Today we’ve published a new report with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, exploring how a future European civic tech hub could strengthen democratic participation across Europe.

You can read it online, or download as a PDF. 

Drawing on interviews with 19 civic tech organisations from 12 countries, we’ve wrestled with the opportunities and challenges facing participation and pro-democracy tech across Europe.

We’ve structured the report around three progress areas: increasing demand, strengthening supply, and optimising implementation. For each area, we identify both short term activities and longer term ambitions.

Recommendations

Jump to the recommendations section of the report

1. Increased demand

A recurring theme from our interviews was that the technical issues were only half of the problem. Many public authorities still need support to see participation itself as a valuable tool for better decision-making.

As a result, the report recommends that the hub should initially focus on practical support: helping people find existing resources, connecting them with networks, and showcasing successful examples. Over time, this can contribute to a broader shift where participation is increasingly seen as a normal and valuable part of governance.

2. Strengthened supply

A lot of our interviewees discussed the challenges they face as organisations building participation technology.

We heard that key barriers include procurement requirements, certification costs, and uncertainty around sustainable business models. The tensions between open vs closed source tech in the current market came up regularly, but we’ve tried to take a balanced approach.

Rather than treating open and closed source approaches as a binary choice, we think the hub can support a diverse ecosystem while reducing barriers to openness, collaboration and interoperability.

3. Optimised implementation

Here we’re trying to unite supply and demand.

We think there needs to be stronger links between civic tech practitioners, democratic innovators, universities and public authorities, alongside support for pilots in places where participation is less established. Longer term, we’d like the hub to explore approaches such as shared testing environments and procurement reform that would make participation technology easier to adopt and scale.

4.  Cross cutting themes

Finally, there are two cross-cutting themes that we wanted to recognise, even though they’re not central to our recommendations. 

The first is the importance of political buy-in. Successful participation processes require political leaders who are willing to engage with the outcomes, whatever they may be. The second is the growing impact of AI. Interviewees highlighted both the opportunities AI creates for participation technology and the new challenges it poses around regulation, platform governance and digital infrastructure. 

In summary

Overall, our conclusion is that the most valuable role for a European civic tech hub is to reduce friction across the ecosystem: helping authorities find trusted resources, supporting organisations to navigate barriers, sharing evidence of what works, and creating the conditions for participation to become a more routine part of democratic decision-making.

Read the full report, and watch our launch event.

Any questions, comments or feedback? Get in touch tictec@mysociety.org

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Photo by and machines on Unsplash

Our latest TICTeC work to help improve the impacts of civic technology takes its form in a collaboration with Sitra (the Finnish Innovation Fund). Together, we are exploring the development of a proposed European Civic Tech Hub.

As part of the Democracy Shield, the European Commission has committed to creating a European Civic Tech Hub as part of boosting societal resilience, citizens’ engagement and European digital sovereignty. 

Sitra is currently investigating what this hub could look like in practice, with the aim of addressing key barriers to civic tech adoption across the EU. As part of this work, we are helping them to engage with the civic tech and democratic innovation community, gathering insights, testing ideas, and identifying what would be most valuable for practitioners.

We hope by doing this, the perspectives of civic tech and democracy practitioners will be taken into account by the European Commission when planning the Civic Tech Hub and future civic tech initiatives.  And ultimately, that citizens can engage more effectively in democracy across Europe. 

Our aim is to publish findings in a public-facing report in June 2026.

Get involved

As part of this research, we’re conducting interviews with civic tech practitioners (especially in the civic participation space) as well as deliberative democracy practitioners between mid-March and the end of April 2026. 

If you’re a civic tech or deliberative democracy practitioner and would like to share your perspective on the proposed EU Civic Tech Hub, then please get in touch by filling out this form, or emailing tictec@mysociety.org.  

Today we’re launching a new report: Shifting Landscapes: A practical guide to pro democratic tech.

