Imagine a world where every citizen automatically receives the government grants they’re entitled to, stays informed about public consultations, and can easily contribute feedback—feedback that they trust will genuinely shape policy decisions. Services like these could strengthen and transform democracies worldwide.

But, should this be the reality we ought to seek? What are the opportunities and challenges? And how close are we to achieving this?

At this TICTeC gathering, we heard from two insightful speakers:

• Richard Gevers, Head of Service Design and Delivery at the Digital Services Unit of The Presidency South Africa.
• Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta, Specialist in the Democratic Innovations programme at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.

Sign up for our newsletter to be informed about future events, and find out more about TICTeC at tictec.mysociety.org. Appreciate mySociety’s work? Please do donate!

Transcript:

[00:04] Louise Crow: Welcome everyone. I’m Louise Crow. I’m Chief Executive of mySociety. Thank you so much for joining us today for this TICTeC community gathering: ‘From digital public infrastructure to democratic public infrastructure’.

[00:20] Just as a brief reminder, TICTeC stands for The Impacts of Civic Technology. TICTeC started life as a conference, but since 2020 we’ve been running year round activities to try and connect people building using and researching technology to strengthen democracy and civic power, with the aim of helping us learn from each other and boost our collective impact.

[00:44] So ahead of the global DPI summit next week, we thought this was a good time to talk about civic tech’s relationship to digital public infrastructure. What are we talking about when we say digital public infrastructure? 

[00:58] Well, as we are about to hear all over the world, governments are implementing fundamental digital systems to enable improved delivery of services, to try and facilitate data exchange and to foster economic growth, and we know that DPI initiatives are leading to benefits for citizens so they can access vital services like social payments and healthcare without the need to queue for hours and hours at government offices. 

[01:23] But should we be thinking beyond that and beyond service delivery to ways to provide opportunities for citizens to participate more fully in decision making? 

[01:35] What are the risks and opportunities around that, and are there lessons from the growth in DPI for building transparency, accountability and citizen participation infrastructure?

[01:47] So lots of big questions. To help us contextualise and maybe answer a few of them, we’re delighted to be joined today by two fantastic speakers. We have Richard Gevers, the head of service design and delivery at the Digital Services Unit of the South African presidency, and Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta, a specialist in the Democratic Innovations program at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. 

[02:12] Firstly, we’re going to hear from Richard Gevers, who’s got substantial experience working outside of government on civic tech projects, as well as now within government, and he’s going to talk about his work implementing DPI at the national level in South Africa, as well as thoughts that he has on the relationship of that to democratic participation. 

[02:32] Richard Gevers: So yeah, welcome everyone. As mentioned, Richard Gevers: formerly a recovering economist turned data scientist turned technologist turned founder of Open Cities Lab, which was a civic tech organisation. It’s still going. I’m not. 

[02:52] That is a really good civic tech organisation that runs data and digital government projects across Africa, and I have now joined the presidency, as we see, get into that. 

[03:07] And I think when you know, thinking about the topic today, DPI, can do much more than government service delivery and government efficiency. It can strengthen trust, transparency, participation, and I probably should have highlighted the ‘can’, rather than the ‘others’.

[03:29] So in the context of what we’re working on, we’re trying to understand how this infrastructure that is meant to rapidly deliver a much better link between social protection and employment, and I’ll get into that, also enables citizens to shape decisions that affect them in the design across the across the ecosystem. 

[03:58] So just some context and apologies for those that may have seen similar slides at TICTeC. I’ll go through these fairly quickly. But like many countries, South Africa was exposed in the pandemic around its ability to deliver services. 

[04:17] So history of siloed and outdated and inefficient digital infrastructure, the stuff we know, meant that we couldn’t prove people were who they said they were. We couldn’t pay them easily. 

[04:33] Rapid development and some very good pilots and prototypes and projects and a universal grant came into place as a result of this, but mostly across the board, things kind of ground to a halt. 

[04:47] And so there was plans made to create this digital transformation roadmap, and that happened to evolve at the time that DPI became something that became a common global language, and I think also for the first time, and why I hopped in to go into government was the first time I saw Director General, so our highest level civil servants, government ministers, presidents, starting to understand that this isn’t the sort of domain of IT as they would describe it, but the domain of governments and society.

