Shifting landscapes: what we’ve learned from TICTeC – report launch
Over the past decade, mySociety has convened a global community with a shared interest in how digital tools can defend and advance democracy, via our TICTeC events and activities.
This new report draws on dozens of TICTeC presentations, and interviews with global civic technologists. The result? A practical framework for navigating different approaches to using technology in the service of democracy, bringing out examples of innovation, and guidance on how to use the best tools available. It’s designed to be a practical jumping-off point for practitioners and funders seeking to understand more about using digital technology to defend and advance democracy.
At this launch event, mySociety researchers shared key insights from the report, reflected on impacts of TICTeC initiatives, and discussed ideas of what’s needed next to protect and innovate democracy in a changing global context.
- Read the report: Shifting landscapes: what we’ve learned from TICTeC
- TICTeC Knowledge hub
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Transcript
00:00 Louise Crow: Well, hello everyone. Welcome.
0:03 For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Louise Crow. I’m the Chief Executive of mySociety, and really appreciate you joining us for this session where we’re going to be launching our TICTeC landscape report.
0:15 We’ve called it ‘Shifting landscapes, a practical guide to pro-democracy tech’. We’re going to be pulling out some key parts of the report and basically discussing what we’ve learned from running TICTeC over the last couple of years.
0:29 So a super quick introduction to mySociety. We use technology to help people participate in the decisions that affect their lives. We do that by creating and running digital services that equip millions of people to take action and drive meaningful change.
0:44 We’re also part of a global community of people working to create and popularise different kinds of pro democracy technology in different societies and contexts. We think this is really important. We think having an anchor in the global perspective helps civic tech organisations around the world fight their local battles.
1:05 We can all get useful tools and ideas to use at home, but also connecting with a global community, doing similar things, can transform what can often be quite an isolated experience, chipping away at big problems, often in difficult and constrained circumstances.
1:23 So because we think it’s important, we actively work to bring this community together through our TICTeC program. TICTeC stands for The Impacts of Civic Technology, and we’ve been running TICTeC conferences for 10 years, since 2015 -now 11 years – and since 2020 we’ve also been running year-round activities between conferences to try and connect people building using and researching tech to strengthen democracy and civic power.
1:52 The last two years in particular have seen everyone working in the field trying to navigate a sometimes rapidly changing world, because we sit at the intersection of two things in motion, rapid changes in technology and also global challenges to democracy and moreover, the changing geopolitical landscape has also affected the resources available to civil society and civic tech organisations around the world.
2:20 During that period, we’ve had the opportunity and the privilege of meeting and talking to people who are responding in creative and effective ways to these challenges. So we’re publishing this report as a practical resource that attempts to describe some of the directions of travel that we see, but also lay out approaches that we see working in specific areas.
2:44 Today’s speakers are going to be well known to you if you’ve attended any of our recent TICTeC events: I’m delighted to be joined by my mySociety colleagues, Gemma Moulder, Alex Parsons, and Julia Cushion, who have done a fantastic job of working together to deliver the programme over the last couple of years, and also to write the landscape report.
3:04 In terms of running order today, Gemma is going to start with a brief refresher on TICTeC and how the programme has worked over the last couple of years, and she’s also going to share with us some of the brilliant things that have already come out of it.
3:18 Alex and Julia are going to talk us through the report after that, and they’re going to pull out some key highlights and some useful examples from each chapter. And so we’ll hear from each of them in a moment, and we will have time for questions and discussion after that. I am going to pass over to Gemma to kick things off.
3:37 Gemma Moulder: Hi, I’m Gemma. I’m responsible for making sure our TICTeC programme of work has happened, as Louise said, the last 11 years really to talk about this particular project. Since mid 2023 until the end of last year, we’ve been really fortunate to have had the support of the National Endowment for Democracy on our TICTeC communities programme of work.
3:58 And the overall aim of this project has been to promote learning, knowledge exchange and collaboration amongst global civic tech organisations to enhance public participation, transparency and accountability around the world.
4:12 The project has consisted of running two global communities of practice simultaneously, which have fed into two hybrid global TICTeC conferences. We’ve also been conducting interviews, one on one, interviews with pro-democracy tech practitioners around the world, and we’ve produced a research report, which Louise mentioned, on pro-democracy tech around the world, learning from the amazing work that’s been shared at TICTeC gatherings and conferences over the last couple of years.