This report builds on the conferences, seminars and conversations we’ve been having in our TICTeC programme over the last few years, to present a comprehensive picture of where pro democratic tech is now. We explore how technology can strengthen and defend democratic life, and how civic tech practitioners, pro-democracy organisations, and funders can make effective choices in a rapidly shifting landscape for both democracy and technology.

The result is a report of eight chapters in four thematic areas:

Pro-democracy tech: this extends our definition of pro-democracy tech, to explore how  technology can be joined to wider democratic movements working to both defend and extend democracy using technology.

Communities of practice: what we’ve learned about how we can best work together with our communities of practice around Access to Information and democratic transparency, balancing efficiencies of scale with unique circumstances and needs.

Shaping the landscape: Civic tech sometimes needs to adapt to changing times, but should be trying to shape the times. These chapters look at changing distribution methods (video and AI chatbots), but also how we can create infrastructure that makes democratic projects easier and more effective.

Using technology effectively: These chapters are aimed at practitioners thinking about how to use technology, with examples and frameworks for practical approaches to AI technologies, but also other examples of tools that can be effective in ways that AI approaches can’t. 

The report can be read online, or as a PDF. 

Header image: photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash

Once again, the TICTeC Communities of Practice have given us all the opportunity to learn from those at the frontline of civic tech: this week’s session, Beyond websites: how pro-democracy projects reach their audiences saw practitioners from Georgia, Nigeria and Uganda explaining the ways in which you can engage with audiences beyond a website.

You can watch the session here.

Ana Arevadze from ForSet explained the care and attention that the organisation put into making sure that an election education campaign, delivered by influencers, was a learning experience for all involved. This was a presentation that a small group of people had been fortunate to experience at the ATI Day in Mechelen, but is now available for all to watch. 

Ufuoma Oghuwu from Enough is Enough Nigeria outlined how the Shine Your Eye website provides citizens with information about their elected officials — something that’s often missing after the canvassing and electoral cycle has passed — and then described how that information has a life beyond the website, thanks to chatbots, WhatsApp and social media.

Last but not least, Joseph Tahinduka of ParliamentWatch Uganda shared the fantastic efforts they go to to make parliamentary activity accessible to the social media generation, who so greatly prefer short videos to trawling through lengthy reports. Is it time for all of us to start getting onto TikTok? You’ll have to watch to find out!

Sit back and enjoy the video: there was so much to learn from our speakers, and we’re glad to be able to share their insights with our networks. 

Transforming and publishing official Parliamentary transcripts is one of the key activities of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs)  — in our case, that means running our website TheyWorkForYou, but there are many organisations around the world doing the same for their own parliaments. 

Building on top of transcripts means that PMOs can focus their time on where they can add value to those transcripts: either applying their digital skills to make them more accessible, or merging them with other datasets and sources in ways the official Parliament sites cannot. 

One of the interesting things about Parliamentary transcripts is that they don’t exactly reflect what happened. They can be an official record of what was supposed to have been said rather than what was said: a constructed version of Parliament that is close to, but not exactly, reality. 

This can be very important when democratic needs are not for verbatim transcripts. MPs can ask to make corrections on factual content if they misspoke. The Record can add useful shorthand, referring to standing orders, or additional information that was not said orally. For parliaments with multiple official languages (in the UK’s case the Senedd/Welsh Parliament), transcripts make parliamentary activity accessible in all official languages. 

But the difference can also be political in the “first draft of history” sense. The transcript can retrospectively apply rule-following in a way that can remove political speech on the edge of those rules. We’ve noted before there are times where the transcript does not reflect reality in procedurally significant ways. Historically famous events can be at the edge of the transcript, rather than visible in it. 

So there are pros and cons to our understanding of parliamentary activity being dependent on transcripts alone. But the existence of accessible video recordings of Parliament makes it easier than ever to see the difference between what officially happened and what actually happened.

Combining transcript and video

In 2008 we did some work with the BBC to explore how to make parliamentary video searchable. At the time the best approach we had was a crowdsourcing approach to reconcile timestamps and speeches  — around 400 volunteers aligned 160k speeches. Ultimately this process had big technical overhead in video storage, and a lot of manual work was required to keep the two feeds together, and we stopped using video in this way. 

