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)

…so why not stay a few more days?

We’re all busy people, but if you’re making the trip to Mechelen in Belgium for TICTeC this June, it makes sense to stay on and sample some of the city’s unique attractions.

First things first: if you haven’t already read our post on how to get to Mechelen or our practical information page, you might not realise that this small city is just 20 minutes by train from Brussels Midi/Zuid or Centraal stations and 11 minutes from the airport (Brussels, as we all know, is a great travel hub, accessible from everywhere).

But what to expect when you get there?

Mechelen is a historic city, typical of the Flanders region, and provides ample opportunities for enjoyable strolls — along the river, through picturesque architecture, or interspersed with a bit of culture and shopping. 

TICTeC itself will take place in the Lamot Congress and Heritage Centre (a former brewery), which, as you can see on Google Maps is located just a minute’s walk along the waterside from Haverwerf‘s so-very-photographable frontages, and a few minutes’ walk through shop-lined streets to the city’s cathedral and the Grote Markt square.

Hotels are very conveniently placed behind and opposite the conference centre — or, with Brussels and Antwerp so nearby, staying out of town is also an option.

If you’ve been to TICTeC before, you already know that for the two days of the conference, you’ll be happily occupied in attending presentations and workshops, with opportunities for socialising and — dare we say it — networking in the breaks and in the evenings.

If, however, you’re factoring in some time to enjoy the city before or after TICTeC, here are some pointers.

Download the Visit Mechelen app

You’re coming to TICTeC, so the likelihood is that you have opinions about technology. Thus, by using the Visit Mechelen app, you’ll not only be able to benefit from its suggested walking routes; you’ll also be able to enjoy assessing its digital design and development. You know we all love that! 

Or if you prefer the personal touch, drop into Visit Mechelen at Vleeshouwersstraat 6 — it’s very close to Grote Markt.

Need some peace and quiet?

After two days of busy conversation and intent listening, you’ll want to unwind. Here’s a list of green spaces in the city — including a silent one where you’re strongly encouraged to turn off your phone: perfect for a digital detox.

Enjoy the water

The river Dyle runs through the city. But you don’t have to stick to walking alongside it — you can walk on it, thanks to a floating path. 

If you prefer something more leisurely, take a boat tour, by day — or, at weekends, by night.

Art and architecture

Whether you’re into architecture or not, you’re going to experience some in Mechelen — no choice. Simply walking up to the Grote Markt you’ll see vernaculars ranging from 16th century Renaissance to 18th century Rococo. 

The city hall (also known as Keldermans Zaal) was originally a Gothic building, later given a baroque extension — and we’ll all be seeing it from the inside, too, as delegates are invited to enjoy a drinks reception there, hosted by Stad Mechelen and Meet in Mechelen, at the end of TICTeC day one. 

For a visual feast, pop into St John’s Church for its noteworthy woodcarvings and an altarpiece triptych by Rubens — yes, that Rubens. Or if you have a head for heights, you can climb the cathedral tower and (as if actual reality didn’t suffice) enjoy the augmented reality offerings up top. Ticket information is here. 

Zooming forward a century, you might enjoy a visit to the Winter Garden of the Ursulines, a former boarding school for girls, attached to a convent, created in a stunning art nouveau style. Great for fans of stained glass…and taxidermy. 

At the Museum Hof van Busleyden you will ‘experience the heyday of the Burgundian Renaissance’ through both its beautiful gardens and its collection of masterpieces. The museum prides itself on centering voices not heard in traditional art history, tracing themes such as nation-building, humanism, religion, globalisation, gender and power.

Other museums

Games enthusiast? At the Speelgoed museum (toy museum) your visit actually is a game, in which you can score points as you go. Many of the exhibits are hands-on, and although it doesn’t explicitly say so on their website, we’re making the executive decision that this museum is not just for kids. 

Mechelen has museums that you are unlikely to see the like of elsewhere: for example, there’s one collecting depictions of madness.

For a sobering yet important perspective on the Holocaust and human rights, Kazerne Dossin is a memorial, museum and research centre, focusing on the Belgian experience of this dark phase of history.

Food and shopping

The Mechelen tourist board welcomes you to twelve speciality food shops: will you be going home with ‘a creamy triple crème cheese with a filling of figs and coriander seeds’? We do hope so.

Or perhaps you’ll be tempted by the beer mustard, the traditional gingerbread (more of a cake) or the Mechelen city biscuit… better make sure there’s some space in your luggage.

We’ve also seen mention of apple pie with beer poured over it — sounds like a great thing to try with our civic tech friends! And if you fancy a group meal but can’t decide on the cuisine, the Vleeshalle food hall is the perfect solution.

