conversation on what gaps exist, what's possible. And that led to code for all working with the National Democratic Institute and I to make the code for all summit from last year 2021, like more accessible to everyone so this was kind of done in the months leading up to the summit. So that conversation led to a donor actually committing funding for a project that was focused on accessibility built on through this other thing so we work together with Lauren and Sophia and and Mar and nonzo, and we just, you know, put in place like some of my best practices just to make sure that everybody was included in the code for all summit. So we had like, as you have today like captioning we had sign language interpreters for some of the sessions. You know we provided transcripts afterwards which I believe you're doing as well. We ensure that all the YouTube videos that we have that were both pre recorded as well as recordings of actual sessions had subtitles in them. And one of the things that we also did was we. So we've already seen the universal access guide that code for Africa developed. So we then did a version of that for code for all so they also have this resource that they can share with organizations from around the world and that's, that's kind of how you go about it you kind of don't you don't start with like, you know, at the various highest level sometimes it just starts with like a conversation on what the gaps on what's possible, and then that leads down the road to like further opportunities and perhaps when funding and just getting donors. So, and that's something that actually happened you can read about it on course website they wrote about the stuff that we did. And, and yeah, and so that's my advice to everyone who's kind of looking to change how the organization approaches accessibility is just start by talking about you start by giving examples of other people are doing within your space. And that kind of helps people know that there are gaps to fill and there is like possibility to do better. That's a brilliant example. Thank you, Mark. Any other discussions want to come in on any of that. I mean, I want to make a small point there Gavin, and I think I, I think what we just say is extremely important. What we need to do also is to do more learning as much as possible, figure out that even we as an organization as civic tech, the way we approach our document our engagement. It's enough around elicit engagement with across a range of people I mean, how do we ensure that our documents are available to people who have visual challenges, how do we ensure our documents appeal to people who also have a form of disability. I also think that it looks like it always looks as if it's an extra button that we have to carry. But no, it should be an all inclusive strategy right from the get go. So in the way we're from in conversation is as much as possible we think in my inclusion in language and use of technology is our engagement. I think when we talks about people living with disabilities we also must be deliberate from the planning, because it looks that we just want to ship the product and one of which the massive scale of people, and we just don't figure we don't realize that there's a very small group that also matters and without us not being in everybody alone can really even inspire the change that we want to see. So I think I would just, I would just take it at that point that we need to not just be hard up elements in our, in our, in our list, it needs to be just integrated fully in the strategy from the get go. Thanks. Brilliant. Thank you. And just to say if anyone else on the call does want to reflect on any of this, and do you raise your hand and we'll hear from you as well. But it. I just want to also add my voice to what my colleagues have said. Let's also keep sharing the resources that we have in our networks, what we have shared now. And today let's share even more. I know there are more others that we have let's share them and when we share them, let's go ahead to read them and explore what is in those resources let's not just share and we say we clap our hands and we say all the event was good people shared but then we don't open the resources and we read them. Can we read the resources, you know, I just had you mention about our new resource that has been shared from policy, inclusion, not just an add on. It is a very simple resource to read to utilize very simple language, very beautiful case studies, very beautiful visual so if people can go ahead to share and then we read and we utilize in our networks. That will be good. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you. And Laura, do you want to say anything or you don't have to. I just really enjoyed the conversation and yeah, lots to read and continue to think about and so yeah mostly just thank you it was a pleasure to be here and hear all the fabulous perspectives and see the great work that was going on in the board as well. Thank you. It doesn't look like anyone else from the wider group wants to say anything do feel free to add any further contributions to the chat and the pamphlet. So just for the last few minutes what I'm going to do is just share my screen quickly. I mentioned I mentioned the action lab a few times so this is really just to summarize where we go after what I think has been a really productive couple of hours and really interesting explorations of challenges and possible solutions. Again today has been civic tech surgery which has been exploring some of those issues what comes next is an action lab, which addresses the question what would help the civic global civic tech community address common accessibility challenges. So the action lab, which is basically a small working group and will be convened after this surgery. So today we'll work together to commission some work to help address challenges I mentioned that there is two and a half thousand US dollars available for us to commission some sort of project which could be events it could be research it could be case studies it could be a number of things that you've already suggested on the board. And anyone can apply to join that action lab, and we will have details of that on the tick tech mailing list I'm sure if you're here today you're probably already signed up to that. But if not make sure that you do on the tick tech lab website you should be able to sign up to the mailing list there, and we'll let you know when applications to join that action lab will open and when they will close. And then as I said then we'll be funding available and to do some work that is commissioned by the action lab so we'll have the action lab meet. They will think about something that we would like to commission, and then we'll also make everybody aware of that commissioning process and for people to be able to bid to that for that for that work as well. And of course Gemma has put the mailing list sign up link in the chat so make sure that you're signed up to that. And I think, in a sense that's it unless anybody has anything else that they would like to comment on anything they'd like to add anything they'd like to ask. And as I said we'll keep the padlets up. We will be writing at minutes of today's event, you will be able to watch a recording of this as well, and we will keep all of you up to date on the action application process if you want to join it, and then the commissioning process if you'd be interested in doing some of the work. And when will the minutes come? When will they be uploaded? Gemma do we have a sense of how quickly we'll be able to do that? Probably early next week at some point. Brilliant, thank you. Yes, keep keep an eye on the mailing list and on the website. All that remains for me to say is thank you to all of you for coming along and such a valuable discussion and particularly to our fantastic discussions really insightful contributions that I think sparked lots of ideas and the rest of us as well so thank you to them and a big thank you to all of you. Hopefully see you at an action lab or another civic tech situation. Thank you very much.