New approaches make this possible at scale with much less manual effort. As part of our TICTeC Community of Practice around Parliamentary Monitoring we ran a session on video and transcripts, hearing from OpenParliament.tv about their approach (video of the presentations). 

OpenParliament.tv currently covers the German Bundestag, but is interested in expanding the approach to more countries. The platform is a combined video/transcript search platform, where individual speeches can be searched for, and jump the video to that point in the record. 

There’s a lot of moving parts that make this work, but the core work is in how the video and the transcript are aligned. The transcript is converted to computer-generated audio, and then the generated audio is matched against the real audio. The matching uses an adapted version of the aeneas framework for ‘forced alignment’ of text and speech. 

When you think about it, this approach makes a lot of sense: speech to text is often specifically bad at generating the punctuation of written language, while one of the key things in syncing transcripts to video is finding the start and end of blocks. This can still run into difficulties when what is being said is just not present in the transcript, but generally it can flow around problems and match items on either side. From an international perspective, this is also interesting in that it’s an approach that works better across different languages than speech-to-text approaches. 

In other technical details, Open Parliament TV does not host the video themselves. Offline they need to process it to extract and match audio, but online their player links to the videos as hosted by the Parliament. In the long term, they want a workflow that sends videos to an internet archive as a backup. This is another useful purpose of democratic transparency project: – to act as civic redundancy against backsliding access to democratic materials. 

Switching between modes

We had a bit of a discussion in the group about transcripts, and about where AI approaches might make it possible to generate them. This might be useful in settings where there is only video output, to make it easier to search and parse. This could also be a useful bridge in cases where there is a significant delay before transcripts are released. 

But official transcripts are an art beyond just writing down what’s happened,  imposing a consistency on the parliamentary record that is very useful as a building block connecting it to other data. For instance, Open Parliament TV does additional detection of named entities based on the transcript, meaning that specific mentions can then be seen in the video. 

The future of parliamentary monitoring might be switching between these modes: making the ground truth of what happened visible through video, augmenting this with the formal transcript, and bridging from that to other sources of information. In short, pulling on what different mediums do best to make democratic processes stronger and more transparent.

Header image: Photo by Diego González on Unsplash

TICTeC, our Impacts of Civic Technology conference, has been running since 2015. Over the years, we’ve seen shifts within both tech and democracy that have been reflected as priority topics: from the foundational (and evergreen) question of ‘how can you assess the value of civic technology if you don’t measure its impacts?’, to the rise of authoritarian ‘strong man’ leaders across the world, to a surge of enthusiasm for what blockchain can do around civic tech.

As each of these topics rise to the top of the civic tech community consciousness, TICTeC has provided a natural place to air questions, concerns and solutions.

This year, of course, the foundation-shaking issue is AI. Compared to 2024, when the technology was just beginning to be applied in our field, there’s been a maturing of the discussion, and much more concrete engagement with both the opportunities and the challenges that AI brings around government, truth, trust and delivery.

Our job is to make sure we steer towards the good — or, to phrase it in alignment with mySociety’s own aims, to examine how to engage critically and transparently with AI to create a fair and safe society.

AI across TICTeC 2025

The theme of AI was woven through the conference: where it wasn’t the primary topic itself, it coloured our thinking and had relevance everywhere. 

Sessions dealing primarily with AI could be divided into three broad angles:

• Since AI is already making inroads into governance systems, how can we ensure it is used well? 
• How have AI’s capabilities been harnessed to make civic tech tools, improve functionality or increase efficiency, and how’s that going? 
• Can tools counter the problems that AI presents around truth and trust?

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

AI and democratic governance

Both of our keynote speakers were keen to point out the need for oversight and citizen participation as AI is rapidly adopted across government systems. 

