What would help the global civic tech community to overcome common barriers to accessing quality information?
As part of the TICTeC Labs programme, on 24th March 2022 we convened a Civic Tech Surgery that brought together a group of civic tech practitioners and researchers from across the world. During the Surgery, attendees discussed common challenges in accessing good quality information and data for civic tech projects, some of the ways they’ve found to meet these challenges, and ideas for what might be missing.
You can find resources from this online event here, including minutes, a summary blog post, contributions from attendees, and the full recording.
Now the second part of the TICTeC Labs process kicks in as we convene an Action Lab, a global working group to decide on what to commission as a solution to issues raised at the Civic Tech Surgery.
The aim is to provide a practical solution that will help organisations running civic tech projects to be able to more easily access the information and data they need for their projects. There is a TICTeC Labs grant available to make this solution a reality.
The purpose of this Action Lab is to use the information gathered at the above Surgery to discuss and decide on a piece of work that would be most useful to produce in order to help the global civic tech community address common challenges of accessing good quality information/data for their projects.
The Action Lab will then help draw up terms of reference for this piece of work, and a TICTeC Labs grant (this could be up to $3760 USD) will be available to actually make the work a reality.
Common challenges identified at the Civic Tech Surgery were:
Data is often not in the right format to use digitally or is not machine-readable – documents have to be scanned and then digitised through OCR.
Officialdom/authorities can be problematic in a number of ways:
Even if the data is available, it can be too complex for a non-expert to understand.
Good open source code that exists might not be suitable for every country’s circumstances.
The below possible solutions to the above challenges were identified at the Surgery. These, and any others they see fit, will be discussed by Action Lab members to decide if any of them can be taken forward using the funding available:
You can see biographies of Action Lab #3 members here.
Action Lab #3 met on 1st June 2022. Below are the minutes from this meeting:
TICTeC Action Lab #3 members agreed to commission a piece of work that creates resources to help train organisations/ the public in accessing good quality data. The call for proposals is now open – deadline 28th July 2022.