TICTeC2015 Keynote: ‘Hey! It’s time to check your tech’
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What if your civic tech had no impact in the real world? Dr. Boulianne talks us through an analysis of more than 80 studies, because isn’t it time we checked that the internet actually has an effect on civic and political life?

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Opportunity and threat: experimenting with Mzalendo
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Research on how to obtain more users, what information appeals to those users, and how to prompt them to engage with their institutions and politicians on issues that matter to them.

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It starts with a click
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Civics through the lens of efficacy. What can individuals do to influence their communities, their societies and their nations?

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The politics of civic tech platforms
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Civic tech started as an idea that became a community that became a buzzword. Now, it is a market.
Slide deck.

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Approaching research as a small team of developers
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The OpenAustralia Foundation run seven projects with just three full time and one part time staff. When do they find time for research?
Slide deck with speaker notes.

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Code for All: comparative models across borders
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Looking at different setups of the volunteer network across the globe. A slide deck.

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What counts as civic tech success for Africa?
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A donor’s perspective on how to think about impact in the civic tech space in Africa. Slide deck.

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The haves and the have nots: is civic tech impacting the people who need it most?
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The digital divide means that a lot of people never even see those fancy civic tech interventions. Looking into the data behind the impact claims.

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It’s there for you now use it: making sure young people see the point of civic tech
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Slides from the Accountability Lab, looking at the challenges around getting young folk to adopt civic tech initiatives.

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ICT and governance in East Africa: preliminary study findings from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania
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A look at civic tech that has facilitated two-way interaction between representatives and citizens. A slide deck.

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The digital divide: why civic tech leaves 3 billion people behind
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The chasm between the digital haves and the have-nots has never been more evident. Are we all missing the point?

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From the funders
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Funders discuss what they look for when choosing which civic tech projects to support.

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Mobile civic tech: encouraging accountability or increasing inequality?
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Mobile technology has quickly become pervasive in civic tech – but there is much about its impact that we don’t yet fully understand.

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GovLab demonstrate The Open Governance Research Exchange (OGRX)
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GovLab launch OGRX, an online hub for quantitative and qualitative research on innovations in governance.

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(Un)civic tech?
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An overview of the use of technology to enhance democratic processes, highlighting how they have often failed to meet the expectations of their time.

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Political matchmaking online: changing the electorate?
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Research into the impact of voting advice applications, which help citizens choose which candidate to opt for, by offering an explicit ranking of viable options.

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Look who’s talking
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The Open Government Partnership is perhaps the most prominent international effort to connect citizens and governments through the use of technology.

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RTI platforms as a force for positive change
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RTI (also known as FOI) laws create a new type of relationship between government and civil society. Fumega and Scrollini argue that civil society-led FOI portals have affected RTI regimes in a positive way.

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Randomised control trials: lessons for civic tech
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What have these powerful tools taught us about state capacity, government accountability, and responsiveness? And what does the RCT literature tell us about the use of technology to improve public services and galvanise citizen groups?

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Automating feedback – the answer for small civic tech teams?
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We all know it’s crucial, but if you’re a tiny team of developers, it’s hard to dedicate resources to study the impact of your work.

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The impacts of civic tech… on the people who make it
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When we talk about the impact of civic technology, we tend to look only at the impact on the end users. But what about the impact it has on the makers — the individuals who become creators and change agents?

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The state of civic tech: beneath the surface
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Looking beneath the surface at the state of civic tech by tracing the dependency graph — the links between software and its constituent parts.

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Designing for digital democracy
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EngageTech, not just online engagement, is critical for representative democracy. How are governments now designing for digital democracy? Slide deck.

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Data collaboratives: an assessment of new ways to use data for civic impact
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While the impact of open government data has become more understood, little is known about the practice, potential and impact of sharing proprietary datasets to solve civic problems.

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Blockchain for civic change: can it deliver?
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A panel offers insights into Blockchain, the much-hyped technology, widely heralded as the answer to a vast array of public problems.

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Design for civic participation
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One of mySociety’s designers takes us through the main civic tech product design lessons he’s learnt while working at the organisation.

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Design principles for re-engaging disaffected citizens
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This paper assesses the impact of a design process to understand root causes of anti-government populism, and the means of reversing its spread.

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What research has mySociety been doing internally?
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Looking more deeply into the use, and users, of mySociety’s street fault reporting platform FixMyStreet, and the contact-your-representative website WriteToThem.

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The problem with impact measurement in civic tech
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Just how meaningful are the various types of impact measurements offered by civic tech startups, really? An honest look at what has value, and what counts for very little.