Marietje Schaake, whose presentation you can rewatch here, warned of the dangers of private tech firms holding more power than our constitutional democracies, thanks to the limitless profits to be made from this new technology; while Fernanda Campagnucci (presentation here) advocated for citizens to be allowed into the decision-making processes not just around governance itself, but in the making of the tools that facilitate it.

We also heard from the people at the frontline of governance. An instructive session from Westminster Foundation For Democracy and the Hellenic Parliament (not recorded) quizzed participants on how comfortable they would be in easing the administrative burden of parliaments by allowing AI to help categorise, filter and even answer letters from citizens. Would our opinion change if we knew, for example, that there was a backlog of 40,000 messages to representatives?

In a session deeply rooted in the realities of running a local authority during a period of tech acceleration, Manchester City Council explained that in a city where 450,000 people don’t even use the internet, it is crucial to ensure AI is being used ethically and to communicate how it affects citizens’ lives: “Whether or not you choose to interact with AI there’s no way of opting out – AI based decision making is happening around you.”

Three speakers from the Civic Tech Field Guide laid out the case for audits on how AI is being used in your own community, showing how anyone can do it, and Felix Sieker from Bertelsmann Stiftung made a strong argument for public AI, with proper accountability and democratic oversight, rather than the power being concentrated in a handful of private firms — something that is already being developed in several different forms, including by Mozilla.

MIT GOV/LAB ran a workshop (not recorded) in which we could chat with a simulation of a person from the future about the effects of a climate policy, then decide whether or not we would implement that policy once we had a human account of its results. This is part of ongoing research into helping to break deadlocks in policy decision-making.

How AI is already being used in civic tech

Both Code for Pakistan and Tainan Sprout showed how they’ve deployed AI to allow citizens to query dense policy documentation and get answers that are easy to understand

Demos talked about the work they’ve been doing around a new AI-powered digital deliberation process called Waves, hoping to ‘do democracy differently’ in our current crisis of mistrust.

Dealing with AI and misinformation

Camino Rojo from Google Spain showcased new tools, some of which are shortly to be rolled out, to help counteract misinformation. In particular, these allow users to check whether or not media displayed in search results was artificially generated. At the moment, the onus lies with the image generator to provide this information. Strict guidelines apply, in particular, to those advertising around sensitive areas such as elections.

AI and mySociety

In the final session of the conference, we presented the various ways that we’ve been exploring how AI can support mySociety’s work. You can rewatch this session in full here.

We have been guided by our own AI framework, in which we set out the six ethical principles by which we adhere when adopting this (or any) new technology. In essence, these can be boiled down to the single sentence: “We should use AI solutions when they are the best way of solving significant problems, are compatible with our wider ethical principles and reputation, and can be sustainably integrated into our work.” 

In other words, we are not working backwards from the existence of AI to see what we could do with it, but approaching from the question of what we want to achieve, and then examining whether AI would aid us to do so more efficiently.

In this session you can discover how we’ve used AI to more effectively deal with problems in bulk, and make information easier for everyone to access across our work in Transparency; hear thoughts on how, for our work in Democracy, and especially the recent WhoFundsThem project, we’ve found that a human approach is sometimes needed — but that there are some tasks that AI can make easier here.

For the future we’re thinking about AI as it might apply to WriteToThem not to burden representatives with more mail, but perhaps communications of a higher quality.

Overall, we’re keeping a wary eye open for how AI will almost certainly be (and already is?) muddying the ability to trust the provenance of information — especially given that mySociety is essentially a ‘resupplier’ of data from public authorities and Parliament.

In a LinkedIn post, our Democracy Lead Alex got at the core of the challenges ahead of us all in the civic tech field, when he said: “Different kinds of technologies make different kinds of futures easier – and what we’re trying to do with pro-democratic tech is to make democratic futures easier. But the opposite is obviously [possible], and AI has arrived at the right time to merge aesthetically and ideologically with authoritarian regimes.

“A core to the spirit of civic tech is persuasion by demonstration – and to me TICTeC is a wonderful distillation of that spirit of both imagining better things, and doing the work to show what’s possible.” 