[05:31] Everyone knows the sort of future you’ve probably seen this a lot: a lot of talking about what DPI is and stacks. 

[05:41] This diagram, actually originally created by Richard Pope, talks about this sort of idea of reforming governments from silos into your day to day and hardware, shared infrastructure services. 

[05:55] I’m presuming I’m talking to a DPI enabled crowd, and so going to not spend a lot of time on that, but I think a lot of what Louise is saying, it’s been interesting, and I, walking a line from being a civil servant, but from the context of my background. 

[06:17] Because what these slides show is that what was compelling to South Africa was faster services. There’s fraud and corruption savings. 

[06:29] You can see there the economic impact being very prominent in these slides, of DPI experiences around the world, and an understanding of DPI as data, exchange, payments, identity, and then the services layers that sit on top of it. 

[06:46] I think one of the things that we’re trying to break into the zeitgeist, to build capacity around, is that when you start to create a universal service channel, when you start to do things like implement data exchange across the country, digital ID, government’s people payments and vice versa, it creates channels that can carry both services and voice, and you’ve got to be very deliberate. 

[07:16] We are trying to be very deliberate in our design, that that voice isn’t one going one way from us to people. And so on LinkedIn, I’ve started to develop and write week notes, there’s a lot more communications will be coming out of this whole project as we try to work in the open and really take that principle, work in the open, show the thing, very seriously.

[07:44] But building an openness consent and transparency can obviously do way more than just pay someone their grant or help them not have to stand on the queue, and you can start to ask… one of the key connections I made at TICTeC actually was with Pol.is, who a lot of you know, apologies to, because it’s taken a long time for us to collaborate. 

[08:11] We’re starting to get to the point where there will be a collaboration around building Pol.is into our universal service channel to be a way that we can chat to citizens about even about the design and implementation of our DPI. 

[08:25] But this can enable participatory budgeting, policy consultations. You know, what we’ve seen is when going into any of our government’s websites, department teams, that being the main way, apart from a government office, that people receive services, no user feedback loops, nothing, no ability to communicate past probably an email address around. 

[08:55] And so we’re really looking at the chain of service design, which is why I fought hard for that to be in my title. 

[09:01] I think also at the data level, at registries level, we’ve got opportunities and risks around what’s happening with open APIs, state exchange, what will go into AI and how AI comes into this environment. 

[09:19] But I think there’s the risk of doing a little bit what I would say, the way I described it was back at open data days when, when Trump became president, and all of a sudden, some of the naiveties around open openness and open access and information were exposed and led to harm, whereas some other areas, where openness hadn’t been so focused and should have been, meant that there wasn’t transparency,

[09:51] and there’s a there’s really good discussion in DPI around like the implementation: does the private sector implement something?

[09:58] Does government implement something, or is it self sovereign? And you know, I think right now, people are seeing the move around DPI very much from a supply side type of thinking, and very much from a commoditising or taking back areas and digital infrastructure that the private sector has taken over. 

[10:19] But I think it needs to go further into what, and you know, the next question, and what should not be government, but actually owned by citizens and residents and people.

[10:34] You know, a lot of you, and maybe not enough, but through significant amounts of user design around the drawing of this strategy, this digital roadmap that South Africa launched in May 2[025, this year, and which set up the DSU and started this journey towards DPI, was this sort of archetypal South African Thandi.

[10:59] And so, you know, the idea would be Thandi, like a school leaver that’s done really well at school, looking for employment opportunities, looking for further education opportunities, likely to have a young child, likely to be supporting people that live in a more rural area with digital access issues and digital literacy issues and a platform MyMzansi that uses the benefits of DPI to reach out. 

[11:29] But when we talk about democracy in the next phase, you know, she doesn’t just have to receive: it can be that two way flow, and can start to be a discussion between people and government about what they want their government to be. 

[11:44] And I think that that’s something that is not, again, not very clear in our strategy. Yet we’ve all probably seen in a lot of your countries, where you are much further in this journey, the sort of change of view towards life stage, versus having to know the supply side government department that you need to go to, and being stuck in this mire of local to national to departments, to agencies and trying to navigate government. 

[12:15] So the whole idea here is, how does Thandi get stuff? You know, have something that she can access based on her need. So demand driven, demand built kind of approach. 