Onze-Lieve-Vrouw street, just behind the conference venue, is especially known for its independent and sustainable shops, including boutiques selling gifts, homeware, fashion and sweets. 

Further afield

Of course with Brussels so near by, there’s a wealth of other tourism opportunities just a quick train ride away.

No doubt you, like us, have a heightened interest in democracy, so the Parlamentarium will be a must-visit, along with famed chamber of the European Parliament, the hemicycle.

You definitely shouldn’t miss the Atomium, the Grand Place, or (says our resident bandes dessinées enthusiast) the Comic Art Museum.

If Brussels doesn’t appeal, maybe take a trip to Antwerp and see their beautiful Central Station, as well as many other idiosyncratic attractions.

The cherry on top is that, from practically anywhere in Europe and the UK, Mechelen, Brussels and Antwerp are all accessible sustainably, by train.

We hope this post has left you keen to visit — if so, we’ll no doubt see you in the cheese shop, the toy museum and at the top of St Rumbold’s tower — as well as at the conference, of course. And with that in mind, here’s where to book your tickets for TICTeC.

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All images: Meet in Mechelen

As part of our TICTeC work bringing together civic tech practitioners, we are running a community of practice for Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations (“PMOs”).

The other week we ran a session looking at “Subnational PMOs”, and this blog post is to work through what I’ve learned from the speakers, why that was a bad name for the session, and how it’s shaping my thinking on our future UK and international work.

Finding projects I want to learn from

As the name suggests, a Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation is a civil society/non governmental organisation that observes and monitors what happens in a Parliament. It’s a term that’s used internationally to help draw together and network organisations doing this work in different places.

My key interest here is that we run TheyWorkForYou, seen internationally as one of the first civic tech enabled PMOs (and it’s a delight to see new projects like Thailand’s Parliament Watch continue to cite us as an inspiration).

The trouble I’m having is in jumping between international work (where we say ‘PMO’ a lot), and long term planning for our UK services —where I see some of the key democratic problems/opportunity areas as further away from Parliament, but still something that logically fits within TheyWorkForYou.

I’ve got two “problems” here.

In the UK, I’m trying to think about what our approach should be to new levels of devolution in the UK. For international readers, the UK is an unusually centralised state, with a few layers of weak local government and a semi-federal arrangement in some areas of the country, but not others. In recent years, there has been more devolution to the larger cities and elected mayors. But this is a structure that doesn’t fit well within the framework of TheyWorkForYou, and needs new approaches.

Internationally, I’m trying to understand how we can add value in joining up organisations that wouldn’t otherwise know about each other. Joining up PMOs isn’t a new idea, and we don’t want to duplicate work with other regional networks. So part of looking subnationally is trying to learn more about organisations that may or may not consider themselves to be PMOs, and may be less discoverable (to us and each other) through the channels that already exist.

Ideally these two problems have some overlap in the solution. But the first step was to find some organisations doing what can badly be described as “subnational PMO” work. Fortunately, we found two (more detail below)! And this has helped me refine our thinking about what we’re actually trying to do here, and how we might better discover these groups in future.

Moving beyond Parliaments

I think the first thing we need to do is generalise PMOs: the term I’m thinking about is ‘Democratic Transparency Organisations (DTOs)’. Here’s a working definition:

Democratic Transparency Organisations are projects that [rework / create] public information about [democratic institutions / politicians] to improve [transparency / accountability / standards / efficiency].

The important bits of this definition for me are:

• DTOs will generally build on existing data from one or many institutions, but can also create new analysis or data.
• Their focus is democratic institutions – generally elected representatives, but could include scrutiny/transparency of citizens assemblies.
• Their role isn’t passive —it is to change the democratic system they are a part of. While the theory of change may differ, the goal isn’t to just record, but make things different.

This captures what I generally consider to be a PMO, but is also language that captures projects that share the same spirit. The tools of PMOs are a strategy that DTOs adopt when faced with democratic institutions that look like parliaments. But lots of democratic institutions do *not* look like parliaments —and these need a different approach.

Subnational DTOs

When we talk about subnational DTOs, there’s a lot of things that can be covered with the language of PMOs. Many state/devolved legislatures fit perfectly into the general model of elected representatives who are in parties and have debates, votes, etc.

But there’s a transition to entirely different forms of democratic institutions that the PMO model works less well for. The forms of democratic institutions become more varied, and the number of institutions to deal with increases.

DTOs aimed at the sub-national/municipality level have a different set of problems and these are in some respects harder problems. If your goal is to explain subnational democracy in a country, you have massively increased the scope of the work. This now involves thousands of politicians rather than hundreds, and hundreds/thousands of institutions rather than one or two.