4:39 And my colleagues will be talking about the report in more detail soon. The themes of the TICTeC Communities of Practice have been Access to Information and democratic transparency. The Access to Information Community of Practice has currently 69 members from 34 countries, and the Democratic Transparency Community of Practice has 27 members from 16 countries, making about 96 members in total from 42 countries. So a real global span.
5:09 And these communities have met online 25 times over the span of the project, which roughly equates to about one gathering every month. And Julia will talk in more detail about these communities of practice.
5:22 Later, we managed to bring together these community of practice members as well as the wider field, together in person at TICTeC conferences and post conference community days, once in London in June, 2024 and then again in Mechelen last year, in June, 2025,
5:42 and in total, 403, people attended these conferences, both in person and virtually, from 44 countries.
5:49 And just to say, all recordings and related resources so things like slides, reports from the majority of TICTeC community gatherings and conferences can be found over on our TICTeC Knowledge Hub.
6:04 I just want to say thank you so much to everybody who has attended TICTeC community events and conferences over the last two and a half years, and everyone who’s openly shared their work with us and the whole community to help everybody with this work and to work towards our common goal of strengthening and innovating democracies.
6:21 And this was an amazing stat that I worked out recently, that in total, around 715 people from 69 countries have attended TICTeC community events and conferences over the course of this two and a half year project, and that’s both in person and virtually, so an amazing global span of people.
6:42 Thank you to NED of course for their support with this program, but also to Porticus, the Friedrich Neumann Foundation for Freedom, Global Innovation Hub, Mechelen City Council and Meet In Mechelen for their support of TICTeC 2025 alongside a number of other funders.
6:59 Obviously, we’re delighted with so many people from across the world have engaged with TICTeC events over the last two and a half years. But we’re even more delighted to hear about the tangible impacts that attending these events have had on participants. So here’s just a few examples.
7:13 This organisation actually shifted its focus towards developing digital tools to help people be informed about their democratic rights. They traditionally were doing more sort of service delivery improvements, but have introduced new tools that help people understand their constitution and laws and parliaments.
7:36 An example here someone finding a PhD student at TICTeC to work on an AI tool, tool for writing appeals to FOI denials; a social designer used some of the frameworks she learned at TICTeC from one of our keynotes in several public domain projects.
7:54 A nice example of a lecturer taking one of the case studies she heard about, Belarus in this instance, and teaching her students all about it.
8:04 We’ve heard quite a few people saying that they started collaborations on new civic tech, pro-democracy tools. This one, for example, introducing parliamentary transcripts and the author of People Powered Guide to Digital Participation Platforms. Go and check that out. That’s a great guide.
8:24 They found case studies for that at TICTeC. It’s lovely to share the human side of all of this. We’ve done sessions about measuring impact, so people use that to develop their latest theories of change.
8:37 The setup of a new regional network in Asia on transparency, tracking transparency, and collaboration on cross-border, anti corruption projects. People have learned things at TICTeC that they’ve taken away to, you know, make their transparency projects more visually appealing or user-centric, and people have generally found collaborators to work together on things.
9:01 And finally, in Austria, sustained campaigning and legal pressure from support from the community of practice helped secure the introduction of a new Access to Information law, so loads of amazing examples of knowledge being shared and connections being formed.
9:17 I’m now going to pass over to Alex, who’s going to speak about the report that we’re launching today.
9:22 Alex Parsons Hi everyone. So what we’re launching today is the Shifting Landscapes report, which is a building on all the work we’ve been doing over the last few years.
9:30 Why did we write this report? There are lots of big changes happening in the world and in technology and in the intersection of those two things. And one of the questions we want to ask ourselves in our work is, what is the most useful thing we can be doing to make a difference to big problems? And we run TICTeC because we think it helps us as well as a wider community, to answer that question.
9:51 So what are the big problems? What are other people doing? How can we join up that very big picture with a much smaller practical things we can do in our work? We’ve designed the last few years of TICTeC to be helpful at solving this problem, focusing around the idea of pro-democracy tech as a way of bringing focus to a huge area of work, but still covering, you know, a large amount of projects and approaches within that.
