How do you know if your work is making an impact?
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mySociety and OpenUp worked closely with SPOON and the Átlátszónet Foundation, both organisations focus on improving access to government information, to explore a critical but often overlooked question: How do you know if your projects are actually making a difference?
In this insightful TICTeC session, SPOON and the Átlátszónet Foundation share their hands-on experiences, practical methodologies, and key findings from their efforts to —for the first time— track and measure the impact of their projects.
Q&A for ‘Fostering usage of pro-democracy technology’ TICTeC 2025 session
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Question and answer session for the presenters of the following TICTeC 2025 presentations:
– Changing the argument for using civic technology – Rodney Schwartz (Delib, UK)
– Solving climate data deserts on the municipal level: Climate Diaries– Giulio Carvalho (Diários do Clima, Brazil)
– Dream Con: how civic tech puts citizens at the centre of constitutional reform – Thanisara Ruangdej (GG) (WeVis, Thailand)
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Changing the argument for using civic technology
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The moral and ethical case for Pro-Democracy Technology has been made for many years. Despite decades of effort, little has changed. The argument that politicians must “do this because it’s the right thing to do” has not been successful. The rise of far-right populist parties across the world implores us to consider a different approach.
In this TICTeC 2025 presentation by Rodney Schwartz, discover the outcomes of his research and interviews with 80 European P/PPs and PDT suppliers — the first time such a large group had been surveyed.
Access Info Impact Award
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A video about Access Info’s Impact award 2024
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Can robots lobby? AI, democracy and political persuasion
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Lobbying is a negative influence often connected to corruption, secrecy and poor behaviour. But can AI change things for the better, improving the abilities of those who monitor lobbying, or helping raise awareness of problems? Conversely, will AI bring increased powers for political persuaders, perhaps even introducing the robot lobbyist?
At TICTeC 2024, Ben Worthy from Birkbeck College presented a paper asking how AI can change lobbying for better or worse. It looks in turn at how AI can allow different groups to do the same things but better; and do new things. It draws on examples from the UK and US, as well as wider academic studies, to predict what may happen, and offer a framework.
Civic tech and journalism: impact through collaboration
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Impact beyond a project’s runtime depends on embedding stakeholder interests from the start, to ensure uptake after a project is finished. Through European and Japanese examples of citizen-sensed data and journalistic storytelling as well as audience engagement, this TICTeC 2024 presentation by Christoph Raetzsch (Aarhus University) underlines the need for collaborations between civic tech activists and journalists.
Reflections on the challenges of practising digital democratic innovation
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Critical discussion of digital innovation in democracy typically points to gaps between aspirations and realities. Despite initial optimism about the potential of new technologies, research has tended to be much more pessimistic. At TICTeC 2024, Matt Ryan from the University of Southampton presented research exploring the space between naïve optimism and cynical pessimism by asking us to reflect on digital tools’ ability to enhance democracy in practice.
Data for democracy: a Canadian perspective on how governments can leverage civil society to hold big tech accountable
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The SAMbot project uses machine learning to evaluate abusive content sent to Canadian political candidates during elections. Bill-63, a new draft bill from Canada’s federal government which incorporates an Online Harms Act, may be the key to supporting research into how digital technologies are affecting our social fabric.
This TICTeC 2024 presentation from Sabreena Delhon and
Alex MacIsaac explores Canada’s recent data transparency efforts from the position of researchers at the Samara Centre for Democracy, and considers the potential for the new legislation to make a meaningful contribution to safeguarding Canadian and global democratic norms.
Using Access to Information to Support Social Change
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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.
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Engaging for the future: what do the public want from engagement, and how can digital deliver?
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What are the barriers preventing people from engaging in planning? How do people want to participate? What does good and effective engagement look like?
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Fireside chat: Hollie Russon Gilman
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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.
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What does the African feminist future of civic technology look like?
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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.
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Pledge trackers as catalysts for accountability
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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.
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From citizens to data points: the datafication of citizen engagement
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Technologies such as constituent databases are helpful for collecting, storing, and analysing constituent communication, but they promote the datafication of citizen information.
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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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mySociety research: evidence and impact
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TICTEC Local 2019 was kicked off with an overarching look at the meaning, evidence and impact of local digital. Slide deck.
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Creating a cross-local government user research plan
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A slide deck, in which Hackney and Croydon Councils present experimental approaches to user research.
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The political construction of accountability keywords: lessons from action-research
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Reflections on the political origins and implications of terms in the accountability field, addressing their invention, translation, appropriation and circulation in different contexts.
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The personal and the public: protecting sensitive data in huge datasets
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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.
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WriteToThem: an analysis
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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.
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Crowdsourcing subjective perceptions of neighbourhood disorder: interpreting bias in open data
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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.
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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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Civic tech in Nigeria: what works?
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Before you build internet-dependent civic tech, makes sure your intended audience has good data coverage – and other learnings from Nigeria.
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Making waves: tech for water in Sierra Leone
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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.
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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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Exploring sense of community for online citizen engagement
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What value is created through online citizen engagement by using the community psychology Sense of Community theory to examine the behavioural aspects of eParticipation?
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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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If you build it, will they come?
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Anna Ścisłowska argues that data is not enough to engage citizens — they need stories, crafted by journalists and analysts.
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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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The interested bystander, in context
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The interested bystander is an individual who is civically aware, but not civically active.
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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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Findings of the Taiwan Open Government Report
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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.
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Taiwan Open Government report release forum
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This discussion, in Chinese, was livestreamed and can now be watched as a video.
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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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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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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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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 sociodynamics of online political behaviour: the case of lapetition.be
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When 90% of a petition site’s users are ‘lurkers’, it is harder to claim outcomes are representative. Slide deck.
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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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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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Mapping slacktivism: patterns of low-threshold civic participation on the internet
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Looking more deeply into the impact of low-cost, low-risk online actions. A slide deck.
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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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Research into mySociety’s online Freedom of Information platform, Alaveteli
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In what circumstances, if any, can the Freedom of Information tools mySociety builds be shown to have measurable impacts on the ability of citizens to exert power over under-performing institutions?
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How many people use Freedom of Information?
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Trying to understand the percentage of the population who use FOI.
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Exploring information about Freedom of Information in the UK
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Discover statistics on Freedom of Information in UK central government and in Scotland.
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Mapping the online Access To Information network in Europe
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Research on running an Access to Information requesting website in Europe, looking at the challenges faced by organisations, strengths and success stories.
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WhatDoTheyKnow used for research on FOI refusals
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Link to an article about best and worst practices in FOI refusals.
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What People Want To Know on WhatDoTheyKnow
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Research into the topics of FOI requests sent through WhatDoTheyKnow.
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Do authorities respond faster by email or through an FOI website?
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Research showing that online portals result in faster responses from authorities.
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The Third Sector and Online Citizen Empowerment: the Case of mySociety
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Surveys across all mySociety’s sites, including WhatDoTheyKnow, allowed these researchers to better understand the habits and motives of their users.
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Assessing the Impact of Alaveteli
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Researchers Savita Bailur and Tom Longley answer this question: “In what circumstances, if any, can the FOI tools mySociety builds be shown to have measurable impacts on the ability of citizens to exert power over underperforming institutions?”
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