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/RSS FeedmySociety staffers Zarino, Gemma and Myf discuss the TICTeC Session “Fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action”, in which Pryou Chung of East West Management Institute gave real life examples of how seemingly positive climate initiatives can go badly wrong when financial structures and baked in biases provide an incentive to overlook indigenous people.
Watch Pryou’s presentation for yourself here.
If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.
Transcript
0:05 Myf: I’m Myf, I’m Communications Manager at mySociety.
Zarino: I’m Zarino, I’m the Climate Programme Lead at mySociety.
Gemma: I’m Gemma, I’m mySociety’s Events and Engagement Manager.
0:16 Myf: We’re going to talk now about Pryou Chung from the East West Management Institute, and the name of the video is “Fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action”, and that was a remote session at TICTeC 2024.
0:31 Gemma: Having a session that highlights the human rights risks involved with digital innovation in the climate space, and ways to navigate that, seemed especially important to include – and actually I don’t really remember us
0:45 having highlighted technology’s impact and effect on indigenous peoples at previous TICTeCs.
Zarino: Yeah, so she was talking about two examples – one in Cambodia and one in Thailand – of places where local indigenous communities had
1:01 basically been excluded often intentionally from really fundamental decisions about how the climate crisis is being addressed in their area in ways that really would affect them: big infrastructure projects and
1:14 implementation of things like biodiversity credits, and she described them as like technocratic approaches to the climate crisis.
Myf: You could feel warm and fuzzy and like everybody’s doing the right thing because they’re using these wonderful phrases: “carbon financing” and “biodiversity credits” and
1:32 all of these things, but there’s a bit of greenwashing going on there.
Zarino: At one point she said, “Data’s not neutral”, which I really like, and she sort of explained how data and technology has been implemented to perpetuate the existing kind of imbalance of power.
Myf: She was saying these inequalities are almost baked in, whether by design or just
1:51 because technology is coming from a world that just completely ignores indigenous populations.
Zarino: There was one kind of thread through it which is something we’ve been thinking about at mySociety, around ownership of
2:05 data, or physical infrastructure – ownership of things like heat pumps. Ground source heat networks, for anyone who doesn’t know, are one of the more efficient alternatives to individual gas boilers in everyone’s homes, but they throw up really interesting questions about who
2:22 literally owns that physical infrastructure and so we were coming at it as mySociety from like, how can we bring communities together to take on shared ownership of an asset like a heat network that is literally, like, embedded in the streets around your estate or whatever? I think
2:38 it also applies to like the physical kind of infrastructure, like Pryou was talking about, she gave an example of a mangrove protection scheme and how communities were meant to look after these mangroves but they only got like 20% share of profits of what comes out of the mangroves, whereas somebody else – I
2:55 assume the organisations that set this up, or who invested in the first place -get 80%. Nice for them. I think one of the things we’ve been wondering is like, is there a fairer way to try and do that, through things like community share offers, or like local nonprofits and co-ops? Like are there ways we can use
3:11 Civic Tech to try and give those organisations an unfair advantage in a way?
Gemma: Pryou’s presentation really made me reflect on some of our previous
discussions that we’ve had internally about reducing our carbon emissions and carbon offsetting. At the moment,
3:28 mySociety does carbon offset – not to projects that are protecting rainforests,
like REDD projects like Pryou mentioned – but it raises the difficulties that there are in those sort of projects and for us it seemed like doing that was better than doing nothing. These sort of presentations really bring to the forefront those sort of discussions and
3:48 make us realise that we should be constantly reviewing our decisions about carbon offsetting.
Myf: I noticed that at the end she said that she was still an optimist herself. She said that a lot of the problems that she was facing now were the same problems that she had right at the beginning of her career, so good on her for being such an optimist – but she says, “I still believe that AI and
4:07 data-driven technology could be a solution. We’re still battling the same systemic injustices and imbalances as when I started my career.”
Gemma: I would have loved her to go into why she believes AI and other data-driven technologies can be the solution, but I think yeah her focus was on talking about those
power imbalances that still do exist.