[12:27] And so we’ve set up a number of projects around this, which include your classic digital identity trust ecosystems with verified credentials. 

[12:37] We’re using, actually we’ve just launched an X-road based data exchange called MzansiXchange. 

[12:42] Next week, we’re going to be launching more, which I might give a little sneak peek of, because this video will come out after that, and so I won’t be in trouble for sharing things early. 

[12:54] But I think right at the bottom, you know, what’s been quite interesting is a lot of reading into this, is that services – that quote from Mike Bracken and David Eaves, and think it’s Michelle Wronski – that paper, basically said, you know, that services beget stacks, stacks don’t beget services. 

[13:13] And the whole idea of, if you’re going to go from a DPI approach, which, quite frankly, that even framing around DPI has really got a lot of what we have been doing for the last 15 years. 

[13:27] A lot of government is platform thinking, a lot of demand driven kind of, well, there’s a way it has to go. It’s a sort of service or demand driven space. And so I’m less interested in… DPI will be around until, you know, donors are bored, and then it’ll be the next thing. 

[13:48] So to our community, it’s about, what I think it has really helped with was we always found in civic tech, we were heading up against very embedded, infrastructural and and governance government structure problems that were really preventing our ability to build accountability, to build openness.

[14:08] And so I think the supply side focus on the actual infrastructure of the state has been critical, but the risk is that it overplays its supply side hand and doesn’t remember that everything has to be a demand, pull from the citizen need or the people need. 

[14:24] These are very government-y slides. I’ve presented it before, but just to back the idea that this is the first time in probably 20 digital transformation plans of South Africa that we’ve seen a whole of government adoption so a steering committee that is led by the presidency and our national treasury, and our digital department. 

[14:49] So DGS are responsible for work streams that implement those technical things, but also the others. And I think this is where it’s interesting, because we need to move from, I mean, the first thing this does is try to coordinate a ‘whole of government’ approach, but it has to be a ‘whole of society’ approach. 

[15:06] And again, that, to me, is the jump to democracy. So people are, you know, consultants made this with us. I was one of the drafters, and I have to take culpability myself. People love a vision house. 

[15:19] Everyone’s excited about the stuff on the left, but I think it’s the stuff on the right, five to eight that’s going to change the future for South Africa and for the the people on continent. 

[15:32] South Africa often becomes a good lab for the continent in some ways, and in some ways it isn’t. But, pointing to that non vibrant, non government community, a lot of what we’re looking through now is, what are our government mechanisms that include civil society, civic tech participation platforms, you know, power, feedback, transparency, accountability. 

[15:59] So, you know what’s nice that is, that is that this is baked into the strategy. It’s cabinet-adopted, presidency-led busy building into institutional reform so that it’s not reliant on presidential administration terms. 

[16:18] But I think what’s also very key there is this idea of, how do we build in everything from implementation to safeguarding to monitoring to participation to trusted intermediaries in our approach? 

[16:29] And that’s going to be the kind of things that creates these sorts of things. I’m going to send these slides through, and you can find out more about a lot of this by yourself, because we got given five minutes extra. 

[16:42] So I want to jump into something a little bit, a couple more key points. I think one of the biggest problems for me in DPI, in places where it’s been interpreted as very government heavy, is that it is very government efficiency heavy. 

[16:59] And I would say government and I’ve said this, and people have disagreed with me, but I think government efficiency is a trap. 

[17:05] ‘Platform Land’ by Richard Pope and other books, you know, ‘Recording America’, the sort of books that are leading that similar thinking around digital and government, you know, they all point to the fact that, I mean, firstly, digital and service design responds to policy. 

[17:22] And so if we’re not solving our policy, then DPI is limited in its ability to and so the link to have impacted, so the link between policy and and and service design that then drives the way that the DPI comes together into services. 

[17:40] There’s a piece that I think is under focused on in our current thinking. But then I think also, I mean, we’ve obviously seen Doge and, and, you know, I always have to apologise for my, you know, my countryman who claims to have started Tesla and did all of the Doje things, but efficiency gains and cost saving government is not a bad thing, but if you stop there, it risks not actually changing anything significantly. 

