 My name is Matt Stempeck, and I'm the Director of Civic Technology at a new group at Microsoft called Technology and Civic Engagement. And what we do is we work in a handful of major U.S. cities and partner with existing Civic Tech communities in each place to use technology for shared challenges in the public good. So together with Mika Sifri and Erin Simpson at Civic Hall, we've created a field guide to Civic Tech. And that's four things. It's first just a simple definition. Civic Tech is the use of technology for the public good. That's something you can share at a party to say what you do. And then we've gone much deeper. So we've provided, we've looked at the hundreds of examples of Civic Tech out in the world and put them in categories based on what they do, what the core technical function is. But we also realize that Civic Tech is about more than the tech, right? It's the social processes of how we actually organize ourselves to create impact. And so we looked at those social processes and inventoried those. And then lastly, we just asked some research questions of, you know, how do we analyze this space? How do we get at the meaning of the work that we're doing? And how do we kind of look at those cross-cutting questions? To me, impact means that you're actually creating the change that you wish to create in the world and that you have good reason to believe that that change is happening because of your work. And my society's rigorous analysis of their own products and work has actually been really inspirational to me in considering impact measurement. So Microsoft's funding my society's research with governments who are involved in Civic Tech around the US because it really gets at a lot of the questions that everyone in this space and at this conference are considering of sustainability and scale of Civic Tech. We're excited to see what role governments play in the kind of broader partnerships that Civic Tech involve between nonprofits and communities and academics. And looking at the kind of lifeline of a Civic Tech project, you know, which of those different sectors play what role at different times in the building and development and deployment and ongoing iteration of a project. We're really hoping to learn, you know, what role governments can have in that. There are a lot of exciting Civic Technologies that continue to catch my eye every time they come out as new technology continues to advance. But I think at the broader level, one of the most exciting things about Civic Technology is that it's given us an excuse to reinvest in our public institutions and redesign how we work. And if the only thing Civic Tech does is make us excited to combine our efforts together and work together again, then that would be a major success. So I'm a believer that we can do just about everything better than we currently do it. And I think Civic Tech helps us think about how we actually design, you know, the processes of being a citizen and of contributing to our society. And that's a useful thing as we think about, you know, the challenges ahead in the 21st century and also the opportunities that Tech allows us. I think we need Civic Tech to actually work better as a society. So my motivation for coming to Tech was twofold. I'm inspired by the work that everyone's doing and just love to learn and I've already been doing that today. But I was also terrified, thanks to Tom Steinberg, that, you know, we need to really consider the impact we're having in this work. And, you know, Tom compares it to 19th century medicine, I believe, and how, you know, decades were lost to thinking that you're doing good and actually maybe not having any effect or actually doing harm. And that to me has been a major motivator of making sure that the work we're doing from a rigorous methodology kind of perspective is having the effect we intend. One metric for measuring the impact of a meaningful conference is just the conversation tests where you're talking to someone and having a great conversation, but you also, within your shot, can hear several other great conversations happening and you want to be part of all of them. And that's already happened here at TicTac where every single conversation, every breakout session is extremely relevant to our work.