If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you’ll have seen a series of new projects rolling out over the past few couple of months: these are the concrete outcomes of the TICTeC Labs programme. You can access them all here.

TICTeC Labs was a new and, in retrospect, quite bold project for mySociety, involving many moving parts, the generous participation of people from a huge variety of organisations, and with collaborators in several different countries — and crucially, support from the National Endowment for Democracy.

Last week, in a final wrap-up event, we looked back on the programme as a whole, with presentations from our subgrantees and reflections from the steering group. If you’d like to watch for yourself, you can do so on YouTube, and there’s a transcript here (automatically generated, so be prepared for some typos etc).

The process

Each TICTeC Surgery began with a question and ended up with a finished product or service several months later. At any one time, the six projects would be at various overlapping stages, from the initial discussions, to the Action Lab deciding what and whom to commission, to the work being undertaken and finally launched.

 

 

Despite this complexity, and thanks to the hard work of so many, each project was completed on time. Each one is a solution to an identified issue within the global civic tech community. And the benefits don’t stop there: everything is open source, and can be accessed, used or replicated by any group that may need them.

Outputs

The wrap-up event began with presentations from the groups who had created these final outputs:

People Powered, on showcasing public-private civic tech success stories. Pam Bailey spoke about the importance of placing a human interest strand at the centre of the stories we tell. The output for this Surgery was a set of case studies highlighting notable examples of such projects.

Technoloxia, on a toolkit to help the global civic tech community fix common accessibility challenges. Yosr Jouni described the challenge of making a topic like accessibility both fun and indeed accessible in itself. The output here was an online, illustrated guide that’s available to all.

Open North, on data governance and quality. Christian Medina described how they used the international scope of the Labs to ensure that their offering was relevant to everyone, not just the global north. The resulting online course is in French and English and free for anyone to access.

Fundación Multitudes, on storytelling and reach. Stephani Paliza also shared thoughts on how they ensured their output would be relevant to communities anywhere in the world. Their offering was in the form of training for civic tech organisations across several continents, equipping them with effective tools to get stories about their projects and successes into mainstream channels.

The Demography Project, on driving impactful societal change. Richard Muraya described some crucial outputs around water in Kenya: educating, monitoring, and ensuring better water quality during a critical period for the country. The President of Kenya even attended their event for World Wetlands Day. You can see more about their several digital outputs here.

Policy Lab Africa, on civic tech in hostile environments. Charles Ikem described how, in just two months, they were able to map a huge amount of data showing where polling stations — often just unremarkable addresses in rural areas — were located, and launch an app for reporting electoral violence in time for Nigeria’s presidential elections.

Reflections

mySociety’s Chief Executive Louise Crow and Steering Group members Isabel Hou and Matt Stempeck discussed to what extent the programme had met its aims to ‘strengthen civic tech networks and the exchange of ideas’, and ‘develop new initiatives and collaborations that expand the civic tech evidence base, address issues and challenges facing the sector, and enhance the effectiveness and potential impact of civic tech projects.

Matt encapsulated our thoughts neatly when he said: “The value of the unexpected community that was built in this process was important — so the direct, formal partnerships; but also, seeing who’s doing what, the diverse approaches to similar challenges, while at the same time finding that community.

“People really liked the ability to have repeat engagement on the theme and the ability to keep working on things over time rather than one off events.”

Finally, a Q&A allowed audience members to add their thoughts. This is a programme that’s been all about knowledge-sharing, and it’s notable that this spirit also persisted in our conversation: already, participants were talking about more translations of some of the assets, and invitations to speak at planned global conferences.

Everything we learned during the TICTeC Labs process will be very useful as we consider the next phase of TICTeC and what form its offerings will take as we go forward. This event allowed us to take a step back and understand our progress, learnings, and lessons for future programmes.

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)

Our sixth TICTeC Labs surgery has enabled the creation of a new open source tool for Nigeria and beyond: the Election Violence Tracker (EVT). 

The TICTeC subgrant allowed PolicyLab Africa to launch this project, an open-source reporting tool that enables citizens to document and report violent incidents during Nigeria’s elections. The idea is to empower people to independently create, confirm, and track violent incidents in real time during the election season — and more importantly, provide a lasting data resource for journalists, election observers, activists and civil society.

As discovered during the initial TICTeC surgery, the global civic tech community often faces challenges from working in hostile environments. These range from government resistance to operating in conflict and post-conflict societies. After that initial discussion focused on ways in which organisations can thrive in challenging contexts, the subsequent Action Lab agreed to commission a piece of work which repurposed existing software to benefit civic tech organisations working in hostile environments.

EVT uses the Independent Electoral Commission’s polling unit location data to track and map locations of electoral violence in Nigeria; and OpenStreetMap to geolocate each polling unit address and enable user identification to verify report locations. Reports, which can include photos or videos, are visualised on a map and the data collected is openly available for download and export.

The tool has already seen use. During the Nigerian elections on 25 February, 59 cases of violence were reported via the EVT. The tool will be deployed again for the State and Governorship elections in March. PolicyLab Africa plan to continue to make improvements and hope to expand deployment to other countries to make more data available on electoral violence across Africa.

All code and documentation is open and available on the PolicyLab Africa GitHub repository for other organisations to use and adapt. 

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 fifth 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 issues faced by those tackling the climate emergency with civic tech: what are some of the blockers they face, how can these be overcome, and what could a small grant do to help with one or more of those challenges?

Discussants were Laura Brown, Chief Marketing Officer of ISeeChange, Jacopo Ottaviani, Chief Data Officer at Code for Africa and Laurence Watson, Head of Technology at Subak.

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.