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Knowledge from failure: learnings from the Civic Tech Field Guide
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Discover the four common reasons that civic tech projects fail, gleaned from analysis of 800 tools, apps, platforms, and companies.

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Bridging the civic tech research divide
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A discussion on how to increase the ways that useful knowledge about civic tech gets created, shared, and incorporated into our projects.

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Words from Google: supporting the civic tech ecosystem
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Google’s commitment to the civic tech field, outlining why the search engine giant believes it to be of such critical importance in the current age.

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Two heads are better than one: working with governments
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Governments have a wealth of knowledge about the needs of their citizens. Civic tech organisations often have innovative technologies that can meet those needs.

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Donor forum: good practices to support civic tech
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A discussion between donors and civic tech organisations, to surface trends within the civic tech movement, explore shared objectives of scaling, and become sustainable.

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Seeing like a state: lessons from building an open data support team
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Technologiestiftung Berlin started with the hypothesis that the main obstacle for progress in Open Data was a lack of digital expertise in government. This turned out to be wrong.

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How volunteers engage with government
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Volunteers drive a large proportion of civic tech activity around the world. The community organisation efforts of the Code for America network have exponentially increased the influence and impact of civic tech ideals and reshaped public expectations and government culture.

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When civic tech collaborates with government: what works?
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In countries with more autocratic governments, traditional models are not effective at improving institutional performance, and impact on citizens is often very limited. ePaństwo are testing new models and already seeing promising outcomes.

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Civic tech impact: what doesn’t work?
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This workshop provided space to explore a less talked-about side to civic tech: the very real barriers to long-term impact.

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Investing in the future of civic tech
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A panel of funders dig in deep to the question of what grantmakers want to see before they invest in civic tech.

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Questioning impact: what if you find it lacking?
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What happens when a seemingly successful initiative starts to question its Theory of Change?

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Funding impactful civic tech in Latin America
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Fundación Avina worked with researchers to try to understand the evolution and impact of civic tech projects and the organisations that lead them.

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Scaling civic tech impact through the Open Government Partnership
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One of the key challenges facing civic tech initiatives is scaling: they often fail to achieve their full impact potential — not due to design issues, but a lack of an effective dissemination and scaling platform.

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The state of open data: research findings
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Key findings from the report (published in May 2019) and in particular, how they can be useful for the civic tech community.

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The civic tech timeline: a recent history
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The Civic Tech Field Guide has collected and mapped hundreds of civic tech initiatives. The result is a comprehensive timeline demonstrating over a decade of growth in our field.

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When civic tech matures: the issues that arise in long-running projects
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Running Civic Tech websites over a long period of time brings some unique challenges, not all of which are foreseeable when setting out.

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Engagement metrics for social impact
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A workshop exploring how to develop better metrics that can serve organisational missions, using two technology platforms for civic engagement.

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The impact of civic technology in Latin America
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Panel discussion. With examples from Latin America used as a starting point, insights are applicable for civic tech practitioners around the world.

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Seeing like a state: lessons from building an Open Data support team
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The ODIS project started with the hypothesis that the main obstacle for progress in Open Data was a lack of digital expertise in government. This turned out to be wrong.

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How to last in civic tech (especially now)
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Of the many live organisations listed in the Civic Tech Field Guide, only about 75 are more than ten years old. What are the factors that bring about such organisational longevity?

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Digital tools for democracy: what’s been built and where are the spaces?
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An overview of what tools existed for democracy in 2020, by mySociety’s researcher Alex Parsons.

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Find that charity: a tool to help find charities and improve charity data
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A big part of publishing high quality grants data is having good organisation identifiers. 360Giving helped develop “Find that Charity”, a tool for finding non-profit organisations.

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Don’t build it: a practical guide for those building civic tech
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Lessons learned from four years spent building Grassroot, a civic technology platform in South Africa.

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Public-private collaborations – how can civic tech work effectively with public and private institutions?
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A global panel mulls over the challenges of working on private-public civic tech projects, as well as their solutions and ideas to tackle these.

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Ensuring civic tech is accessible – how can we lead and popularise best practice?
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Civic tech tools must be accessible and inclusive if they are to truly help everyone. Practitioners from across the world share the challenges and their solutions and ideas to tackle these.

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Accessing quality information for civic tech success: how can we overcome barriers to accessing good data and documentation?
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Practitioners from around the world discuss the challenges of accessing quality data and information for civic tech projects, as well as their solutions and ideas to tackle these.

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Storytelling and reach: how can we amplify our successes beyond the civic tech community to evidence our impact through mainstream channels?
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During this Surgery, we discussed the challenges of amplifying civic tech projects and their successes through mainstream channels with practitioners from across the world, as well as their solutions and ideas to tackle these.

