Fundación Multitudes have created and delivered training for civic tech organisations in how to get stories about their projects and successes into the mainstream media. Funded by our fourth TICTeC Labs subgrant, the initial training took place from December 2022 to February 2023, with ten participants from Indonesia, Macedonia and the Philippines. 

At our fourth Civic Tech Surgery, we discussed storytelling and reach — the challenges of amplifying our successes beyond the civic tech community —identifying that communications can be difficult for civic tech organisations. Organisations are often small, work is complex and full of jargon, and communications are sometimes seen as a luxury or an afterthought. One impactful solution suggested was training, and the Action Lab commissioned Fundación Multitudes to create this eight-week course. 

The organisations joining the training wanted to:

• develop attractive campaigns for their organisations
• meet and share experiences with other organisations
• learn about storytelling tools and strategies

Their needs were met by modules on:

• Media mapping and media tracking
• Press kit and media management
• How do we elaborate our discourse, editorial line and expressions on contingency?
• Design of a micro action plan for a specific programme or campaign

Participants really valued the opportunity to share experiences and learn how other organisations had met the challenges of sharing their stories. They are continuing to engage with the programme via a mailing list which connects them so they can exchange information, share experiences and build partnerships, plus a follow-up newsletter with relevant information on storytelling and reach, grant opportunities and success stories.

Fundación Multitudes plan to continue to develop and deliver this training – view the course content here (PDF). 

Maai Makwa is an open source, open data and public domain project from The Demography Project, Kenya, and it’s the outcome of our fifth TICTeC subgrant.

Our fifth Civic Tech Surgery discussed the question of how the civic tech community can learn from, and contribute to, climate action, to drive impactful societal change. The subsequent working group commissioned The Democracy Project to establish Maai Makwa (indigenous Kikuyu language for My Water): a water quality and quantity monitoring project integrated with practical civic education to empower individuals, households and communities in Kenya to participate in freshwater conservation and sustainable water resource exploitation. 

Kenya is classified as a chronically water-stressed country by the United Nations. Population growth, growing agricultural water use, frequent droughts and mains supply disruptions all increase the difficulties of accessing and preserving water.

Through this project, the Demography Project have developed:

• An interactive Water Cost Calculator to enable Kenyans to understand the full cost of water services from all 81 water companies in the country
• A compilation of national and local water laws and regulations
• In-person forums in vulnerable communities to help them understand water rights and contribute to water conservation
• A real-time Water Distribution calendar
• Collaborations with higher education institutions, recruiting eight student climate champions who conducted field research on water supplies in their regions and authored stories on their findings
• The deployment of low-cost, compact, modern meteorological kits and water monitoring devices to communities 

The project was showcased at World Wetlands Day celebrations, and collaborations with local youth groups recognised by a visit from the President of Kenya, Dr William Ruto.

As a result of this work the Demography Project have entered into fourteen partnership/ membership agreements with local and global organisations working in freshwater conservation and youth networking. They continue to develop the project, with plans in progress to translate the content and tools into local languages. 

We’re impressed by this extensive set of outcomes and we hope that it will help bring about solutions for the water issues of the region.

To find out more about Maai Mawka:

• Explore the project website
• Watch a recording of the launch event
• Read the full project report (PDF)

Join us on Thursday 16th March 2023 for our online event Unlocking civic tech impact: reflections on TICTeC Labs.

Over the last 18 months, we’ve run a programme of Civic Tech activities and events: TICTeC Labs. With thanks to financial support from the National Endowment for Democracy, TICTeC Labs has discussed some of the biggest challenges facing the global civic tech/digital democracy sector. Across six themes, we’ve:

• hosted Civic Tech Surgeries – discussing challenges, existing research and experience, and identifying gaps and needs
• set up Action Lab working groups to take forward ideas generated in the Surgeries and commission work to meet some of these needs
• and funded subgrant projects to produce work to contribute to meeting these challenges.