10:15 This report was an opportunity to pull those threads back together, join up the big picture problems with concrete examples of approaches and ways of thinking. Help understand the contribution civic tech can make to pro democracy work.
10:27 Building on what happened at the conferences, we’ve been having conversations with people in the community and running seminars to draw out information and themes help fill in blind spots or explore how people are addressing specific problems.
10:39 The goal was to create chapters that are useful to different groups, with parts aimed at practitioners, to guide concrete examples and ways of thinking about tech.
10:48 But also a key audience we want is people who work in wider pro-democracy spaces, who may have less practical experience of technology, to understand where and how tech can be effective and how to think about it in relation to the problems they deal with.
11:03 With that in mind, we’ve written the report that is eight chapters across four thematic areas.
11:10 The first one is pro-democracy tech. Here we’re expanding our definitions of there being a defensive and constructive side to pro-democracy tech, and exploring how technology can be joined to wider democratic movements, in both cases, communities of practice.
11:25 What we’ve learned about how we work well together, balancing efficiencies of scale with unique circumstances and needs, shaping the landscape. These chapters look at civic tech as something that both needs to adapt to changing times, but should also be trying to shape the times. So, how are projects adapting to changes to the open web, changes to distribution methods, but also, how can we create infrastructure that makes democratic easier and more effective?
11:51 And the final set is around using technology effectively. These are more practical chapters, whether examples and frameworks for practical approaches to thinking.
11:59 So, for instance, through AI technologies, but also examples of other tools that can be effective where AI approaches are less likely to be effective. With that in mind, I’m just going to start talking through the first area, which is pro-democracy tech.
12:16 Here there are two chapters: our framing of this for the TICTeC conferences has been that there is pro democracy tech, that is, digital tools that are meant to realise and defend democratic values. And this is acknowledging that authoritarianism doesn’t stand still. It uses technology to extend its surveillance and patrol over people and to listen.
12:38 Our belief is democracy needs not to project technology, but use it to evolve and compete and within that, there are important decisions about when and how technology is adapted that services democratic values.
12:51 So we see there being two rough branches, this defensive democratic tech, which defends the open society, so anti corruption, cybersecurity; and constructive democratic tech, which empowers, powering technologies that help build democratic fibre and participation.
13:07 So on the defensive side, we talk a little about the analogy that Marci Harris and POPVOX used at TICTeC 2024 about the Red Queen dilemma, that there’s a thing in civic tech, and especially defensive civic tech, where everyone has to run in place just to keep in the same position.
13:26 And it’s one of the challenges to defensive approaches, because it’s an arms race where new technology and innovation is required to keep pace, but often those same approaches are also useful to those who seek to undermine democratic values.
13:38 And so here, getting ahead requires efficiencies and use of new technology, building infrastructure tools and approaches that can empower many different actors at once.
13:47 So in this chapter, we draw out two different sets of conversations we’ve been having. One is about cyberattacks on civic tech and civil society actors themselves, how this imposes new costs, and how procedural approaches, such as the Engine Room’s cybersecurity assessment tool, and technological approaches such as Cloudflare infrastructure can help mitigate these risks.
14:07 The other is looking at technology for anti corruption purposes, and this is an area I think about, the infrastructure underpinning projects is especially important, because good access to data is essential component of anti corruption projects, and there are already influential data standards that make transferring approaches and thinking between areas easier.
14:26 So we explore a bit about how AI technologies can lower the cost of certain kinds of projects, but very importantly, these still have to rest on a foundation of good data and have clearly identified routes to impact. As an example, to pull those together, we saw a presentation at TICTeC from the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists, who talk about how they develop civic tech tools as an extension of their investigative journalism.
14:49 And built tools like CruzaGrafos, which creates an infrastructure advocacy layer to help surface data sets that can help journalism go further and lead to more news stories down the line.
15:02 So this represents an investment in specialist infrastructure and tools that helps have a clearer connection to having that wider impact on the constructive side.
15:14 One of the really exciting progressions we’ve seen at TICTeC over the last decade has been an expansion of technology that allows people to be citizen sensors of problems.