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What role for Civic Tech (and data) in mitigating the climate crisis?
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We know that civic technology can do things such as help citizens hold their representatives to account; present data and information about policy and decision making in more accessible ways; and get information to the right people. The next crucial step is to understand how this wealth of skills, experience and tools can be used in the most beneficial way to mitigate the climate crisis.

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Examples of civic technologies and their impacts
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Now that the Civic Technology sector has matured, we can take a step back and assess its worth.

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Fireside chat: Stephen King, Omidyar Network
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The Omidyar Network is one of the most significant benefactors for those working in Civic Tech. Through the Governance & Citizen Engagement initiative, it supports a broad range of organisations working in the US and around the world.

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How can civic tech reach more people? How can civic tech be more inclusive?
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Examples of technology projects that tackle digital exclusion. As a community, coders and activists must ensure that tools genuinely benefit the communities who need them most.

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Government led civic technology: successes and challenges
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Increasingly governments are innovating in the civic tech sphere. What are the advantages and disadvantages of citizen-to-government applications implemented by governments themselves?

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Impacts of leak sites
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Leak sites are web-based initiatives which usually employ encryption and anonymisation technologies for concealing the identity of whistleblowers.

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Impacts of civic tech projects in Pakistan
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Code for Pakistan’s applications have improved government efficiency and the experiences of hundreds of citizens who interact with government every day.

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Impacts of open data standards on transparency tools
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Most open data initiatives assume the provision of data by governments which will be used by a variety of sectors for the good of all. But for some, the promises of Open Data fall far short of the reality.

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The impacts of the SmartCity platform
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The Government of Andhra Pradesh aimed to bring 110 cities and towns online, with the goals of improving service delivery to citizens, moving to data-driven governance processes, improving revenues and increasing transparency and accountability.

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Impacts of ‘school chooser’ digital tools
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When the sole determinant of which school children attend is their residential address, it can produce a spiral of unequal schooling conditions that are difficult to remedy.

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Impacts and challenges of civic tech experiments in India
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Venkatesh Kannaiah speaks about Civic Tech experiments in India, including I Change My City and I Paid A Bribe.

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An analysis of ‘g0v’ for collaborative participation
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g0v is a distributed, civic hacker community in Taiwan. Its members collaborate to bridge the information gap between the government and citizens — and to enlighten and empower citizens to oversee the government.

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Accessibility ABCs: A practical toolkit for the global civic tech community
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Produced thanks to a TICTeC Labs grant, this guide is meant to be a resource to support the global civic tech community to make their work more accessible. It is available in Arabic, Spanish, French and English.

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Digital platform and training boost participation in rural Kyrgyzstan
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Produced thanks to a TICTeC Labs grant, this case study documents how the World Bank worked with the government to empower local communities to make decisions, facilitated by a digital platform.

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In China, popular social media platform is harnessed to increase participation
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Produced thanks to a TICTeC Labs grant, this case study documents how China’s Participation Center developed a “mini app” for the popular WeChat platform, and grew the number of participatory budgeting users in Chengdu city to more than 3 million.

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Participation must be designed to ‘leave no one behind’: Argentina case study
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Produced thanks to a TICTeC Labs grant, this case study documents how Rosario municipality makes their digital participatory budgeting tools accessible to individuals with visual disabilities.

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Chilean institute harnesses digital platform to engage young people as change agents
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Produced thanks to a TICTeC Labs grant, this case study documents how the Chilean government’s National Youth Institute used a digital platform, CitizenLab, to get young people involved in policy making.

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Training for Civic Tech Organisations on storytelling and reach
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Using a TICTeC Labs grant, Fundación Multitudes created a training course for civic tech organisations in how to get stories about their projects and successes into the mainstream media.

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Election Violence Tracker, Nigeria
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A TICTeC Labs grant allowed PolicyLab Africa to launch this project, an open-source reporting tool that enables citizens to document and report violent incidents during Nigeria’s elections.

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Digital tools for democracy: what’s been built and where are the spaces?
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Alex Parsons, the Research Associate at mySociety, gives an overview of tools for democracy as things stood in 2020.

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What is civic technology? How and why is mySociety measuring its impacts?
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Dr Rebecca Rumbul presents mySociety’s research projects which strive to evaluate the impacts (both positive and negative) of Civic Technologies in many countries worldwide.

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TICTeC closing: all you can CHANGE!
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The inspiring wrap-up session from TICTeC@Taipei, with words from representatives of the two organisations that ran the conference, mySociety and g0v.

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