This means a huge amount more foundational work and that changes the kind of project that’s viable. As such, even when PMO tools might be appropriate, the scale of the work makes them more inaccessible than other approaches.

Benefits of local DTOs

The scope of decisions made below the national level means improving the flow of data and understanding can have a substantial impact on public policy and the lives of citizens. Often the policy changes that have the biggest impacts on people’s day-to-day lives are made at the local level. Huge amounts of decisions and adaptation in climate especially involve local action.

The theory of change of local DTOs is the same as national ones: improving democracy through usage by citizens, civil society and official institutions.

• Citizens: Creates better feedback loops between citizens and representatives — better principal-agent alignment.
• Civil Society: Gives new tools to infomediaries (journalists, academic, CSOs) to understand, share information, and take action.
• Institutional: Creates internal efficiencies for the representative organisation(s) by making their own information more accessible/inspire improvements.

For each of these, national PMOs can hit a sweet spot of effort/cost to impact. But for each of these paths, different approaches may be more cost effective at the local level.

Going wide – Querido Diário

Querido Diário is a project that aims to bring together and make searchable the government gazettes for every city in Brazil (of which there are over 5,000). The goal is to create a national level database of decisions made in every municipality.

This evolved out of Open Knowledge Brazil (OKB)’s national level projects looking at public spending data. There often isn’t great data at the national/federal level, but this gets worse the more local you go. However, if information is technically available but horribly fragmented, this is something that civic tech can try and address from the outside. As there isn’t an API of government decisions available, OKB are building it themselves.

When you’re trying to build a project covering hundreds or thousands of different institutions, you have to do more work further down the value chain just bringing the data together before you can analyse it. For instance, in the UK, we’ve ended up being the holders of the best list of local authorities, because we needed that to power our climate analysis. The uses of that base layer are a bit abstract,- but it is the foundation that is required for highly impactful services.

In the case of Querido Diario, Diários do Clima builds on top of this base layer to create a service specifically looking at new environmental and climate regulations in all municipalities covered. Having this information in one place makes cross-city comparisons of climate action possible. As well as making gazettes easier to search for local journalists or civil society, this dataset enables subject areas journalists and researchers to do new cross cutting analysis.

Lowering the cost of accessing all local information helps people and organisations with subject matter expertise do work that would otherwise be unviable or incomplete. The scope of Querido Diario shows the challenges of scale when going wide —but also the big rewards of joining up the data.

Going deep – Datos que hacen Ciudad

An alternative to covering lots of municipalities is to build a service catering to one.

Datos que hacen Ciudad’s goal is to create better information about Santiago de Cali, a city in Colombia. The project includes familiar PMO approaches of displaying information about representatives, but is also consciously aimed towards getting better information to those representatives. The theory of change here is “If we give our leaders more information, it will lead to better decisions.” Through councillors sharing information on their areas of focus/problem areas, Datos que hacen Ciudad can both provide that information to citizens, and shape the information to be sourced and created.

One of the complexities of local governance is that they are best understood as a patchwork of different institutions. This project makes that complexity an advantage —it’s a partnership of different local institutions, pulling on resources and knowledge from different places, with a key anchoring in the university.

This feedback loop between decision makers and different groups helps create highly localised information. Data collection and analysis catering to the exact needs of decision makers can be more sensitive to local patterns than generalised national data.

The different approaches use expertise and technical knowledge in different ways, and can work constructively together:making the data of different cities more accessible helps local analysis pull on other polices and data better.

What can we learn from this?

A key takeaway, in terms of finding other organisations to connect and learn from, is that we should be looking for examples based around cities and municipalities (rather than language around ‘subnational PMOs’). This isn’t always what we’re trying to apply it to,- but they’ll be more discoverable and the approaches might be more generalisable.

In terms of work in the UK, ‘deep’ vs ‘wide’ represent different approaches. Our natural inclination at mySociety is to do ‘wide’ projects and be a foundational service. But funding wise, it’s difficult to score well in competitive bids with this approach (we’ll keep making the case, but it’s a recurring obstacle).

For new levels of devolution, it’s not just a transparency problem but a place-making problem, which requires tailoring approaches to different areas. Doing a better job in current and future devolution means more partnerships with local institutions that can shape the work towards what is most useful. Alongside that, less abstract work with a clear place based approach might be an easier sell.

In new mySociety projects, we tend to work with partners to pull in greater expertise and have a bigger impact. In our core democracy work, we’re getting back towards partnering with volunteers. We’ve thought about being accessible to students in our crowdsourcing approach (and have a few in our current cohort)– but this could go further: for instance, a more direct partnership with a London or Manchester-based university would be good for anchoring how we treat covering the respective mayors.