[18:17] It might mean more people get …it might mean some real outcomes, for sure, but I think one of the key focuses for us and the way we’re measuring ourselves, and there’s been very good impact.  DIAL has put out a very good impact measurement tool, and others, you know, starting to think, how do you make sure you’re essentially measuring your impact on how to solve society. 

[18:43] At my previous organisation, we had this realisation in civic tech, that we often work in ecosystems where, if you’re shopping for running shoes, and you buy a pair of running shoes, you’re the donor, the customer, the user, and the beneficiary. 

[19:00] Civic tech taught us, and DPI needs to take this on: that your customer, your beneficiary, or your user, and the money are all often different and have overlapping, but not aligned, fully aligned goals, and they’re all going to pull you in different directions on terms of how they measure your success and impact, and so learning how to create frameworks that make sure that the citizen – or the person living in South Africa, whether a citizen or not, if they’re visiting – are the ones who are at the top of that framework of impact, and not the donors’ needs, and which is very difficult, especially when that becomes fiscal funding and not the customer’s needs, which is often government leadership, might not even be the user needs, which could be a government worker or intermediary, you know, when the beneficiary is someone without digital access.

[19:59] But actually it sort of ends up there, that sort of framework of thinking about impact is really critical, yeah.

[20:06] So, I mean, I put a bunch into, like, the appendix, just to close out on what we’re doing. You know, these were scribbles of mine that became a prototype. And I think just a lot of things around democracy at different levels. 

[20:32] What does democracy and data and registries mean? Democracy and shared components and service design. A lot for us is just that, as we build this, Mzansi.gov.za single universal port, like channel two services that accessibility and security localisation, data minimisation,  etc, are built into the core of the design. 

[20:54] And so what we’re in this sort of method of doing is also trying to embed open and so we’ll publish quite soon. We’ll publish quite soon our principles and our early service design, manual design system, but really making in the reuse of open source systems into this sort of stack that we’re creating. 

[21:19] And the service design that leads us through the sort of single portal, whether it’s an app or a screen in a service centre, in person or website or a trusted intermediary that’s doing things for you. You’re able to access your government from end to end through, you know, there’s one place and then talk to us about it. 

[21:40] I mean, I think one of the things we’re trying to do in the implementation of DPI is, firstly, show that there’s a lot of solved problems. So this is working software. This is a thing I say, that will be showing the public for the first time on Tuesday next week in the DPI Summit. But we put this together in 10 weeks, it’ll be available to the public in the first half of 2026.

[22:10] You know, there are a lot of known problems inside government and democracy that we we know people need to give government information and government needs to store that information and apply it. 

[22:21] We know it needs to do checks to understand eligibility for grants. We know these things, and so trying to rapidly move through the things we know to make sure that our design is around contextualisation, localisation, and the stuff we don’t know is really critical. 

[22:37] And so what I’ve just kind of demoed is the fact that, we’ve gone really rapidly into something that we’re going to start to put into as many people’s hands as possible, just so that between now and launch, we are able to start to get and hear this feedback, and start to build these loops in. 

[22:58] But that sitting underneath there is, as I say, like a lot of what came out of GDS, what came out of its XRoad, it’s come out of India, it’s come out of Brazil. gov.br/ds for our design system base. 

[23:12] And so I know, as civic technologists, you know, we’ve always said, you know, I suppose, taken the idea of big, civic, small technology. And the biggest challenge for us is to say, well, what are the gaps in the service remains, and from policy to someone getting what they need and being able to express it back and have that two way flow? 

[23:36] And then how does the technology fit into that? What are solved problems? And then what do we have to solve, but trying to keep that idea of like the end user need and the ability to participate, and then hopefully eventually deliberate kind of at the core.

[23:55] Louise: Now let’s pass on to Sanna-Kaisa, who is going to talk about citrus work on citizen participation projects and their ideas about scaling up participatory democracy.

[24:06] Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta: Well, first of all, honoured to be invited by mySociety here. This is a big opportunity for me to talk about our work, and what amazing work mySociety has been doing for impactful civic tech. This is all followed by us and praised by us in Sitra, and today I’m going to show you what we have done, how we have approached advancing democracy in Finland. 