15:22 So for instance, making a street issue report or reporting corruption to deliberative tech that builds on this to help citizens collaborate and deliberate on how our society should respond and act.
15:32 This is the constructive wing of pro-democracy tech, where there is an overlap between people working in democratic innovation and people working in civic tech to explore new ways democracy can facilitate democracy and how it can unlock one of the key benefits of democracy, that it’s not just about the labour of people, but by the ingenuity and creativity of citizens, and how that can be harnessed to everyone’s benefit.
15:55 But there are lots of different schools about what better democracy looks like, and different groups put on democracy in different ways to make their case. So in this chapter, we really focus in on the sort of democratic innovation space and how it selectively has rejected and accepted tech approaches and deliberative democracy.
16:12 And this was a really interesting one for us as an organisation, we’re very steeped in the background of democratic transparency and reaching mass audiences. But these are not necessarily the elements of democracy that deliberative practitioners really put a lot of weight on, preferring to think more in terms of balanced in forms of constructive conversations between people.
16:30 And so here, one of the interesting projects we looked at in detail was policy and the philosophies behind policy; where we were interested in identifying areas of agreement and disagreement between rather than the respective size of those groups.
16:43 So as tools more in tune with that sort of deliberative approach, and here we’re seeing different forms of ecosystem emerge, both around that core software, but also forks and re implementations that adapt this philosophy into other ways.
16:56 So this is a useful case study in how successful adoption of technology relies on a shared theory of democracy. Having a clear sense of what’s valued and what is rejected, helps in applying technologies and new democratic approaches and how to bridge gaps between working in technology and people working in democracy.
17:15 So just to pass over to Julia to talk about our Communities of Practice.
17:18 Julia Cushion: Thank you so much, Alex Gemma and Louise for starting us off. Yes, so Gemma explained to us about the Communities of Practice earlier. We have two Communities of Practice that we’ve been running, and over the last five or so months of this project, we’ve been running lots of webinars, which I know that many people in the room today have been to some of them, and it’s been really nice to have a real deep think about what those amazing speakers that we heard from taught us, and we did some supplementary interviews as well.
17:47 And so yeah, the TICTeC Communities of Practice have been just an amazing way to share and learn from our global community outside of the conferences. And this section of the report looks at how pro-democracy tech works collectively.
18:00 So we’re interested more than just the tools that our friends and partners make. Although we are very interested in the tools, we wanted to explore the shared practices that make the democratic work effective across different political and data landscapes.
18:13 And it was amazing at the start of the call to see how many people from around the world are joining us. Just today, I’ve been really lucky to be working really closely with the Access to Information Community of Practice. So I will start there.
18:26 Our key message here is that we believe that Access to Information, or Freedom of Information or Right to Information, whichever is your favourite phrase, is an essential democratic practice that sits behind so much other wider democracy and transparency work, and it helps people navigate fragmented democratic and data landscapes.
18:46 And we talk a lot about fragmented data here at mySociety and tech plays a really powerful role in bringing together this fragmented data so public platforms such as those that use Alaveteli, including ours, WhatDoTheyKnow, and others like Frag Den Staat, enable sentence checking and verification of official information out in the open for everyone to benefit from.
19:07 So this rebalances power by grounding accountability and communal knowledge rather than individual requests. It’s also worth considering that in the context of AI and automatic decision making, ATI becomes even more important. We think it’s one of the key tools available for investigation, investigating how decisions are made, what data is used and where power actually sits.
19:30 So it was really nice to write this chapter and think about all of the, yeah, the powerful things that Access to Information has achieved and can achieve. There’s some really great examples in the report, and one to draw out is maybe from Citizens Network Watchdog Poland, who shared projects which used ATI as a kind of practice of collective verification. So they were combining formal information requests with local context and local knowledge from volunteers to interpret and challenge official data on a huge scale.
19:59 So we’ve seen some really powerful applications of Freedom of Information in this sort of crowdsourcing efforts. And there’s part of a report on that. It’s worth saying, if you do care about Access to Information and you like conferences, and you’re based in and around the UK, we are having a Freedom of Information festival, FOI Fest, on the 19th of February at Birkbeck in London, and so we’d love to see you there.
