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?
Civics through the lens of efficacy. What can individuals do to influence their communities, their societies and their nations?
When 90% of a petition site’s users are ‘lurkers’, it is harder to claim outcomes are representative. Slide deck.
Civic tech started as an idea that became a community that became a buzzword. Now, it is a market.
Slide deck.
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.
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.
Mobile technology has quickly become pervasive in civic tech – but there is much about its impact that we don’t yet fully understand.
GovLab launch OGRX, an online hub for quantitative and qualitative research on innovations in governance.
An overview of the use of technology to enhance democratic processes, highlighting how they have often failed to meet the expectations of their time.
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.
Anna Ścisłowska argues that data is not enough to engage citizens — they need stories, crafted by journalists and analysts.
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?
The interested bystander is an individual who is civically aware, but not civically active.
Reflections on the political origins and implications of terms in the accountability field, addressing their invention, translation, appropriation and circulation in different contexts.
Release of a public dataset means treading the balance between utility and protection of individuals. This session explains tools that help with PII detection, and concepts like k-anonymity and l-diversity.
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.
Datasets produced as a result of people’s online activities offer new lines of enquiry in social science, in particular for concepts related to crime and disorder.
Looking more deeply into the use, and users, of mySociety’s street fault reporting platform FixMyStreet, and the contact-your-representative website WriteToThem.
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.
Discover the four common reasons that civic tech projects fail, gleaned from analysis of 800 tools, apps, platforms, and companies.
Before you build internet-dependent civic tech, makes sure your intended audience has good data coverage – and other learnings from Nigeria.
Water in Sierra Leone is a complicated issue. On the one hand, availability is high; on the other, access is unequally distributed. Civic tech can help, but it’s not the whole solution.
A discussion on how to increase the ways that useful knowledge about civic tech gets created, shared, and incorporated into our projects.
What value is created through online citizen engagement by using the community psychology Sense of Community theory to examine the behavioural aspects of eParticipation?
TICTEC Local 2019 was kicked off with an overarching look at the meaning, evidence and impact of local digital. Slide deck.
A slide deck, in which Hackney and Croydon Councils present experimental approaches to user research.
Hollie Russon Gilman is particularly interested in revitalising American democracy, local innovation, and the opportunities and challenges of digital technologies to enhance governance and public policy.
An overview of what tools existed for democracy in 2020, by mySociety’s researcher Alex Parsons.
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.
mySociety discusses their work comparing different systems of regulation in place within the UK’s devolved nations, and share parts of their upcoming research comparing systems of regulation across Europe.
Latin America is experiencing a significant change in terms of government and citizen relationships as well as changes in government administration due to the electoral cycle in the region.
What are the barriers preventing people from engaging in planning? How do people want to participate? What does good and effective engagement look like?
Now that the Civic Technology sector has matured, we can take a step back and assess its worth.
Open Culture Foundation finds that there are significant structural issues at stake which, if left unfixed, will leave the concept of Open Government as little more than a beautiful slogan for Taiwan.
This discussion, in Chinese, was livestreamed and can now be watched as a video.
Alex Parsons, the Research Associate at mySociety, gives an overview of tools for democracy as things stood in 2020.
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.