[24:35] I’m going to do a bit of a deeper dive into civic tech, and I’m also going to talk about one piece of democratic public infrastructure we have been drafting with our team for the EU to enable impact for civic tech on such a wide scale. 

[24:59] But let’s get started. So I work as a specialist in a democracy innovation program in Sitra. And our mission in Sitra is, it’s an independent Future Fund. 

[25:12] We are not using money from the government budget. We run in the return of our own investment fund. We are still accountable to the Finnish Parliament, so we work closely together with the public sector. You can consider us as an innovation driver and funding partner, and this is how we approach change and innovation in Finland.

[25:38] So when we advance democracy, what do we do? We are helping authorities and decision makers to address the growing societal crisis. We help them strategically develop citizen participation for their use and that they can solve these biggest problems of our times, and on a national level, regional level, local level, for example. 

[26:09] Just to bring a bit more broad perspective, it’s not only civic tech that I’m delving into. We have also been advancing deliberative democracy. We’ve been building capacity. 

[26:23] For example, for citizen assemblies. You have services for sortition, not only for research. Then you have also facilitators. We have been educating – now we have actually educated – an educator and networks of facilitators for citizen assemblies. 

[26:44] And then we have used civic tech with the deliberative processes, civic tech alone in different processes. And this all needs capacity building. 

[26:57] And today, when I’m talking in different terms than Richard before, and because my background is actually in social and public policy, and this, I think it’s really nicely giving a different kind of view and perspective to the discussion today. 

[27:16] So now it’s the time for next slide. Yes, OK, so I’m going to dwell more into our experiments and how we’ve been scaling, implementing routing into a societal use policy platform. 

[27:40] And I think many in the audience know this platform. It’s developed by the Computational Democracy Project in Seattle, USA. 

[27:52] First, we collaborated with them and one in house company called Digi Finland. We wanted to have a service provider in Finland that can use this open source tool, and that was the first capacity building project. 

[28:06] Together with Digi Finland, we installed open source code to their cloud. We made it GDPR compatible, and this kind of first version that we can start to experiment with, and we started to experiment with the first round in 2[023 we had these counties that are, they are responsible for health and social care services in Finland. 

[28:37] They were a newly established layer of governance, and we want to make sure that this level of governance is actually recognising the democratic perspective when they are developing this governmental level. 

[28:54] So it was a strategic decision to start on the regional level, and we had more than 30 different Pol.is conversations. And all these were different processes, different topics always connected to a different decision making process. 

[29:15] And yes, they were always conducted by the civil servants who were working in the public sector, regional authorities, they had a small team, different capabilities: communications, substance, person who has the substance skills for this topic, and also a person who can do these kind of participatory processes internally and they drafted this process, and they were taking the buy in from the political side and building structures for the processes we had, also learnings and recommendations after this round as a paper. 

[29:57] It’s unfortunately only in Finnish. But we did also our own experiment with the Pol.is platform. Those days, we had a bigger national, wide “What do you think, Finland?” campaign, and it gained 80,[000 participants on the Pol.is platform, and it was discussed a lot. 

[30:18] We framed it also as we have technology that can be used for a good, constructive discussion among thousands and thousands of participants, this kind of technology exists. Come and give your opinion about the future direction Finland should take. 

[30:40] This was also in the morning news and everywhere, so it blew up. We didn’t expect so many people to join, but it was an amazing experiment. We learned a lot. 

[30:50] Also did some technical fixes with this kind of scale. We got user feedback a lot about the user interface. And after this, we knew that we can’t go on without renewing the user interface. 

[31:07] I think sometimes civic tech practitioners are criticised that they are too much concentrated on the UX and UI. I think it’s still rather important. You have to meet kind of it’s the window what you meet. 

[31:23] We made a mobile first version of this pol.is platform. And this was done with different demographies of people: young people, elderly, interviews, design workshops, together with civil servants. 

[31:41] This was a joint process that needed to be done. And now it is in Finland’s context, at least user interface, that we are happy about and we can continue. 

[31:54] And now this year, we have made a second pilot round. We have been piloting in schools, municipals, ministries, government agencies, NGOs, again, different topics we had also our constitutional AI process and one national one we did on our own. 

[32:15] So what kind of rules AI should have when it’s used in the public services in public sector, this kind of discussion we ran, there were over 6,[000 people taking part in it, and the analysis is going on. 