4:26 Zarino: These feel like really deep structural problems, and being based in the UK I think we’re probably missing some of the historical and cultural social aspects of that, but when I apply
4:42 it to what we’ve been thinking about here in the UK, I think it does give me
some hope – things like CAPE, our Climate Action Plan Explorer; the Scorecards even; the Local Intelligence Hub – they’re all about scrutiny and transparency of local government decisions. Admittedly we’re
4:56 not talking about indigenous populations here, but there are communities in the UK who are really on the breadline, who are often completely excluded from decisions either because they don’t feel they have a voice, they can’t participate in
5:09 decision-making or policy making or they’re just busy single moms who don’t have time to turn up to a consultation exercise. And so some of the stuff we’ve been doing here in the UK, and I think some of the other the other topics throughout the whole of this year’s TICTeC have sort of proven that there are
5:25 ways that technology and more transparent data can help. Pryou was being really brutally honest about how difficult that is. But yeah, taking it as part of a wider picture, I think we have seen some examples of how technology can be used for good as well as ill.
5:40 Myf: I’ll put the link to this video in the show notes, and it’s just one of many videos that were taken at TICTeC 2024, so whatever you’re interested in, there’s sure to be a session that is of interest. -
/RSS FeedTICTeC, the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference from mySociety, runs for just two days – but those two days are packed with civic tech practitioners sharing insights and experience from projects along the world.
We share most of the sessions as videos on our YouTube channel, and to help you decide what to watch first, we’ve asked mySociety staff to pick their favourites and chat about what they found so interesting. In this episode, Alice, Gemma and Myf discuss “Have you empirically improved transparency and accountability?” from Sean Russell of OpenUp South Africa.
You can watch that session in full for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsfjF7kV5go.
If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.
Transcript
0:00 Gemma: Hi, I’m Gemma I’m mySociety’s Events and Engagement Manager and I am the producer of TICTeC.
Myf: I’m Myf and I am the Communications and Marketing Manager
00:10 at my Society.
Alice: Alice I’m the Head of Fundraising at mySociety.
Myf: Today we’re going to talk about one of the sessions that was at TICTeC 2024 and this was
0:20 Sean Russell from openup South Africa and the title was “Have you empirically improved transparency and accountability?”. Alice you chose this one to talk about.
0:30 Alice: Yeah I liked that he was challenging us to think about how do we prove that we are having the impact in the world that we say we want to? It’s obviously very relevant as a fundraiser.
0:40 I have to demonstrate that we are having an impact. He gave some really good examples of what he called The Good, The Bad and The Misguided.
Gemma: in terms of impact measurement it was a really
0:50 nice sort of back to basics presentation of why it’s important to measure impact in the first place and some ways to go about it, but they also talked
1:00 about some really interesting impacts of their own work which is what TICTeC’s all about. They run a tool, apparently, that is a medicine price registry, so a massive database where you can see
1:10 prices of all the medicines across South Africa at their lowest price, so you can see if you’re being overcharged and apparently it’s a legacy project doesn’t have any funding
1:20 and they don’t measure the impacts of it, and then when website went down one day and they had loads of calls and emails saying, “Where’s the website? I use it all the time!”
1:30 and it it has a massive real world impact that they just weren’t measuring, so I thought about some of mySociety’s tools, you know, our legacy projects that we keep up to date but we don’t
1:40 have any funding for and just wondered what would happen if we turned off some of our sites and what the impact of that would be.
Alice: He also talked about how there’s a service
1:50 that they have for looking at corruption in lottery grants, and he said it essentially only has two users, which if you – and his words were,
2:00 “If you’re measuring success based on user numbers then this would be the worst website ever!”, but he then went on to talk about the fact that those two users have
2:10 then gone on to have like significant impact with that and it’s been dramatic the things that have come from it.
Myf: Those two users are journalists, right?
2:20 Alice: Journalists and legal experts, so people who can actually make change happen from seeing this data, and that I think is really interesting relating it to mySociety again like Gemma was just talking
2:30
about – we’ve got services that are more niche and they they reach like more specific audiences, so user numbers, we’ve got services that reach millions of people, but we’ve got2:40 other services that have much smaller numbers, but if those people are then going on to have really significant real world change with the information that we’ve provided or the
2:50 way that we’ve been able to connect them to important information, then that’s what we want to see. It doesn’t matter how many people are doing it as long as there is change happing as a result and
3:00
I think that’s where he was trying to make the distinction between outputs and numbers, and actual outcomes and impact.Gemma: I found it really impressive that they actually could count up
3:10 how much money was actually being recovered from uncovering that corruption so I think he said like 20 million Rands which, I don’t know, is like a million pounds or something that had been recovered from
3:20 those investigations of that civic tech project that had two users.
Myf: I remember he sort of opened the whole talk up, didn’t he, by saying somebody came into the office one day and said, “Why should people fund our projects
3:30 rather than just feeding a hungry child?” The answers that he came up with was that it’s about systemic change so it’s about making the changes that then
3;40 ensure that there are fewer hungry children in the world rather than just addressing the problem.