20:22 It’s also online, so you can join us from wherever you are in the world, and I’ll make sure to put the link in the chat in a second. But moving on to our other community of practice, before I hand back to Alex, our second Community of Practice takes a wider look at democratic transparency, thank you Gemma.
20:38 Supporting global democratic transparency is less about exporting a single model all around the world, and more about strengthening a shared capability and working out ingredients for success that can work in different contexts. So in the report, we emphasise how important it is to look beyond parliaments, although we are nerds about parliaments, beyond Parliament as the sole site of democratic activity and to recognize the role of media ecosystems and informal democratic spaces.
21:07 We think the regional networks are really well placed here, and we’re tied into lots of those regional networks for strengthening practical skills in running democratic transparency organisations.
21:18 But perhaps what’s missing at a global level is the flow of ideas and approaches to innovative technical approaches. So there’s more explanation of that in the report, but it’s worth saying that we were really, really interested by some of the video-first transparency projects that came out in the report.
21:35 And so, for example, collaborations between Open Parliament TV in Germany and Open Fun in Taiwan showed how starting from video can be a key source of translating democratic information from that original video source to all sorts of other multiple new formats and so, yeah, it’s just really nice to highlight these areas and projects where, even if not, the whole project is recreated, but techniques can be drawn upon and reused.
22:03 So yes, I think that is me on this little section, and I’m going to hand back to Alex.
22:09 Alex Parsons Hello. It’s me again. So yes, this is there’s a lot of stuff in this report, and I recommend reading cover to cover, but actually also just picking up chapters that if you speak, speak to what you’re interested in. We wrote it to be able to dip in and out.
22:24 So the next section we’ll talk about is how to use a technology effectively. Because this is an obvious point, but successful pro-democratic technology involves making good choices and how to use technology effectively.
22:36 And so this chapter, this is split into two chapters, one of which is thinking and understanding AI like AI stuff is throughout this report in terms of how it’s useful to different areas. But what we want to do is bring it to one place, like tools that we think tools and approaches we think are useful for thinking about how to apply it to problems.
22:56 So in the last few years of TICTeC, we’ve seen projects involving machine learning or large language models move from a niche area to a whole field of work, exploring not just how these tools can be used for pro-democracy work, but how we should approach democratic issues around their governance and how we evaluate their impact.
23:12 So for instance, evaluations of how people using chatbots to get interaction information, we distinguish between AI technologies and AI is sort of a wider phenomenon, because that includes the hype and raise expectations that can push organisations towards approaches that are poorly aligned with what they need to do.
23:29 As AI is a fast moving field, the goal of this chapter is provide some central concepts, but we expect the technology will move on relatively rapidly. So key to this is our AI framework. We’ve got some common questions on the slide, which is essentially a set of questions we wrote for ourselves about how to think about how to adopt new technology to solve problems, and especially that sort of key thing about like working backwards from the problem, rather working forwards from the problem, rather than backwards from AI as a solution.
24:01 We’ve also, in this report, introduced a new grid for working through the kind of problems AI is it’s likely to be especially useful for this is a sort of production verification grid where the key point is that we know AI can generate content.
24:17 What’s important is, if that content is useful in some domains, it’s quite cheap to verify it’s useful, and this makes deploying AI tools more practical.
24:26 So for instance, approaches where you can check if the result is valid. So for instance, computer code approaches with good test suites are a strong use of the technology. In others, verification isn’t especially expensive, but neither is production, so the effect will only sort of sharpen the aggregate.
24:42 So, for instance, people use AI tools to help them write to their representatives, which case may be slightly useful, but the aggregate effect is systematic, and means we have to engage a societal lens. When we consider these tools, what does helping lots of individuals to do something change how our process works?
24:58 And do we want that result – is that the result we want? When it’s hard to verify the solution, the approach is often still better suited for a person or alternative to think about how the verification problem can be broken down. And we talk a bit about this in one of our approaches, where most of the work we saw in creating an LLM process to help us in our work was investing that in the verification flow so we can help it trust its outputs, rather than the approach of how it’s generated.
25:28 The other chapter is where the report talks about sustainable tech, which is driving a trade-off between different kinds of sustainability. We want to share examples of how people put AI to practical effect, but also emphasising this other innovative technology available that solves different kinds of problems.