[32:30] But now we come then to next step. We found out that, OK, if we want to scale this effectively, now we start to have capabilities and skills around the Pol.is platform. We still need to have more service providers, not only one service provider that can offer this in Finnish context, we need more of them. 

[33:03] Otherwise, it’s too risky that when we are getting away as Sitra from this field, that the story goes down. We founded this kind of open source community. 

[33:17] It’s run by Open Source Finland, and first decision this community made was that they changed the name, and it was a good one, because pol.is actually is a police officer in Finland, and it goes too near when we have discussions about the security situation, it just doesn’t fit.

[33:41] And this is OK, a story and experience is gathered in a long term now, but as it’s often said, it’s less about the tool, but more about the effective process we are able to build to support the decision making. 

[33:58] And when I was talking about this experience, experiments we have been funding and instructing and done together with civil servants, they could always create a method that was fit for their own resources, and they could build around Voxit, so meaning the pol.is platform, they could build around this kind of maxi public, mini public themes, have a final report, have a decision made based on that. 

[34:34] This is just layering one example of one northern Karelian area where this was made, and step by step, they have done this, and I think they have done amazing improvement in a way that they don’t only tell about the outcome, but they also tell about the impact of these processes, but it’s a learning curve. 

[35:00] And you need to be doing civic tech that you learned the most of it. There needs to be place and space for that kind of experimentation. And then we have been watching a long time Finland, but we also start to get more and more questions all around Europe. 

[35:21] So how did you start it, to scale this pol.is platform and and can you tell more about it? And then we also see, OK, there’s a momentum now in Europe. Everybody is looking at the democratic backsliding happening in different countries. EU is going to push now for democracy shield program, having investments on democratic resilience. 

[35:48] And this shouldn’t be only, in our view, it shouldn’t be only about protecting from outside threats. It should be also about renewing democracy. And this is why we started to draft with our team and European civic tech hub. And this could be one point of view to a democratic public infrastructure that enables European thriving, European civic tech ecosystem and this hub so go further. 

[36:28] It has two purposes. One is to strengthen and renew European democracy by helping to anchor these effective use of civic tech into a policy making at local, regional, national, European levels. 

[36:46] Second, enhance European technological serenity by creating a European ecosystem for civic tech platform, solutions and services, and how we approached something like this could exist already about what kind of services this kind of hub could offer for for the civic tech industry and citizens.

[37:20] We needed to first delve into bottlenecks and do an analysis of what is really needed. And here I’ve highlighted some of these bottlenecks for you to see what kind of the analysis and what are the problems that this civic tech hub needs to tackle and build the services on.

[37:43] If you watch from the citizen side, you might lack of trust of different civic tech tools. You don’t want them to be used in the decision making. That’s also not always clear. But you have to earn that trust with many kind of ways. 

[38:01] You have to have open technology. You have to show that they can make a difference, that they can be trusted. 

[38:10] Then there’s also unawareness, when can I participate? And as Richard was before, explaining well this, this should be also seen through one app. 

[38:23] And just to get a bit provocative here, it’s actually funny, we live at times that you can order a package from Amazon and follow it step by step when it’s delivered to you, but then we can’t follow legislative process, how it’s approaching, step by step, and when is my time to have a say?

[38:47] We have done, as Sitra, also work to map the legislative process. It is messy, but it’s important work we also do on the national level, and you have to create a quite heavy infrastructure and system that you are able to use that app and also follow when it’s my turn to have a say. But it’s all possible, I believe. 

[39:13] And then bottlenecks from the public authority side. There’s a lack of skills, awareness and trust they see that, oh, there’s a lot of different tools here. Where do I start to look for one? 

[39:29] They might be rated to some level, but they need quite a lot of information about the maturity of these technologies, and there’s just a lot of skills you also need when you are trying to imagine and building these kind of processes around different civic tech tools. 

[39:51] Then there’s also when public sector themselves, they try to build technologies, civic tech tools. Internally. It’s often a project that ends and then there’s always lack of resources for maintenance, then comes to security problems, etc. So it’s not the most optimal always to have it built fully internally and then be fully in depth with different kind of other services and ‘interoperability first’ thinking.