Hear about the work produced by the subgrant projects and how these have met the needs we identified. Members of the mySociety team, Steering Group and Action Labs will also reflect on how this experimental format worked – the successes and the challenges – and which aspects of it we’ll take forward into future TICTeC activities. There will be opportunities to ask questions about the outputs and the programme as a whole. The session will run from 14:00 to 16:00 GMT and we’d love you to join us live if you can (a recording will also be available shortly afterwards)!

Book your free place to join us on 16th March.

Data is at the core of everything we do at mySociety, and the better quality it is, the easier our work becomes — so the latest output from TICTeC Labs is particularly welcome. We would love everyone to know exactly what constitutes good quality data!

And, thanks to the members of the Action Lab #3 working group, now they can. They awarded a contract to the Canadian civic tech group Open North, to devise a course on Data Quality. This course is free to everyone, and we know it’ll be of huge benefit to the international civic tech community.

Available online in English and French (and hopefully with more languages to follow), the course provides users with a practical introduction to the topic, discussing key concepts and setting practical exercises.

Quality information for civic tech success

This output was the end result of our third TICTeC Labs Civic Surgery, which took place back in March 2022. That saw participants discussing the theme: ‘Accessing quality information for civic tech success: how can we overcome barriers to accessing good data and documentation?’ — it was within this session that the concept of a training course first arose.

This course uses Open North’s existing learning platform to provide training which covers:

• Understanding the importance of data quality
• Understanding the key terms when engaging with data
• Knowing how and where to find good quality data
• Recognising the barriers to accessing data and documentation
• Knowing how to evaluate the quality of a dataset

Collaborating with the Action Lab members throughout the process of planning and building the course, Open North have created an online educational resource that is suitable for a wide range of audiences. It provides a starting point for those already working with data, or those at the beginning of their journey. 

Take the course

You can find out more, and take the course by signing up to Open North’s Training Center and then looking for Data Quality (D103), with the French version at La qualité des données (D103F). In fact, once your account is activated you can take any of their free courses, so take a look around and you might find some more resources to try, as well.

A starting point for making civic tech more accessible

Commissioned by the TICTeC Labs programme, Technoloxia in Tunisia have created a practical accessibility toolkit for the global civic tech community.

At our second Civic Tech Surgery in February 2022, we discussed ensuring that civic tech is accessible – how can we lead and popularise best practice? The subsequent Action Lab working group agreed to commission the creation of a toolkit or resource to support civic tech practitioners in making their work more accessible.

The subgrant was awarded to Technoloxia to create a beginners’ guide to accessibility. Technloxia are a training provider who specialise in digital accessibility for different audiences including civil society organisations and tech practitioners. The team working on this project included people with disabilities and trained practitioners, who worked with a focus group of users with different accessibility needs to review the material and provide feedback.

With this guide, Technoloxia look to provide a simple primer and introduce the subject while staying practical and action-oriented. This guide is in no way exhaustive but is a starting point for a larger conversation.

Step-by-step guides to better accessibility

The guide starts by explaining basic concepts and principles and then presents best practices by examining case studies. After each case study, the guide highlights a few potential challenges and how best to deal with these. It provides you with questions to ask to check whether your work is accessible, and always centres the people using the services, reminding us that accessibility goes beyond ‘technical accessibility’ to the ways in which we communicate and interact around our work.

An accessible accessibility guide

The guide is freely available on our website, to download as a PDF and as an audio file to increase the accessibility of the information itself. Please do download it and/ or pass it on to any other contacts who might find it useful: this guide will have most impact when it is widely used.

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TICTeC Labs is our hands-on programme for fixing some of the prevalent problems in civic tech, supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. Each TICTeC Lab begins with a public discussion – Civic Tech Surgery – on a topic affecting the civic tech community, followed by an Action Lab, a working group who meet to discuss the challenges and commission some work to help provide solutions. To find out more about the TICTeC Labs programme and the work being produced following the series of Civic Tech Surgeries, see the TICTeC website or sign up for email updates.

The first TICTeC Labs subgrant project provides practical examples

How has civic tech helped protect the health of a small rural community in Chile, engaged citizens in decisions about their local areas in China, improved the electricity supply to a village in Kyrgyzstan and assisted people with visual impairments to take part in participatory budgeting in Argentina?

