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.
Civics through the lens of efficacy. What can individuals do to influence their communities, their societies and their nations?
What can you do when residents are suffering from ‘consultation fatigue’, with a low sense of efficacy due to lack of change? A slide deck.
When 90% of a petition site’s users are ‘lurkers’, it is harder to claim outcomes are representative. Slide deck.
How do you make the Mexican government become a platform for innovation? Running through Reboot’s theory of change and outcomes. A slide deck.
Three cases of citizen participation through technology and three different research methods used to understand impact. A slide deck.
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.
Slides from the Accountability Lab, looking at the challenges around getting young folk to adopt civic tech initiatives.
Looking more deeply into the impact of low-cost, low-risk online actions. A slide deck.
A look at civic tech that has facilitated two-way interaction between representatives and citizens. A slide deck.
The chasm between the digital haves and the have-nots has never been more evident. Are we all missing the point?
First findings from a project to bolster trust in the political system and mainstream media, through the use of transparency.
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.
Members of Facebook’s Civic Engagement team run through their democratic bolt-on to the social media site, Voting Plan. A slide deck.
The Open Government Partnership is perhaps the most prominent international effort to connect citizens and governments through the use of technology.
Audrey Tang, Minister for Digital, oversaw Taiwan’s transformation into one of the most open and participatory administrations in the world.
Using Decidim Barcelona’s Open Data API to analyse the political process of participatory democracy in the city.
EngageTech, not just online engagement, is critical for representative democracy. How are governments now designing for digital democracy? Slide deck.
Exploring the use of Bootlegger, a synchronous participatory media tool, to capture everyday stories, contributing to the production of a neighbourhood plan.
Governments seeking to harness existing communication trends also must grapple with the additional constraints that come with adapting to these rather inflexible platforms.
The interested bystander is an individual who is civically aware, but not civically active.
This paper assesses the impact of a design process to understand root causes of anti-government populism, and the means of reversing its spread.
This paper argues that mySociety’s contact-your-representative service seems not to generate high levels of interactivity between citizens and the elected; and is often used for purposes not intended by its makers nor necessarily appreciated by the elected.
Before you build internet-dependent civic tech, makes sure your intended audience has good data coverage – and other learnings from Nigeria.
The appropriation by the government of civic tech tools created a dynamic of change inside government which was largely unexpected.
A platform that allows citizens to send free, anonymous messages to local government officials, reducing the cost and increasing the efficiency of communication about public services.
Governments have a wealth of knowledge about the needs of their citizens. Civic tech organisations often have innovative technologies that can meet those needs.
What value is created through online citizen engagement by using the community psychology Sense of Community theory to examine the behavioural aspects of eParticipation?
Lessons learned from implementing civic engagement processes using web-based platforms for citizens to share ideas for innovating public services and urban plans.
With over 120 Citizen Budgets implemented across North America, Open North have undertaken research on the impact of the tool in different cities.
Roma Capitale expects not only to boost innovation policies at local level but also to improve the civic approach to the city.
Consul’s participation software is used by 90 governments in 18 different countries, giving citizens a voice in decisions about their own neighbourhoods. Slide deck.
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.
What happens when a seemingly successful initiative starts to question its Theory of Change?
Technology has brought many opportunities to change the way that governments and citizens can interact – but it has also brought challenges.
The keynote of TICTeC 2019 and an inspiring look at what citizen-led activism and direct engagement can achieve – even when things look hopeless.
Every year, the city of Paris puts aside 100 million Euros to fund projects chosen by its own inhabitants.
French MP Paula Forteza joins the dots between the discontent shown by the gilets jaunes demonstrators, and the increased empowerment fostered by participatory democracy tools.
The influences and tensions that shape the civic tech ecosystem, using local governments as a case study to see how tools are used and perceived by public institutions.
Panel discussion. With examples from Latin America used as a starting point, insights are applicable for civic tech practitioners around the world.