In general the future of TheyWorkForYou’s devolution approach may need an element of partnership with existing organisations, or incubating new groups. Going local means scaling up — and we need to find sustainable ways of doing that.

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If you’d like to join our global Community of Practice on parliamentary monitoring, then feel free to email us on tictec@mysociety.org

Image: Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash.

TICTeC will be returning in 2025:  10 & 11 June in Mechelen (Belgium), and online. 

Registration is open now. 

This year we are framing our call for session proposals around ‘pro-democracy technology’. This blog post contains information about the audiences, themes, and formats for the conference – and information on how to submit proposals. Read on to discover what we’re looking for in submissions, and guides to the different formats of sessions. 

What is TICTeC?

TICTeC, short for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, first launched in 2015 as an annual gathering. Since then, it has evolved into a programme of year-round activities through our current TICTeC Communities and previous TICTeC Labs projects. 

A key tenet of the civic tech movement is the idea that the best advocacy is the demonstration of what’s possible. This is what TICTeC is all about. We’re bringing together practical people and practical thinkers to talk about the impact of our work, and learn lessons in how we can go further.

TICTeC is all about sharing research, knowledge and experiences on how digital technologies are being used to defend and advance civic and democratic values across the world.  We want a future where technology strengthens democracy rather than undermines it, in order to build societies and technologies that serve the many, not just the few. 

TICTeC is a place where you can learn about everything from combating corruption and misinformation to empowering communities and enhancing civic participation, and is a unique platform where attendees connect and collaborate.

Attendees are a distinctive mix of small and big tech practitioners, civil society leaders, funders, users, civil servants, government representatives and academic researchers. Together we want to showcase cutting-edge pro-democracy innovations with a relentless focus on their real-world impact and effectiveness.

At previous TICTeC conferences, between 150-250 people have gathered in person and online, from more than 40 countries.

Conference themes

This year we’re shaping TICTeC around three thematic areas. 

• Access to information and open data
• Democracy, people and politics
• Climate change

In these areas, we’re structuring panels around ideas of defensive and constructive democratic tech. Read our blog post on pro-democracy technology to understand more what we mean by defensive and constructive technologies (there are also examples below). Proposals may in practice cover multiple areas. If your proposal does not fit either category, you can select both or neither. 

Beyond these topics, we will also have time for sessions that are interested in meta questions around ideas of civic tech and pro-democracy technology.

The examples below are not meant to be comprehensive, but give a sense of what we mean by each category. 

Access to information and open data

This thematic area applies to people working with access to information/Freedom of Information laws, or open data. The tech side may be innovations in running ATI platforms, improved government efficiencies, or projects that produce subsequent analysis or tools as a result of the data. 

Defensive tech

This category is looking at the use of access to information laws/platforms or open data as part of anti-corruption projects or platforms. This might include how data from ATI requests have been used as part of wider initiatives, or meta-investigation about how technology can make anti-corruption use of ATI more effective. 

Constructive tech

This category is looking at how open data or access to information laws can be used to build new data and tools, and the wider social (or commercial) impact of making it easier to access information. 

Democracy, people, and politics

This section covers projects concerned with mainstream democratic structures, or technical approaches to democratic processes involving people directly. 

This might include democratic transparency projects, e.g. those that create/rework public information about democratic institutions/politicians to improve transparency, accountability, standards, or efficiency. This includes Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations, but also extends to projects looking at elected politicians in other contexts that are Parliaments (such as city governments), or other democratic processes such as deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies. 

But it might also look like technology that directly involves people in democratic processes, such as toolkits of deliberative processes, consultation approaches, conditional commitment etc. 

Defensive tech

This covers a range of uses of technology to safeguard and investigate democratic processes. For instance: electoral violence monitoring, political donation tracking and broader anti-corruption work. 

Constructive tech

Here we are looking for empowering technologies that build democratic fibre and capacity. These approaches are less of a zero-sum game, but are looking at the potential for technology that enriches democratic life. 

This covers technology that may be trying to improve processes and understanding of electoral democratic institutions. It might include new forms or innovations in PMOs applying machine learning to existing problems. It also includes innovations in new forms of technology, and the uses of technology in deliberative processes.

Climate change

The climate crisis is a massive practical issue that requires urgent action — and like all practical issues it’s a democratic question. We’re interested both in where action on this issue is being actively disrupted by anti-democrats, and where we need to build democratic capacity to solve these problems. 

At TICTeC we want to explore practical approaches to facilitating and delivering democratic action on climate change. 