This month sees the first output from our TICTeC Labs subgrants.

TICTeC Labs is our hands-on programme for fixing some of the prevalent problems in civic tech, supported by the National Endowment for Democracy. Each TICTeC Lab begins with a public discussion – Civic Tech Surgery – on a topic affecting the civic tech community, followed by an Action Lab, a working group who meet to discuss the challenges and commission some work to help provide solutions. 

Tackling the challenges

At the first Civic Tech Surgery, in October 2021, the challenges of public-private civic tech projects, as well as possible solutions to tackle them, were discussed by Aline Muylaert of CitizenLab, Amanda Clarke of Carleton University, Gabriella Razzano of OpenUp in South Africa and Ebtihaj Khan from Code for Pakistan, with valuable input from our Surgery attendees. 

Action Lab #1 then convened to decide what would help the global civic tech community to work more effectively with public and private institutions. They agreed to commission a piece of work that showcases examples of where civic tech interventions have resulted in tangible improvements and benefits for governments/public institutions and their citizens, aiming to promote the benefits of civic tech and inspire and motivate government actors to start similar civic tech projects in their contexts. 

Showcasing successful projects

The Action Lab #1 subgrant was awarded to People Powered, who approached the organisations who were highly rated on their digital participation platform to provide examples where their work has resulted in clear improvements and benefits for governments, institutions, and communities.

The case studies all include key lessons learned and recommendations on how to use digital platforms effectively:

• Digital platform and training boost participation in rural Kyrgyzstan – this World Bank project demonstrates how the government can empower local communities to make decisions, facilitated by a digital platform.
• In China, a popular social media platform is harnessed to increase participation – China’s Participation Center developed a “mini app” for the popular WeChat platform, and engaged 3000 of the 3,044 neighbourhoods in Chengdu city in participatory budgeting.
• Participation must be designed to ‘leave no one behind’: Argentina case study – Argentina’s municipality of Rosario is so committed to digital transformation that it has integrated it into every aspect of its operations, from education to participatory budgeting, including a commitment to make the process totally accessible to individuals with visual disabilities. 
• Chilean institute harnesses digital platform to engage young people as change agents – Youth are the leaders of tomorrow (and today!), and progress toward a sustainable environment can only be made with their full engagement. Chile’s National Youth Institute understands this, and knew that to involve as many young people as possible, a digital platform was needed. It chose CitizenLab, and this post explains how the institute uses it to find and develop new leaders.

To find out more about the TICTeC Labs programme and the work being produced following the series of Civic Tech Surgeries, see the TICTeC website or sign up for email updates.

Last week we convened the sixth and final (at least for now) online TICTeC Civic Tech Surgery, our hands-on programme for fixing some of the prevalent problems in civic tech.

Each TICTeC Lab begins with a public discussion on one topic area affecting the civic tech community. Interested parties can then apply to take suggested ideas forward in a smaller working group, building solutions with the aid of a grant.

This time, the discussants looked at the challenges and rewards of creating civic tech within hostile environments, from war zones to dictatorships; examined what ‘peacetech’ means and whether it can be applied more broadly; and then discussed how a small grant might best be deployed to help those working for good despite tough external factors.

Discussants were Yolanda Booyzen, Communications Coordinator at HURIDOCS, joining us from South Africa; Julie Hawke, Digital Peacebuilding Lead at Build Up speaking from the US; and Teona Tomashvili, co-founder and Project Lead at ForSet in Georgia.

For a high-level view, read on. We’ve attempted to capture all the ideas discussed, but if you’re keen not to miss anything, access the notes from the meeting, as well as the full recording of the session and the AI-generated transcript.

Problems

A summary of the issues identified during the chat and by the audience.