[40:30] Then there’s a lack of collective learning for these different regional and national level civil servants, what could they do and how they could use these tools? There’s a lot of interest for learning together, but and then also highlighting the complexity when you use open source tools, the procurement processes are not easy. 

[40:52] It’s not easy to deploy these, especially if you are like myself, you’re not a data scientist, you are participatory democracy expert. 

[41:06] So then, on the other hand, you have European civic tech communities, you have startups and companies like our Voxit, open source community. There’s just a lack of resources for open source development and maintenance, or constant lack of resources. 

[41:29] There’s even situations that the company wants to open source its tool, but it’s just too costly, even though there are synergies and you could gain a lot together in a community, small seed funding or something would help a lot further and complexities of compliance. 

[41:53] So I know, as we have been scaling this together with the service providers, so kind of civic tech companies, you always meet different kind of interpretations of GDPR; depends what kind of municipal officer you go to. 

[42:11] So some kind of labeling and standards should be used here and clarified better in this civic tech hub. Last but not least, the lack of spaces for experimentation.

[42:26] What like we have done, etc, is super important that we can learn together and also develop jointly, together with civil servants for their use these tools and that direction is right, they can actually be connected to the decision making scene, and also, if we think public services are definitely something important for democracy and that they function well, and digital infrastructure supporting that, but we also need to reach people outside of the services. 

[43:09] This is what the democracy tool should be used for. Thank you. It was my pleasure to introduce this to you, and if you have further questions, I’m happy to think about it with you further.

[43:26] Louise: Thanks so much, Sanna-Kaisa, really interesting, and reminds me, when I was preparing for this session that the term Digital Public Infrastructure, I think, originated in the deliberative community. 

[43:38] So perhaps from both the presentations, we can take away that they’re not so far apart as we might imagine with the current focus on services. Richard has been answering questions in the sidebar busily, but I want to pull out the top one at the moment, and please do add others.

[43:56] The questioner wants to ask you both about the relationship between open source tools and the kind of infrastructure you’re talking about. Do you feel like it is necessary that DPI is open source? Challenges and opportunities around that relationship? 

[44:14] Sanna-Kaisa: Yeah, I think it’s a good question. And this is actually often asked from me that, what do you think about open source? And I think in a context of what I was just talking more like a civic tech, and not that the whole infrastructure, government infrastructure, has to be open sourced. 

[44:34] I think the path is a bit longer. But when we have such a platforms like, for example, Pol.is, yes, you then don’t have the vendor lock ins that might create black boxes of how these tools are actually built and how they work. 

[44:57] But it’s not only that. You can have also company doing services with their own really well designed civic tech. And then you might have a civil servant who needs exactly the whole package and doesn’t have resources to plan anything like this what we have done here, and I think especially on a national level, you need, maybe on an EU level as well, you need that kind of service provider that there comes the technology, there comes the skill to help you, to make the process, and I don’t say that if you haven’t open sourced your tool that you would be out of the game. 

[45:42] I think they are serving many kinds of purposes now, but open source tool collaboration, it is competing with quality, and I think it’s a good driving innovation system for civic tech.

[45:58] Louise: Yeah, Richard, you’re much more embedded in the service delivery end. What’s your experience been?

[46:04] Richard: I mean, I think that open source, wrapping delivery in open source frameworks and open frameworks, which is different, is really critical. I don’t think that within the service chains, it can’t be that proprietary tools are used. I think there’s a place for them. 

[46:35] But I think that the standards and framework and implementation around anything that is proprietary should be such that it can be swapped out immediately with no cost to anyone, not financial or non financial cost, you know. 

[46:54] And I think that that’s really what we try to get across, is that, you know, overseas, like we stopped using civic tech as a term, because even though that’s what we do as a community, and in that I also think with open source, open is not the same as open source, which is not the same as open data, those are all conflated too much to get to truly open society. 

[47:21] I think that that as a goal may mean frameworks that are that encourage openness and transparency, but it doesn’t mean that the only way to digitally get there is with open source. 

[47:35] It’s to say, as I say, it’s the environment safeguards and implementation and design methods you put in the place that allow for a chain that can include it, I would say at its core, DPI is taking is commoditising, or at least, you know, leveraging open source to take back areas that it shouldn’t have lost to the private sector. 

