Transcript of Rebecca Rumbul's presentation So I am on the complete opposite side of things to most of you. I work outside of government. I work for a civic tech organisation called mySociety. Has anyone actually heard of mySociety here? OK, good, cool. Great, a few people, thank you. You don't count. We're here with you. So we are a not for profit social enterprise, with a mission to invent or popularise digital tools that enable citizens to exert power over institutions and decision makers in some way. We work all over the world, in about 50 different countries. Everything we develop is open source. Just quickly — it turns out there's people grinding cement in the car park down there. We have no control over it. So apologies for the background noise. We just have to deal with it. Sorry. Thank you. No worries. So, in the UK we developed our original services, parliamentary monitoring site, theyworkforyou.com, fix my street, which is one of the original issue reporting sites, whatdotheyknow.com, which enables people to make FOI requests and have everything published online so nothing's in the dark. We actually have this running in New Zealand, FYI.org.nz, which is run by the Herald. In Australia we have Open Australia, one of the really great platforms is this planning alert. So this is all built on software that we developed. So everything we do is for citizen good. So is civic tech, much of the thing here in New Zealand. Do you have many groups here that collaborate on this kind of stuff? Amelia Loye asks: GovHack has been running for three years. And it's pretty active. And there's the open government ninjas who are pretty active. There's a few people in the room that can talk to that. But maybe you could give us your definition of civic tech today, because I think it's worth explaining to everyone the broader category? Rebecca continues: So civic tech, as far as we're concerned, is quite simply tech for good. It's tech that's designed and built for citizens. And it's usually born out of frustration, normally with government in some way. Normally people are trying to get something done and it's really, really just a very long process, or a very absurd process. A process that is basically built for the logic internally within government, not for the person outside of it. One of my favourite things here is, you phone up government, or you send them an email, and they say, OK, I'll email you a form, print it out, sign it, post it back to us, at which point someone at the other end will type it back in again. I had to giggle this morning when we got here and we said, is there wi-fi? And they said, oh, well the host has to fill out a form 24 hours before you get here, and then that has to be approved. And like, it's a digital event. So a lot of this, a lot of this kind of civic tech, it's built by these third party organisations, or PAC groups, or individuals, to make government — to make accessing government far more rational than it currently is. And the great thing about it is, it captures skills and experiences that certainly, 10 years ago you would never have found, really, in government. A lot more these days, a lot more governments like here in New Zealand, are investing in actually, you know, proper career pathways for people with digital skills. But 10 years ago, this would not happened. So it was people outside of government that were looking at it saying, do you know there is just a way better way to do this? Let's see if we can figure it out. What I love about civic tech is, it really focuses on a two way interaction. So what Amelia was saying earlier about participation tech, or engage tech — engage tech is the word you used. It's not just the government deciding what they want to tell people and pushing the information out there. It's much more of a two way conversation, where people are telling their governments what they need and how they want to do it. Civic tech is generally supposed to be disruptive. It's supposed to be a way of nudging government. It's not supposed to be a way of bringing the government down, generally. But it's supposed to innovate. It's supposed to be agile. It's supposed to be new kind of things that maybe government can't do because government can only work at a certain pace. All of the tech that Justin was talking about just now. I mean, that kind of stuff has been around for a long time, but it's only now that government is being able to catch up with what the potential is for use of services. Whereas us sitting outside of government, you know, there's only 25 of us. We can pick something up and then put it down like a hot poker if we figure out there's something wrong with it or it's not actually being beneficial. So civic tech is very much designed to be a critical friend to government. It's supposed to hopefully be a bit of an inspiration. It's supposed to kind of demonstrate, display what the possibilities are with technology that maybe government's not quite used to yet. That said, we always advocate for doing simple things well. So I always get carried away when I hear Justin speak about the AI, blockchain, and all this kind of stuff. But actually, what we really want generally is to make the simple interactions good, because if you can't really do it with the simple stuff, there's absolutely no point in running away with the tech. So we tend to always say, don't start with what tech you want to use. Start with what outcome you want to achieve, and then figure out what tech's the best for it, because otherwise I have seen so so many millions of dollars, pounds, whatever, invested into it just really big white elephant kind of vanity projects almost, that inevitably don't get used because they haven't been researched. So one the examples from the UK, which I'm pretty sure you're all aware of Gov.uk. I have great hopes for this. It was actually some people from the founders of my organisation, a couple of them that helped to set GDS up in the UK. And Gov.uk is one of the first things that happened. And initially everyone was really, oh my god! This is so great. Look at all the stuff they did. All these agencies have put it all in one place. And at the time this was revolutionary. All this research they did, all of this user testing. But it's now 2017. Times have moved on. And actually, I'm starting to feel like this might be a bit of a missed opportunity, because it's very, very, very much that one way system, that one way street I was talking about earlier. This in no way a conversation with users. There is very, very little flexibility in this. This is the government deciding what it wants to tell you. And if you want something different, oh, my god, it's so difficult to find out how to ask for something different. It's a website that basically says, ooh, we don't really want to hear from you, because look how shiny! It's quite quickly becoming just a really, really sexy shop window, and not a lot else. Don't even get me