• Security: Both people and information must be kept secure when working in hostile environments.
• Practical and logisitcal problems: Stable internet connections and electricity supplies can’t be relied on; roads may be poor and organisations may need to work across large or difficult-to-reach areas; there may be language barriers.
• Time: Issues with time expectations manifest themselves in a variety of ways; for example –
  • The documentation of atrocities may take longer than the period in which funders expect to see results;
  • Organisations may need to react more quickly to fast-changing events than tech developers are used to.
• Socio-cultural factors:
  • Organisations have to work in hostile online environments which also foster mis- and disinformation; hate speech, algorithmic profile targeting and polarisation.
  • In the real world, they may be battling electoral fraud and a non-independent media that is under political pressure.
• Lack of political will: Trying to run a service that is helpful to citizens, such as an Alaveteli-based FOI service, is difficult without government co-operation — and this leads to a lack of open data for civic technologists to work with.

Possible solutions

• Create networks of grassroots organisations working in the same or similar areas, online if that is safer.
• Make longlasting and authentic relationships with the organisations working on the ground; not just partnerships for the duration that the funding is available.
• Base your services or software on the actual needs of the people you’re making it for. Listen to them before you begin. They might not even need software: it might be that they need connections, or training, instead. The objectives come first, before the tech.
• Ensure that the safety of people and security of information are prioritised.
• Build software so that it works offline — for example by storing data locally on a device and allowing the user to upload it when they come back to somewhere with wifi.
• Often the way forward is to use or repurpose existing software in new contexts. You don’t necessarily have to see yourself as a creator of ‘peacetech’ to be providing a technology that fosters peace.
• Don’t forget that people in hostile environments need psychological support as well as technological tools. A sense of humour is also important.
• Consider giving money to people other than ‘the usual suspects’, directly and without strings. Take more risks.

How the grant could help

Some ideas for spending (and administering) the grant.

• Consult the organisations over what they really need.
• A handbook listing ways to work and what not to do in hostile environments.
• The organisations that need the most help are not always fluent in English. Consider providing a contact that can help them through the grant process.
• Consider not requiring any proposals or reports, as that uses up the valuable resource of the organisations bidding for the money, and takes up some of the money you’re granting in terms of their time.

Action lab

Some of this discussion also took place on Padlet and you can see more ideas there.

We are now inviting people to join the Action Lab working group, which will comprise up to six people who are keen to use this discussion to inform the group as they pin down how the grant will be spent.

To keep an eye on this progress, and to know more about the next Surgery, see the TICTeC website or sign up for email updates.

Last week saw us come together for the fourth online TICTeC Civic Tech Surgery, our hands-on programme for fixing some of the prevalent problems in civic tech.

Each TICTeC Lab begins with a public discussion on one topic area affecting the civic tech community. Interested parties can then apply to take suggested ideas forward in a smaller working group, building solutions with the aid of a grant.

This time, the discussants examined the issues around getting our work out to the wider world: with resources always stretched and often complex stories to tell, how can small civic tech groups reach a more mainstream audience?

Discussants were Daniel Carranza of DATA Uruguay, Attila Juhász from K-Monitor in Hungary, Amy Leach of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, and me, Myf Nixon on behalf of mySociety.

Notes from the meeting can be seen here, as well as the full recording of the session here and a transcript here, but if you’d prefer a higher-level view, read on.

Problems

A summary of the issues identified during the chat and by the audience.

Resource and capacity Civic tech organisations tend to be quite small and focused on the creation of their services. Communications can be seen as a luxury, or something that is spread between the team as a bit of an afterthought. Even if there’s a dedicated comms person, they often can’t focus deeply on all the tasks that need doing, and bringing in a freelancer doesn’t always work if they don’t have a full understanding of your work.

Complexity of our offerings Talking to the public about our work often means that we’re also having to explain things that are taken as a given within the civic tech world: for example, Freedom of Information; how governments work, what open source is, etc.

Temptation to speak at a technical level It’s important to use simple language, but because we’re ‘experts’ in our field we have to make an effort to not use jargon – especially if you’ve also been involved with the development side personally. Users probably don’t care about things like how it was coded or whether it’s open source: it’s more important to talk about what it can do for them.

Narratives aren’t always clear-cut People want stories with a nice narrative, but if you are making systemic change it can be iterative and messy, and take time.

