Call for proposals: driving impactful societal change

In one sentence

TICTeC Action Lab #5 is looking for an individual, organisation or joint team to produce a piece of work to help the global civic tech community do work which drives impactful societal change and enables people to coordinate action so that it’s greater than the sum of its parts, in the area of climate action.

About TICTeC Action Lab #5

As part of the TICTeC Labs programme, mySociety convened the TICTeC Action Lab #5 working group in order to take ideas raised at Civic Tech Surgery #5 forward, and decide together what piece of work would be useful to commission to help civic tech to encourage people to change and coordinate their behaviour in ways that can cause significant changes in society, with a particular focus on climate action.

The TICTeC Action Lab #5 working group has six members from across the world, who between them have many years of experience working on civic tech. You can read more about Action Lab #5 members here.

About this project

TICTeC Action Lab #5 members agreed to commission a piece of work that will help with using civic tech to encourage people to change and coordinate their behaviour in ways that can cause significant changes in society. We expect the project to focus on climate change, as per the original Civic Tech Surgery, but we are interested in work that would be applicable in other areas of civic tech.

We are looking for proposals involving working with college/ university students or from students based at institutions of higher learning/ higher education.

Some possible ways this could work are:

  • run an online hackathon or challenge for students to come up with new solutions, ensuring that there are plans to turn the output into something tangible
  • create a community-led learning group (or bring together an existing network as a learning group), involving students, to tackle specific issues on climate change 
  • an organisation taking on students on a mentorship/ apprenticeship/ fellowship model to investigate a particular issue or to do work such as e.g. collecting, digitising data, talking to local governments – the funds could be split into microgrants to support a number of students
  • a journalism organisation taking on/ mentoring a student to investigate and report on a global issue or in under-reported regions, for example looking at an issue of climate accountability for local government
  • an advocacy or other organisation to convene student activists or student run organisations to submit journalistic or investigative material for publishing

Preference will be given to projects based in or strongly involving participants from the Global South. Please think about and describe how the work could be maintained beyond the initial eight-week project to have a long-lasting impact – e.g. could this initial project be a pilot for a longer-term scheme?

There is up to $3760 USD (inclusive of taxes) available for this work.

Applications

Applications are now closed. Applications are being reviewed by the TICTeC Labs team at mySociety and the TICTeC Labs Steering Group, and applicants will be notified of the status of their application no later than 9th November 2022. We expect work to start around late November and to be completed within eight weeks of the start date – please provide a clear and realistic timescale in your application.

What happens after the project

We intend to publish the work you produce, credited to you, on the TICTeC and mySociety website, licensed under a Creative Commons licence. We may make some light edits (beyond proofreading) before we publish. You will be free to make publicly available your own version should you wish to, and any other material based on the research you conducted. The project will then be disseminated by TICTeC Action Lab members, the TICTeC Labs Steering group, and the TICTeC community to ensure it’s used as much as possible. 

mySociety will convene a ‘report back’ event at the end of the TICTeC Labs programme to discuss how the programme went and the work commissioned by the programme and its participants. Authors of commissioned work will be invited to attend to present their work.

Any questions?

Please send any queries or questions to tictec@mysociety.org