TICTeC 2015: Take-Home Thoughts on Civic Tech

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At the end of March I attended the first TICTeC conference, run by mySociety in London. If you haven’t come across mySociety yet, you will almost certainly have come across one of their websites, including TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet and YourNextMP. They now have a research programme aimed at understanding how effective these tools are, part of which includes running an annual conference bringing together people interested in civic tech.

I turned up to give a presentation about Viewpoint and I don’t think I’ve ever been to an event that seemed quite so tailored to my interests—in fact, I think I’ve run events I was less interested in. There was a lot to soak up, but now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to digest, here are some take-home thoughts.

How do we measure the impact of civic technologies?

Opening the conference, mySociety CEO Tom Steinberg set out the importance of this question with a neat analogy: in the past, doctors prescribed all sorts of things that we now know to be hokum, because they lacked the ability (or will) to rigorously test their remedies. If we develop civic technologies but don’t rigorously test their impacts, we are effectively doing the same thing.

When talking about Viewpoint I’m always candid about the fact that while we succeeded in our goal of generating high levels of participation, with hard data to prove it, we failed to find a way of converting that participation in to meaningful outcomes. What’s more, we didn’t really have a clear idea of how to evaluate that. It was both reassuring and concerning to discover that most other people working with civic tech didn’t really have a clear idea of that yet either.

By coincidence, this question has emerged on three separate projects I’m involved in over the subsequent couple of weeks. One of the solutions mooted has been measures of self-efficacy or collective efficacy that measure people’s belief in their ability to effect a change before and after the intervention. This sounds quite neat and tidy, but I’ve never quite been convinced by the simple ten-point checklists that have been developed for this purpose. Slightly more convincing are community-level indicators, which measure conditions in the community tailored to your goals. However, both these approaches are confounded by the time-scales we work with: research projects are increasingly tending towards the 18-month variety, but these effects can take a long time to emerge.

What is the value proposition to civic organisations of getting involved with researchers?

In contrast to most conferences I attend, practitioners vastly outnumbered academics and it was interesting to see how the non-academic civic tech community perceives us. The two communities have a lot to offer each other, but articulating the academic contribution and working around practical challenges is difficult. It’s something I spent a lot of time banging by head against while working on the Creative Exchange (with only a headache to show for it). Not least amongst the practical difficulties is the seemingly glacial pace that academia works at. Even our shortest projects don’t mesh well with small organisations who need to be fleet of foot.

There’s also the issue of money: we have a bad reputation for assuming organisations will be willing to take part in research projects for free. It’s not entirely our fault, as RCUK is often the most attractive source of funding for us, but typically won’t hand anything out to non-academic partners. There is some sign of change on this front: In the Making is funded through a strand of AHRC funding that allowed groups representing communities (in our case Disability Rights UK) to be funded as Community Co-Investigators, and the AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hubs are also handing out limited amounts of funding to non-academic organisations. I’d love to see EPSRC’s Research in the Wild strand move in this direction, where it seems particularly appropriate.

How do we think beyond the web?

My last thought is more of a self-centered observation. The vast majority of work I saw presented was web-based and much of it was based on national-level discourse. There were exceptions: Nanjira Sambuli spoke about the importance of local radio and it was great to meet some people from Code for America and their international siblings whose work can potentially take all kinds of forms. But for the most part of idea of civic technology is currently grounded in the web.

The web is obviously pretty great and a powerful tool for civic engagement—you only have to look at the level of discourse going on right now around the General Election to see that. But if we fixate on the web, we risk being blinkered in the same way that Old Media was. Civic life works at a lot of different scales and the web isn’t suitable for all of them—at least, not the web as we currently conceive it. I went along hoping to show that we can think much more creatively about the role that technology can play: I don’t know how effective I was in doing that, but I think it’s something that bears repeating.


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