We are in a polarised world Some areas that civic tech operates within, eg migration or health, are divisive issues that get boiled down to clickbait/soundbites on social media.

Projects can be longterm but enthusiasm doesn’t last As with funding, it can be easier to get attention at launch, but it’s harder to find stories and get interest once a project has been going for a while.

We can’t always find the interesting stories We can be sure that our software is being used in some really interesting ways; but we’re not always aware of them. There’s no compulsion for users or site-runners to tell us how they’re using our sites or software.

The range of potential audiences is really broad We might be trying to talk to ‘everyone’ – or if not, we’re trying to put messaging out to citizens (with varying amounts of knowledge), governments, funders and several other potential user groups.

We don’t always reach every sector of society It takes focus and effort to reach a more diverse audience in terms of race, education, deprivation etc.

It is hard to maintain a stable team Small organisations can’t pay market rates, which means that there’s a higher staff turnover, and the narrative thread can be lost as a result.

The issues we tackle are often quite abstract It’s hard to represent concepts like ‘corruption’ or ‘transparency’ in image form.

Possible solutions

Simplify your language Assume basic knowledge in your audience: run it by a relative if you want to check how an ‘outsider’ will receive and understand it. Create a style guide so everyone in the organisation understands how to talk about your services simply.

Don’t worry about technical details If concepts like ‘open source’ and ‘open data’ are vital to your work, you can always work them in at the end of your communications – but they are very rarely the main story.

Find the story that resonates with people What will make people connect on a personal level with your software or service? Show how it solves the problems they encounter on a daily basis.

Create communities mySociety has set up mailing lists, events like TICTeC and when funds allow, runs conferences. These are all ways of discovering the stories around how people are using our software.

Be systematic about audiences Spend half a day thinking about where your work will have the most impact and who you’ll need it to reach. Once you know who you want to talk to, it is much easier to pinpoint where you will find them and what you will need to say.

Build comms into your funding applications Comms is an important part of any project launch, so make sure you include a budget line that allows for it.

Consider volunteers Can you offer jobs that will benefit people who volunteer – eg by giving them specialised experience that they can use elsewhere – and which will also give your comms a boost?

Make sure your services all promote one another A cheap and relatively quick way to spread the word is to tell users of one service about all the others you offer.

Pool efforts with your partner organisation/s They are likely to have different networks and audiences that you can really benefit from, especially if they are larger than you.

Find open source images and other sources for visuals You can often find Creative Commons images. If there is budget, illustrations and animations can be very effective for abstract concepts.

Time upgrades to coincide with new funding or partners That means that when you have something to talk about, you also have the capacity and resource to put out your comms.

Forge relationships with journalists When you send them a press release you’re helping them out and writing the story for them. Or go even further and train up journalists in using your tools so they can generate their own stories.

Look for stories around your tools How are people using them? How does this tie in with whatever is more widely in the news at the moment? Even a surge in users can be a story if it relates to the main news story that day.

How the grant could help

Media training for civic tech comms people.

Set up a journalism prize for the best news story to come from one of our services.

Or a civic tech fellowship for local journalists.

Run a conference specifically for journalists to meet civic tech people.

Or just pay for some civic tech people to attend journalism conferences and speak about the potential stories in our work.

Set up a portal where all civic tech groups can place their stories, and let journalists know it’s available as a resource for them.

Pool resources Look into bulk-buying Google ads or Facebook ads etc, across multiple organisations. It will be cheaper and we can also share expertise (or commission a contractor together).

Create an image library and advice around making good photographs with your phone. This could be used by all civic tech groups everywhere.

Or commission a generic set of visual explainers that anyone could pick up, alter and reuse.

Create a sharing community More widely, a space like Slack or Matrix could be used to share tips, advice, images and comms opportunities.

Make universal logos for some of our common themes There is no logo for ‘open data’ etc – we could commission one.

Action lab

Some of this discussion also took place on Padlet and you can see more ideas there.

We are now inviting people to join the working group (aka Action Lab), which will comprise up to six people who are keen to use this discussion to inform the group as they pin down how the grant will be spent.