And on that thought, we will roll up our sleeves and work towards the version of the future that is better for everyone.

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We’re leading the conversation on AI and democratic decision making —

and we need your help.

mySociety was founded more than two decades ago to help democratic governance deliver on the raised expectations of the internet era.

We are in a period in which the relationship between tech and government is more entangled and fraught than ever. We’re stepping up, but we can only do so with your support. Please do consider making a donation.

If you’ve been holding off from booking your place at TICTeC until the full schedule is announced, this is your sign to act!

You can now see all the sessions, together with info on who’ll be presenting and what they’ll be talking about on the TICTeC 2025 page.

We’ve already introduced our amazing keynotes, Fernanda Campagnucci and Marietje Schaake. Now you can enjoy looking through the rest of the two days’ offerings, with a global spread of speakers from US, Nigeria, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, Thailand and many, many more, representing organisations including  MIT GOV/LAB; Global Data Barometer, OpenUp South Africa, Manchester City Council, Delib, Code for Pakistan, Polis, Mzalendo Trust, Google, Tainan Sprout… and lots more.

Responding to our theme of pro-democracy technology, sessions cover topics as diverse as: tech for better elections; AI-powered deliberation; tracking climate finance to curb corruption; measuring the impact of Access to Information, and much, much more.

The world is going through ‘interesting times’ just now. TICTeC is all the more important in the face of these multiple threats, as we get together, forge new alliances and learn from one another. We’ll return home stronger, with new knowledge about the myriad ways in which civic tech can help us to preserve and further democracy.

Book your tickets for TICTeC 2025 now.

The keynote speakers set the tone for TICTeC each year, kicking off the conference with a timely provocation that seeds ideas through the sessions that follow, and informs new channels of discussion.

Our first keynote announcement for TICTeC 2025 is Fernanda Campagnucci, Executive Director of InternetLab, who brings unparalleled expertise in transparency, digital transformation, and civic engagement. Fernanda will explore what is made possible by new forms of technology — especially in the anti-corruption space — and what needs to happen to make those possibilities a reality.

With TICTeC’s emphasis on pro-democracy technology this year, Fernanda’s knowledge and experience is sure to spark two days of informed insights.

Fernanda’s diverse career spans a number of roles — and continents — but has been guided by a commitment to reshaping public governance and leveraging technology for positive change.

From 2019-24 she was Executive Director of Open Knowledge Brasil, enhancing its impact on public policy. Prior to this she was a public manager at Sao Paulo City Hall, championing policies centered on transparency, digital transformation, and civic technologies, fundamentally reshaping the way government interacts with its citizens. 

Her role as the Head of Integrity at the Comptroller General’s Office further deepened her understanding of ethical governance; and at the Department of Education, she led the flagship Open Government Initiative ‘Patio Digital’.

Meanwhile, Fernanda’s academic achievements have complemented her practical experience, with a first degree in Journalism followed by a Masters in Education and a PhD in Public Administration: she’s also acted as a lecturer on Compliance and Public Innovation.

All of these roles will inform Fernanda’s keynote, so we hope you’ll be in the room — or joining us via Zoom — when she steps up to the podium. Here’s where to reserve your place (and if you act before March 3, you’ll pay earlybird pricing).

Every year at TICTeC, we strive to find keynote speakers that can speak directly to the present moment for the civic tech field. 

At a time when tech and democracy are becoming ever more entwined, we’re delighted that Marietje Schaake will be kicking off the first day of proceedings at TICTeC.

Marietje is a former Member of the European Parliament, a Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, a columnist for the Financial Times and author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley — one of the ‘top ten tech books’ of 2024.

Marietje will explore the delicate balance of our age, between the good that tech can do for democracy, and the dangers of letting self-interested tech giants dominate the field. It serves us to examine how authoritarian regimes are using tech, and to ask, can democracies reclaim sovereignty and stand up for the interests of citizens? Do we require more oversight and regulation in both tech and democracy, and if so, how can this be built to allow other kinds of tech to flourish?