25:47 So this is in part to bring up the sort of often the gulf between the sort of development environments people who are writing software and the sort of expected users of software, who will often be on older, lower spec machines and have more unreliable connections.
26:04 So we look at examples of projects that put lots of work in at the initial phases to lower ongoing running costs or to reach audiences. So Minha Receita provides access to Brazilian companies data, hundreds of millions of requests a month, but it has very low running costs because the initial selection of programming language and running infrastructure to give that end goal, being able to run something sustainably, full service software meant to help assist production of human trafficking cases.
26:33 And here the key requirement was to work effectively and fast on older lockdown machines. And here is so effective use technology means picking the right tool for the right problem.
26:42 And we emphasise that AI has a useful is useful in certain kinds of problems, but there are also other tools that people should have in their repertoire, also know they’re available.
26:53 And just to pass back to Julia for the last section on the shaping the landscape.
26:58 Julia Cushion Thank you so much. Yes. So this section looks more at the broader condition in shaping civic and pro-democracy tech.
27:05 Here we explore projects that adapt to changing distribution models, but also how we can create infrastructure that makes certain kind of democratic projects easier and more effective.
27:16 So first, looking at Digital Public Infrastructure. Digital Public Infrastructure is an umbrella term for the idea that there are foundational digital services such as digital identity, digital payments and address infrastructure that should be created to enable government services, commercial services and economic growth. So we’re looking at that kind of base layer.
27:36 Civic tech projects already obviously have a relationship with infrastructure, both providing it and relying on it. And we see this across the projects that come and talk at TICTeC: as DPI initiatives grow pro-democracy approaches must work from the foundations upwards, influencing mainstream DPI so it is governed for the public good, while also building an explicitly democratic civic stack inside and outside the state to provide resilience against democratic backsliding, which I think is on all of our minds at the moment.
28:06 And at one of the webinars as part of our most recent series, MyMzansi in South Africa talked to us all about how civic tech can engage directly with infrastructure, and that is about embedding democratic values at a foundational level, rather than treating infrastructure as neutral.
28:23 So thinking really deeply about the foundations of our work, there is a whole chapter on that, and then another one, our final one to talk about today is reaching bigger audiences.
28:43 And one of the distinctive features we think of digital tech is the ability to scale while each new user when you’re using digital methods, is not costless. It is much, much cheaper than non digital approaches, and it’s possible to reach a mass audience relatively cheaply and more easily than it would be through non digital methods.
28:56 And changes in the media and information landscape mean civic tech has has new routes to impact, but needs to engage with its new routes to impact. With the decline of the open web and the rise of video platforms and conversational AI democratic projects, we need to rethink how information is shared and discovered.
29:15 There’s a whole new world out there that we’re all exploring, and we look specifically at two strategies, both ‘be the influencer’ and ‘influence the influencer’, and these are both routes to meeting people where discussion is already happening, democratic discussion and day to day discussion.
29:31 ForSet in Georgia came to talk to us about their influence, the influencer model. And so they had a really powerful project, working with influencers to encourage voter registration in the Georgian elections, they took a really considered approach with a substantial research phase and to choose the right kind of influencer.
29:53 I thought this was really interesting because they were very explicit to us about the fact that they didn’t, in their team, within their organisation, pick influences that they thought would be influential; instead they did that research work of getting together focus groups, groups of young people to identify the right scale of influencer.
30:01 And their whole presentation is linked to in the report so you can go and find out all about that. And yeah, I think their results ultimately showed a really pragmatic response to platform power, attention economics, all of these huge trends that we want to engage with but feel so big. I’m just going to pas back to Gemma for a little look into the future.
31:23 Gemma Moulder: Yeah – what’s next for TICTeC? Focusing on these themes, but as well as other areas that we also focus on at TICTeCs too, such as democratic climate action, digital security, tech for better elections, etc.
31:36 But obviously we can only do this with financial support. So yeah, please do let us know if you would be interested in collaborating to help continue TICTeC’s great work bringing people together from across the world to learn from and help each other.
31:51 Louise Crow And I think, as we are reaching the end of our time, it just remains for me to say, thank you so much for joining us being part of this community, please do stay in touch, and we will hopefully have more news on TICTeC very shortly. Thanks a lot everyone.