[48:03] And then, if you think about the opportunities on top of an open source, largely open source DPI, largely open source, government as a platform, I think that gives a lot of opportunity for and that’s where you see the GDP bumps. 

[48:22] And the last thing I’ll say is, you know, I think of that flag, but before and after the GDS flag, the map of the UK with technology providers to the state, that had, I think, five dots around London, and then posts five years later, you’re like over 1,[000 dots across the UK of technology providers to the UK government who were able to build open source and even proprietary tools on top of the public rails that were built, you know? 

[48:52] And that’s that I think is really critical. Those are jobs and skills and capacity that are being built in house in country rather than being shipped to Silicon Valley, you know?

[49:04] Louise: Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to come back to a question that you briefly answered in the sidebar, but I think it’s a really important one, which is, how do we address the problem when citizens’ feedback is not aligned with the policy roadmap or the agenda, and I guess I would build on that kind of thinking about when citizens want to do interact with the government in more oppositional ways. 

[49:30] So I guess question to both of you, Richard, you talked about services that are neither government nor private sector, but somewhere in between, where would we host that kind of service if it’s less likely that the government is is keen on developing it, and how do you fund it? Where do you situate it in institutions?

[49:54] Richard: So that’s a lot of difficult questions.

[49:58] Louise: Whichever aspect you want to address. 

[50:00] Richard: I think the point is, there’s never been more of a need for civic tech. And I think that once the hype around DPI starts to fade, I have a feeling that the next stage for us, because, let’s say AI is already here, is trust and back to open data, weirdly, and the trust ecosystem. 

[50:23] So basically, the thing that says, you know, we know we have privacy but openness. We know we have digital trust and payments and data in, you know, sort of those sorts of things. So coming back to that. I mean, there’s never been more of a need for civil society to be active, but there’s but then you said the funding question, and I’m like, I don’t know.

[50:49] Which is a question we were talking about, and now, in the environment of cuts to budgets and things like that, you know, to me, that’s something we should almost be, and I’ve said this to the civil society groups. 

[51:03] And this is going to go on YouTube, and my colleagues are going to hear this, and I’m going to get in trouble, but we should be giving them the platforms to shout at us, or at least facilitating the space for those platforms to be created. 

[51:09] That’s where I see civic tech as crucial. You know, if it’s all going to be done by us, then there’s no way we’re gonna make sure that all was still heard in, you know, just, I think, fundamentally, capacity wise, even if we had the best intent, you know.

[51:33] Louise: No, totally. And final words from you, Sanna-Kaisa on that question,

[51:39] Sanna-Kaisa: I hope I get it right. Was a good question, and many questions that I started to think there, but about the civil society and broader civil society, how they could be using these tools, and where does this actually I think there are roof organisations that could implement these tools and offer them almost as free. 

[52:05] So we know this moment that there’s a lack of resources, but there should be institutions, kind of the rooftop institutions, that offer the usage for free education around them for free, that they are and they able to adopt them. 

[52:26] And then the role, of course, is differently. It might be not such a connection to decision making as it is harder to build on, but it’s a important voice, because you have to also, all the time, bring out, out of the out of the political agenda. You have to raise the voice. 

[52:47] And we have, in Finland quite well, institutionalised citizen initiative process. But alongside of that, I see that there should be better use of civic tech in the civil society broad, so giving voices to those initiate initiation processes would be really fruitful, terrific.

[53:14] Louise: Well, thank you both so much for sharing your work and your expertise. Thank you to you all for coming to listen. 

[53:22] We are going to be hosting more TICTeC gatherings between now and the end of the year. So to hear about these, do subscribe for TICTeC email updates. 

[53:33] Just to give you a taster, our next gathering will be the 11th of November on networked auditors, crowdsourcing and community led access to information, and we’re going to be hearing from some great organisations across Nigeria, Germany and Poland, who’ve been working with volunteers for Public Interest transparency projects. So very relevant to that last point of discussion. 

[53:55] And following on from that, we’ll be meeting again on the 24th of November to talk about converting information from Access to Information requests to journalist friendly resources. 

[54:05] So thank you all once again and to our speakers, and hope to see you soon. Bye everyone.

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Music: Ivan Luzan