The spirit of the ‘civic internet’ is what brought our community together: TICTeC is one place where principles of openness, democracy and engagement still burn brightly. Marietje’s keynote will help us consider the underlying questions around the future for the civic tech field, both for the immediate tomorrow, and for the longterm outlook.

This will be a keynote you don’t want to miss, so be sure to secure your place at TICTeC — in person or online. Book here: tickets remain at earlybird prices until March 3.

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Image: Sicherheitskonferenz (CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Eurostar booking is now open for the dates that TICTeC is running (10 -11 June), so it’s a great time to benefit from the best travel prices.

Even if you’re not coming from the UK, read on for advice on how to join us in Mechelen, easily, cheaply or sustainably — and ideally, all three!

From the UK

If you’re within reach of London, Eurostar is a great option: comfortable, speedy and above all, climate-friendly.

If you’re planning to return before 15th June, you can book a return ticket from London St Pancras, all the way to Mechelen: select the ‘Brussels-Midi/Zuid + Any Belgian Station’ ticket, including Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent and Liege. 

It’s a two-hour journey by Eurostar to Brussels, where you’ll transfer to the train to Mechelen, just another 20 minutes.

Top tips: 

• Before you snaffle up that super-cheap 08:14 Eurostar option, be aware that you’re advised to arrive 75 minutes before departure, in order to go through security. This slot is for the early birds only!
• On the way back, Eurostar check-in is a more relaxed 45 minutes ahead of departure. Grab a coffee and relax.
• If you have mobility or disability-related needs, check out Eurostar’s accessible travel page.

From Brussels 

Brussels Midi/Zuid station

• Get the branch line train to Mechelen. These run every 15 minutes throughout the day, and many of them go on to Antwerp.
• If you’ve come on the Eurostar with a ‘+ any Belgian station’ ticket, no need to pay for this leg of the journey — it’s included.
• But if you’ve come from elsewhere, a standard ticket costs €5.50, and you can buy them either:
  • on the SNCB app (we recommend downloading the app in advance, either for Apple or Google Play, and setting up your account/payment method before you travel). The app is in English and gives you platform numbers, delay notifications etc.
  • or via a ticket machine at the station (they take cards and cash). 
• Advice for those with accessibility needs is on the SNCB website.

Brussels airport

• Look for trains to Rotterdam or Antwerp – Mechelen is a stop on the way. 
• A standard ticket costs €10.60.
• Check that you get a direct train: avoid those that require changing at Brussels North.

Top tips:

• Make sure you travel to Mechelen in Belgium — there’s also a town 113 km away in the Netherlands with the same name, and we don’t want anyone ending up there!
• Mechelen is also known as Malines, and you might see both names (“Malines/Mechelen”) on station announcements, when buying tickets etc.
• Get off at the main Mechelen/Malines station, not Mechelen-Nekkerspoel which is a suburban station.

When you arrive in Mechelen

• The Lamot Congress and Heritage Centre, where TICTeC is taking place, is at Van Beethovenstraat 8/10, 2800 Mechelen, Belgium — about a 15 minute walk from the station, 9 minutes by bus or 6-8 minutes by taxi.
  • There is a taxi rank near the station exit on Koning Albertplein, or this page has phone numbers for taxi services.
  • Details of travelling by bus in Mechelen are on this page, and you can plan your route here. The best option for the city centre and/or the conference centre is the number 1 bus, which runs as a shuttle — catch it by platform 9. You can pay with contactless ‘tap on’ (no need to tap off: all bus tickets last 60 minutes).
•  Head to one of our recommended hotels: see the Accommodation section on this page for discount codes that will give you a special delegate rate. Mechelen is walkable and all these hotels are very close to the venue.
• Had the foresight to give yourself a bit of extra time in Mechelen? Great! See our post on things to do.

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Banner image: Frederic Köberl; Eurostar trains: Kitmasterbloke; train going through Amsterdam: Rob Dammers(CC by-sa/2.0); Mechelen station: Smiley Toerist (CC by-sa/4.0)