Data and understanding

Access to data – there is a lot of relevant data out there, but much of it is behind paywalls, expensive, or relies on an understanding of jargon. It is difficult to get reliable data for many areas that are needed.

People aren’t experts: To what extent do you need to hold their hands and tell them what to do with complex datasets? The very people who are impacted by climate change impacts do not understand the terminology: climate communication should be localized for people to understand and get involved in the fight.

Experts in climate data aren’t experts in communications – they need to learn how (or employ staff) to make their messaging easier for those at the receiving end. As a techie, it’s relatively easy to build solutions, but there’s a whole different skillset involved in publicising them and getting people onboard with them.

Apathy and mistrust

There’s general apathy from the public over a problem that seems too big or difficult to solve, or which has ben talked about for such a long time with no seeming progress.  People think they’ve heard it all before, and don’t believe this time will be any different. They also don’t think small local changes can make enough of a difference.

Mistrust of government: the diminishing levels of trust, especially in national government, affects how people regard the data they provide (and possibly the data provided by all authorities).

Governments shift responsibility between levels and governments are complex to navigate.

It’s hard to persuade people to make difficult changes  – it’s easy enough to suggest them, but harder for tech to push them to actually see it through. The challenge is in getting people to accept short term inconvenience or risk, for a long term (and often non-individual) return. Incentives are tricky to identify and then communicate.

The public has a short attention span and climate is a longterm, slow burn issue.

Ways of working

Startups also tend to work to short timescales and need to see quick results.

NGOs don’t work together: there may be infighting as NGOs jostle for the same resources, which wastes their energy and disregards opportunities for working together. There are many organisations  working on similar-but-different solutions, making for a lot of wasted/duplicated effort. Non-profits often are funded for very specific things that they can deliver individually, so they are not incentivised to put effort into working with one another.

Too many projects have no Theory of Change – they’re just created because it seemed like a good idea.

It is difficult to measure impacts when asking people to take action in the real world. Particularly for projects that aim to create or open up information that could be used by a wide variety of stakeholders

Societal issues

Citizen action can only go so far – governments need to lead the way with legislation.

Dis- and mis-information from climate denialists makes the job harder. The for-profit practices of social media and mass media are amplifying division. For all the energy and money going into advocating issues and their solutions, there seems to be an effective amount of money and energy preventing those solutions.

Logistics

Access: In countries with poor Internet coverage, there is a very basic problem of poor connectivity. This makes all sorts of things difficult, but the example given was about the difficulties of journalists in central Africa accessing training resources.

Financial stability of newsrooms in Africa – many are relying on grants, which is fine for the short term, but can pose problems for sustainability.

Trying to train up people with differing levels of experience: for example, training journalists who might not have used Excel before, in the same group as people with a bit more expertise.

Possible solutions

Making data accessible

Employ data guides – make experts visible and available (perhaps at set times). These people could aid less experienced people in how to use complex data, like a reference librarian.

Distil expert views and make them available so that people can understand them without ploughing through masses of data or content.

Humanise the data – journalists can portray the human stories behind the facts and figures. See Lungs of the Earth and vox.com for some great examples; animations can be appealing and Johnny Harris from Vox does explainer videos that show how these can be made cheaply.

Reaching people with meaningful messages

If only a small proportion of people are likely to act, speak to those people. Find the ‘champions’ and don’t worry about communicating to the others just yet – they may follow on.

Put attention on to those living low-carbon or low-plastic lifestyles, rather than shaming them. For some reason, we as a society seem to have taken this path with plant-based diets (influencers have led the way in normalising veganism) but not with other climate-friendly practices.

Go where the people are – if that means learning how to utilise TikTok, the most-used social channel at the moment, so be it! Learn how to visualise data and include robust and useful climate change information within the TikTok vernacular.

Games that help us envision the future: There is a disconnect between local discussions on local issues and the big changes that are coming, ‘like the end of the private motor car that in 15 years will be no more relevant than the horse and cart’. Could games help people understand?

Roadshows Done well, a travelling event with a single message can be very effective.

Hyperlocal webinars Match local interest community groups with experts in their area, like an e-bike expert talking to cycling groups; a food and growing expert to local gardening groups.

Systemic change

We need an effective, overarching law – like GDPR- designed to stamp out mis- and dis-information on the social media platforms.

Working together

Open and scaleable solutions When groups create something, they should do so with reuse in mind – create the documentation and support that will make it easy for other groups to pick up and adapt internationally.

Identify & connect with climate officials working on a topic internationally

Collaborate internationally or cross-country with other initiatives to collect data.

Winning elections: Encourage more people to stand for election on a climate platform.

How the grant could help

Some ideas for spending the grant.

Develop the results.org model for mobilising people, with an emphasis on climate.

Create a model example for how to respond to your council’s Climate Action Plan that people could use as a template.

Financial support for a data librarian who is available at set times of the week.

Recruit, train and support ‘community climate champions‘ based in research teams, policy units, universities etc. We couldn’t fund this long term but could dedicate seed funding for an agency to pilot the idea.

Infographics based on Climate Outreach’s work on persuasive language around climate.

Give grants to college students who will be able to use them efficiently – with a little going a long way.

Set up a table at climate protests to seed action in  people who are already feeling passionate, eg ask people to write a letter to their MP that you can gather up and send en masse the next day.

Run a hackathon or challenge for students to come up with new solutions.

Research into how communications can be used to overcome climate denialism.

Make climate change data journalism micro-grants in under-reported regions.

Communications between climate champions and citizens: Help, for example, the local authorities that have declared climate emergencies to engage citizens with their actions so there is mutual understanding, with a combination of engagement software used in public consultation with local data and the psychology used by Climate Outreach to reach different audiences.

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.