Alice: Which is what I guess people in civic tech are trying to do like and it’s why
3:50 I think he wanted to do this talk and challenge us in the room to think about how how we’re measuring that systemic impact because it’s harder to prove than, yes, we’ve fed this many children but actually how do you see if you are
4:00 having systemic impact and as you say the systemic change bit is a really important part the impact of civic tech.
Gemma: But also he mentioned that if civil
4:10 society are not doing those projects, then for-profits might take up that space.
Myf: I thought that was a brilliant point actually.
Gemma: Yeah. I find it really refreshing that he was saying how hard
4:20 this stuff is to track you know, because you almost expect everyone else to be finding it a bit easier or like there’s some magic silver bullet that is the way
4:30 to track impact and measure impact but of course there isn’t. They’ve got some really good ideas, you know they gave their methodologies. I feel like it makes us feel a bit better that like this is a hard thing.
4:40 This presentation by OpenUp was chosen for TICTeC 2024 because it it really epitomises what TICTeC’s all about. Obviously the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, we want to talk
4:50 about how do you measure impact, what impact your civic tech projects are having, and the fact that this encapsulated both impacts of their civic tech tools
5:00 telling us about those and methodologies for how to actually do the impact measurement was just TICTeC all over. OpenUp, they’re going to be mentoring a couple
5;10 of the organisations that are part of the Access to Information community to help them measure impact of their civic tech tools and their Access to Information tools, so that’s a a really nice impact of
5:20 TICTeC, you know you meet amazing people doing really interesting work and then you end up partnering with them to do longer term projects.
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We’ve got updates from Julia on this Parliament’s first Register of Financial interests, showing what second jobs and gifts, etc, MPs have declared; and on the startlingly diminished list of All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs).
Meanwhile, Gareth tells us how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, and we hear from AccessInfo about a new award – the winner will be invited to Madrid to present their work.
Alongside all of that, Myf explains how a WhatDoTheyKnow user harnessed the power of Reddit to verify the responses they were receiving to their FOI requests.
Enjoy!
Links
- Blog post on the Register of Financial Interests spreadsheet; and more details on what it contains
- Blog post about Reddit, WhatDoTheyKnow, and Physician Associates
- Blog post on the diminishing number of APPGs
- AccessInfo Impact Awards
- Full details on how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro by linking to your outcomes
- Our TikTok account
- Our Bluesky account
Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
[0:04] Myf: Hello. Thank you very much for tuning in.
[0:07] This is our second monthly collection of news and updates from mySociety, and my name is Myf Nixon. I’m mySociety’s Communications Manager.
[0:15] This month, I’m going to share with you five pieces of news — two from our democracy work, and three from our transparency side. (more…)
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It’s our first ever podcast at mySociety! Heeey how about that?
Myf, our Communications Manager, runs you through all the stuff we’ve been doing at mySociety over the last month. It’s amazing what we manage to fit into just 30 days: you’ll hear about a meeting of Freedom of Information practitioners from around Europe; our new (and evolving) policy on the use of AI; a chat with someone who used the Climate Scorecards tool to springboard into further climate action… oh, and there’s just the small matter of the General Election here in the UK, which involved some crafty tweaking behind the scenes of our sites TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.
Links
- TICTeC videos on YouTube
- TICTeC photos on Flickr
- Browse the TICTeC 2024 schedule, find slides etc
- Matthew’s post on updating TheyWorkForYou on election night
- Sign up to get an email whenever your MP speaks or votes
- Democracy resources and our future plans in Alex’s post
- Local Intelligence Hub lets you access and play with data around your constituency
- Matt Stempeck’s summary of the Access to Information meetup
- Our summary of Matt’s summary of the meetup
- Updates from all those ATI projects around Europe
- New in Alaveteli: importing & presenting blog posts; request categories and exploring csvs in Datasette
- Fiona Dyer on how volunteering for Scorecards upped her climate action
- Where to sign up if you fancy volunteering as well
- mySociety’s approach to AI
- Contact us on hello [at] mysociety.org if you have any questions or feedback.
Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
0:00
Well, hello and welcome to mySociety’s monthly round-up.
My name is Myf Nixon, Communications Manager at mySociety.
0:11
This is part of an experiment that we’re currently running where we’re trying to talk about our work in new formats, to see if that makes it easier for you to keep up with our news. (more…)