We need to develop defensive approaches — but we also need to bring the full cognitive and relational capacity of democracy to bear on the problem, – pushing decisions away from a few big levers in the middle, to understand how to reshape our environments and communities to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Submissions in this category may also fit into one or both of the other two. 

Defensive tech

In this area, defensive tech may take the form of anti-corruption approaches focused on the influence of fossil fuel companies and petrostates. This might include monitoring of fossil-fuel sponsored narratives repeated by politicians, or fact checking for climate conspiracy theories.  

Constructive tech

Constructive tech in this area is trying to bring the cognitive and relational capacity of democracy to bear on the problem, – pushing decisions away from a few big levers in the middle, to understand how to reshape our environments and communities to respond to the effects of climate change. 

This might be participatory approaches to shaping policy, directing local changes, or collaborative approaches to mixed public/private decisions home upgrades and retrofit. 

Session types

This year we’re looking for three session types.

• 20 minute presentations
• 35 minute short workshops
• 75 minute long workshops/panels

For workshops, we really want to see a strong interactive element that involves the audience in working through a practical activity, sharing information and experiences. 

Short workshops may (but don’t have to) take the form of a short presentation, with structured audience participation. 

Long workshops may take the form of a panel (where multiple speakers are involved), but there should still be a strong interactive component. For these, we would want to see panellists from a range of expertise and backgrounds. 

Structured participation doesn’t have to be complicated. When we run sessions, we tend to use the 1-2-4-all method to structure conversation around questions. Sessions in the past have used slido or similar. What we’re looking for in evaluating workshops is:

• A clear sense of the kind of discussion and questions you want to have.
• A sense that participants will have something to say, and get something out of these discussions (so being clear which subset of the TICTeC audience and themes you are talking to). 

When submitting workshop proposals, the key thing to bear in mind is that we have fewer time slots and can accept fewer of these proposals.

You are allowed to submit multiple proposals if you would like to pitch a presentation and a workshop (but both are unlikely to be accepted). 

We have a limited number of travel grants available to support speakers to attend, you can apply for this via the submissions form.

While we will favour speakers to be in-person, there are a limited number of slots for people who cannot travel to present remotely. Please indicate if you may need to present remotely when filling out the submission form.

Submission details

Submit your proposals via this application form by 15 Jan 2025 at the latest. 

Those selected for inclusion in the conference programme will be notified by 31 Jan 2025. 

Presenters will be required to register for the conference by 14 February in order to confirm their slot (the registration fee will be waived for individuals presenting; people who have already booked will be refunded). 

What is a good TICTeC presentation?

TICTeC is a practical and reflective conference. We encourage presentation submissions to focus on specific impacts or usage, rather than showcase new tools that are as yet untested.  We’re less interested in speculative uses of technology, but more in people’s practical experiences of working with tools and technical approaches. Technology does not have to be new, and we welcome retrospectives on long running projects.

A tool doesn’t have to have mass usage to be worth talking about – we’re equally interested in qualitative stories on the impacts of technology; their impacts on official processes; and how users have used platforms to campaign for change. We’re also interested in stories about obstacles and barriers to having impact. The main work of your organisation does not have to be technology centred: we are interested in experiences and impacts of adopting new approaches in less technical organisations. 

TICTeC attendees are a mixture of practitioners and researchers. Presentations should expect audiences to include different levels of technical knowledge. 

We score proposals according to their alignment to the conference themes, as discussed above. 

Use of AI in writing proposals

You may use ChatGPT or similar to sharpen ideas for proposals, better highlight alignment with our themes, or improve written language. However, proposals and sessions that are entirely AI-conceived will not score well. 

Last year we saw a number of proposals we suspected were AI-written because while they were at first appearance well crafted, they ultimately only spoke in vague and general terms about the themes we asked for. Because we prioritise experience and impact, such submissions will score poorly. If using these tools, ensure the result is an accurate and truthful account of your own experiences, research, or impact. 

More information

The TICTeC 2025 Eventbrite page contains further information about the conference, including FAQs. If you still have any questions after reading that, please email tictec@mysociety.org.

Speaking opportunities through sponsorship

TICTeC 2025 sponsors receive a guaranteed speaking slot, with no need to participate in the open call. Find out more about sponsoring TICTeC 2025.

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You can follow updates as they are announced over on the TICTeC website. If you’d like to be the first to receive TICTeC 2025 updates, please sign up for our emails.

And in the meantime, if you’d like to see what TICTeC is all about, you can browse all the resources from previous events over on the TICTeC Knowledge Hub.

We look forward to welcoming you to TICTeC 2025!