To keep an eye on this progress, and to know more about the next Surgery, see the TICTeC website or sign up for email updates.

How can we overcome barriers to accessing good data and documentation?

Last week, a global audience came together online for the third TICTeC Civic Tech Surgery, our hands-on programme for fixing some of the prevalent problems in civic tech.

Each TICTeC Lab begins with a public discussion of one topic area affecting the civic tech community. Interested parties can then apply to take suggested ideas forward in a smaller working group, building solutions with the aid of a grant.

In our third Surgery, the discussants explained the barriers they’ve experienced in accessing good-quality data and information, and then some of the ways they’ve found to meet these challenges, and ideas for what might be missing.

It was fascinating to learn how similar the issues are, as well as where they diverge, in the several countries represented by our speakers and by the audience.

This time around, our expert panel comprised Nehemiah Attigah of Odekro in Ghana; Laura Zommer from Chequeado in Argentina; Khairil Yusof representing the Sinar project in Malaysia; Sym Roe of Democracy Club, in the UK; and Nati Carfi of Open Data Charter, in Argentina.

Notes from the meeting can be seen here, as well as the full recording of the session here and a transcript here, but we’ll summarise the main points in this blog post.

Problems

Data is often not in the right format to use digitally or is not machine-readable – documents have to be scanned and then digitised through OCR.

Officialdom/authorities can be problematic in a number of ways:

• They might demand unwarranted fees for information;
• They might be ignorant of legislation such as FOI that requires them to provide information on demand;
• Laws might be contradictory, for example one law might penalise officials who give out information, while another gives citizens the right to request it;
• There might a low level of understanding as to how the data could be used;
• There can be concerns that the data would uncover the authorities’ own corruption;
• They might stop publishing data or change the format it is in, due to political circumstances;
• They might work to different deadlines or timescales than is useful for organisations’ needs.

Even if the data is available, it can be too complex for a non-expert to understand.

Good open source code that exists might not be suitable for every country’s circumstances.

Possible solutions

• When authorities can see the data in use, it’s much easier for them to understand why it’s needed – so resources showing examples of where civic tech is working elsewhere (for example in other countries) or making prototype tools that show what could be done might be a solution.
• Groups could publish stories in the media about what happens when data stops being published or changes in a way that damages the tools people rely on.
• Could data sources be archived to provide a permanent home in case the official sources stop publishing them?
• Educating the public to make them understand data better – through blog posts, podcasts, ‘data translators’ or whatever means.
• Publishing case studies that explain solutions that haven’t worked, as well as those that have.
• Training for NGOs and organisations on how to engage with authorities.
• Training for the public on how to use data.
• Translating existing guidance on open data standards into languages other than English.
• Producing resources that explain the value of open data standards rather than just advocating for open data standards in of themselves.
• Research how access to information laws apply to datasets and how those laws work in practice.

Action lab

Some of this discussion also took place on Padlet and you can see more ideas there.

We are now inviting people to join the working group (aka Action Lab), which will comprise up to six people who are keen to further develop solutions together, for the benefit of the wider civic tech community.

To keep an eye on this progress, and to know more about the next Surgery, see the TICTeC website or sign up for email updates.

 

Last week we convened for the second online TICTeC Civic Tech Surgery, our hands-on programme for fixing some of the prevalent problems in civic tech.

Each TICTeC Lab begins with a public discussion on one topic area affecting the civic tech community. Interested parties can then apply to take suggested ideas forward in a smaller working group, building solutions with the aid of a grant.

In our second Surgery, the discussants examined how to make civic tech more accessible to all: what are the barriers to accessing the tools and services we make, and despite the best of intentions, have these barriers been somehow baked in to our ‘tech for good’ practice?

Bringing their experience and a diversity of international perspectives to the conversation were Mark Renja of Code for Africa; Laura Nelson-Hamilton from Public Digital; Oluseun Onigbinde CEO of BudgIT Nigeria, and Bonnita Nyamwire of Pollicy.