Learn how US civic tech organisations are deploying a variety of means to get citizens engaged.
Looking at two projects which used civic tech to better engage with public: design services to be used by local people; and collecting opinions about autonomous vehicles. A notes document.
Looking at four intersecting crises hitting deprived areas of the UK. A slide deck.
Sigurlaug Anna Jóhannsdóttir is a Democracy advisor at the City of Reykjavik Council in Iceland.
g0v began as a hacktivist group, and went on to shape Taiwan’s digital policy. One project sought to increase online civic participation. Who could be better positioned to do this work? But things didn’t go as smoothly as anticipated.
Women and sexual minorities are frequent victims of online gender-based violence. But we are yet to fully understand the impact that this has on women across Africa, and on how they access civic technology.
Transparency International UK’s Promise to Practice project tracks and advocates for the implementation of governments’ anti-corruption commitments made at the 2016 London Anti-Corruption Summit.
Technologies such as constituent databases are helpful for collecting, storing, and analysing constituent communication, but they promote the datafication of citizen information.
What should the post-COVID world look like? Civocracy wanted to find out about the hopes and dreams of the French public — but also, what they were willing to sacrifice to make the change happen.
Across South Africa, municipalities recognise that community engagement in local policy-making is crucial for effective governance, but they nonetheless struggle with low and unrepresentative participation.
Researchers invited 150 constituents that were representative of the district to a week-long, single topic, online forum with their Member of Congress.
FutureGov was commissioned by Blackpool Council to deliver a neighbourhood assembly on climate change. But Blackpool’s population is in the top 10% most deprived in England, and they had to recognise that there were significant barriers to online participation.
What are the barriers preventing people from engaging in planning? How do people want to participate? What does good and effective engagement look like?
Citizen Space Geospatial incorporates interactive mapping and geospatial data throughout the digital engagement process — and it will have broad-reaching implications for the field of public participation.
Generally, contributing to OSM’s mapping is regarded as a form of volunteer service. However, recent analyses suggest that experience of mapping could be as important as the data contributed.
One of the key barriers to housing development is public understanding of development proposals and the true impacts these might have. Improving understanding of development proposals is as important as improving the user experience and opportunity to participate in the planning process.
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.
In 2016, the Berlin City Senate released its official 3D city model as Open Data.
The Ideation Lab converted the model to work within Minecraft, a computer game especially popular with children and young adults.
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.
Video footage of TICTeC@Taipei conference session by French Digital Agency, a governmental agency overseen by the Ministry for the Economy.
Questions from the floor for this TICTeC@Taipei session’s panelists.
This discussion, in Chinese, was livestreamed and can now be watched as a video.
Questions from the audience, answered by the panel at TICTeC@Taipei.
Putting the capital’s unused commercial properties to use as ‘meanwhile spaces’. Slide deck.
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.
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.
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.
Audience questions for the sessions in this section of TICTeC@Taipei, covering participation tech for Taiwan, France and Hong Kong.
Over to the audience for questions across the five sessions that made up this strand of TICTeC@Taipei.
A look at how organisations which support marginalised communities use and request information from public bodies, what the information unlocks and how to better support this use of access to information.
A small charity was able to gather significant data around councils and carbon reduction, by sending mass FOI requests and using volunteers’ help to analyse them.
Some examples of how to leverage mySociety sites, including WhatDoTheyKnow, to help fight the climate emergency.
Prior to Brexit, one person used FOI to understand more about plans around the Irish border – something that did, indeed, prove to be a big problem after the event.
Discover the arguments made in favour of FOI – they might be applicable elsewhere.
Examples from nine countries of the effects of restricting Access to Information.
Surveys across all mySociety’s sites, including WhatDoTheyKnow, allowed these researchers to better understand the habits and motives of their users.
A Show and Tell from Sara at GONG about their learnings from their data visualisations mentorship with ForSet in Georgia