started on the immigration pages. It's almost as if in the UK, we don't want anyone to come to the UK. You'd never think it with Brexit, would you? I don't work for government. I can say this. What I'm learning at the moment, though, is what's happening in Taiwan. So a few years back the Sunflower movement managed to achieve enormous change in Taiwan in the government. And that Sunflower movement was built on civic tech groups. It was very much civic tech groups that organised the Sunflower movement that occupied parliament, and who are now actually inside trying to reform it. So I was very, very fortunate to be in Taiwan all last week. And their digital Minister now was actually one of the prominent members of the Sunflower movement. And they are doing amazing things in terms of how they govern. One of the things I love is pol.is, which is what they are using to properly have that two way conversation with their residents. And you know, this is central government. This is a conversation the 23 million people, which is no small feat. But they are actually having successes. I mean, I'm not going to read all this out. I can provide the slides. But it's a really, really inspirational way of making legislation, of figuring out what you want to do. And there's a really nice case study of how they managed to address the Uber issue. When Uber came to town, there was a lot of disquiet. And using this system, they managed to come to a very consensual way of regulating Uber and enabling other people in that kind of private space to operate in a satisfactory cohabiting kind of way. We also love the fact that one of the things that they use is some of mySociety's code. They use our 'say it' code, so that every meeting that the Minister has is automatically transcribed into this. And it's put out there online for everyone to see. And it's a nice bit of software that enables you to share and chop it and change it, and it's all out there. It's not like, for instance, our government that puts everything in Hansard. Just a couple of other examples from around the world that I really like, and then I will pass over. Amsterdam is doing loads of stuff digitally. Their municipal government is really pushing the barriers of how much they can get it. They are really trying to leverage all sorts of skills, they are having lots of different competitions and inviting lots of collaboration with the private sector, which is really cool. So I don't know if anyone here has seen the news in Europe, Barcelona in particular have had massive protests about tourism levels. There's a few other places in Europe as well that are seeing this — Croatia. Quite a few cities are at the point now where residents kind of in open revolt, because tourism is so high it's displacing people out of the city because of Airbnb and that kind of thing. So Amsterdam worked with Booking.com to put sensors around the city to monitor traffic flows, footfall. They actually enlisted a lot of residents to say, OK, you take us through your route in the city. You show us the pinch points and that kind of thing. So they're using this kind of technology to just improve people's lives. And it's not the government saying, we want to do x. This has come from the people. This is coming from the people saying, we need to sort this out, otherwise tourism in Amsterdam is going to get to a critical point like it has in Barcelona. Paris is doing an enormous participatory budgeting exercise, as is Madrid. This is a really quite ambitious programme. I'm still sceptical about what the results will be, but they've invested a lot in it. It's a way of citizens being able to tell people what they want as well, being able to say, OK, this is a problem area. We want the government to look at this. We want to use money. We want to use public money for this, rather than it just being assumed into some sort of budget. And one of my favourite things is in Berlin. They put it on Minecraft, and they invited residents to build, reimagine Berlin. See how it looks. And like, techy people that love Minecraft, just getting straight on it from their bedrooms. But they also enlisted a lot of disengaged residents to actually go out and think more cerebrally about what might be needed. So a group of young people went out, and they interviewed some people in Alexanderplatz — which, I don't know if any of you've been to Berlin, but Alexanderplatz, while it's lovely, it's a big interchange. It's very lively. It's a bit grim. It's not like — it's not a very beautiful space, shall we say. So they got people to reimagine Alexanderplatz. I know, it's these young people. You're thinking oh god, they're going to put in like a skate park or something really absurd — you know, young people. And it turns out actually what they wanted was a little bit of landscaping, some park benches, some smart lighting, and some public loos. So it was really a nice exercise to show how young people and other people who are residents can collaborate and actually tell the government, well, this is actually how we imagine our city. One of my favourite stories from this exercise actually was, there was two people who met online, on Minecraft, and they collaborated on a project. They got a beautiful new train station. And if anyone's used Minecraft, it takes ages. You really have to be enthusiastic. Anyway, these two met online. They were chatting. They were building this thing together. And at one point, one person says, oh, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to leave it there. I have to go to work. And this message comes back from the other user like, work? How old are you? It turns out that it was a nine-year-old and a 27-year-old that have been collaborating on this project, which I think I really like, because it just goes to show that it's not just one type of person that engages. Actually you can leverage expertise and enthusiasm from all over, the places you don't expect it. So as Amelia talked about earlier, we run a conference every year which is mainly looking at the impact of civic tech. So no one at this conference comes along and says, oh my god, look at the new shiny thing I built. Isn't it wonderful? People come along and say, right, I built this shiny thing two years ago. This is what's happened. This is the kind of impact it's made on citizens. This is the impact it's had on government, or institutions, or politicians. This is basically a conference about those ripples that come out in the pond after you've dropped the tech in it. So it's really very interesting. It's completely global. We have, I think, people coming from about 40 different countries. And you get a mix of government and civic tech people. So it's a really, really useful conference. And we also have like Google, Facebook, and other people coming along to share their kind of citizen stuff. So I encourage you all to join us in Lisbon next year, if you are able to. And that's it for me. Thank you.