Notes from the meeting can be seen here, as well as the full recording of the session here and a transcript here, but we’ll summarise the main points here.

Problems

A summary of the issues identified during the chat and by the audience.

A lack of user-centred design practices Civic tech is often built before there is a full understanding of users’ needs. Users aren’t involved in the planning or during the build, still less do we engage with people who might have extra accessibility needs.

Inhouse culture There’s often no structure within civic tech organisations that ensures that accessibility is built in from the beginning of every project – it’s often seen as something to bolt on at the end. And there’s nothing to ensure that the small changes to our working methods that have a large impact on those trying to access our services are adhered to over the years, through staff turnover or organisational growth.

A lack of expertise Civic tech teams are often small and may not have accessibility knowledge inhouse. It can be tricky, for example, for non-experts to approach a visual interface like maps and make them equally accessible for those with visual impairments.

A lack of funding Funding sources don’t always recognise the necessity for adding time and resource to ensure that a project is accessible. Funders prefer to fund new projects than to give additional funding to an existing one which might allow more work that would make it accessible. 

Differing needs Audiences may have access to (or no access to) a diversity of platforms, or speak a variety of languages. We generally assume a level of literacy that a large percentage of the population doesn’t have. And those who need our services most might not even be online.

A lack of understanding our users Engagement by those who are struggling to use the service can be misinterpreted as misuse or abuse. If users with accessibility needs aren’t already accessing our tools — because they can’t — it can be hard to identify them and therefore understand which needs we need to meet.

Possible solutions

Don’t assume, ask Ensure that solutions come directly from the experiences of people who will use your tech. Involve these people in every step of the build. How can we normalise this?

Online materials Guidance like the Universal Access Guide by Code For All provides a free and open source for developers to learn from. Make your accessibility guidance friendly and approachable, like accessguide.io. Could we find ways to ensure these resources are more widely known about and adopted?

Get buy-in — and start at the top Get the decision-makers on board with the move to total accessibility. Often this is best achieved by showing them the real-world results of making projects accessible, so this could take the form of meetings with users or really compelling case studies.

A companywide change in culture Embrace the idea of designing and building for everyone as one of your organisation’s guiding principles. Make a guiding document for the entire organisation that informs how everyone thinks about and approaches accessibility. One way to encourage this might be to provide a template.

Utilise pictures Like IKEA instruction manuals, don’t use text where you can use visuals. Employ illustrators to make attractive and easy to understand interfaces. Could one solution be to collaborate with an existing database of illustrators?

Begin with your own colleagues Run an anonymous survey to find out how many staff are disabled and have issues with online tools: this is a powerful way of showing where you already have gaps internally, which can really bring home what a lack of accessibility means. Might we spin this out to a sector-wide survey?

Share figures Try to educate your peers on disability stats so they can grasp the scale of the problem.

Coding that instills change So much of accessibility is optional. That shouldn’t be the case. Build it in. For example, if you’re coding up a website, make it so that people can’t add an image without filling the ALT field in. 

Seek to educate funders about accessibility and when applying for new funding, ensure that accessibility is part of the scope. Encourage funders to insist on accessibility being a consideration in every application. Could we identify which funders already consider this a priority and share that with the community?

Consider translation and audio Even automated translation can help widen the accessibility of your materials. Can we experiment with audio based access to information?

Building connections If we can’t do it all, can we provide a means of connecting civic tech companies with organisations that can help?

An accessibility developer corps: a list of software developers with experience in making sites and tools accessible, available for hire and volunteering.

See what’s already been done Identify best practice in other civic tech projects which are accessible and broadly used, whether that’s inherent or accidental. 

Start by making events (online and IRL) accessible Include captioning, sign language, transcripts provided afterwards. Make sure videos (both prerecorded and live) have subtitles. 

Action lab

Some of this discussion also took place on Padlet and you can see more ideas there.

We are now inviting people to join the working group (aka Action Lab), which will comprise up to 6 people who are keen to further develop solutions together, for the benefit of the wider civic tech community.

To keep an eye on this progress, and to know more about the next Surgery, see the TICTeC website or sign up for email updates.