The TICTeC 2024 schedule is now live! Climate, AI & Democracy Under Threat

[Gemma Moulder]

Hello everyone,

We're delighted to share the full list of sessions for our 2024 Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC), which will be happening in London and online on 12th and 13th June. 

EXPLORE THE TICTEC SCHEDULE 

With 65+ speakers from 23 countries across 55 sessions, this year's conference is set to be one of the best editions yet. 

The conference's focus is on democracy, climate - and of course, the civic tech that seeks to help. Explore the list of sessions, which includes information about which can be joined virtually and which are in-person only.

There's still time to register to attend, but be quick, as previous TICTeC conferences have all sold out. 

REGISTER NOW

We hope to see you there!

Gemma. 

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Gemma Moulder (she / her)

Events and Engagement Manager

mySociety | mysociety.org

[simon fj]

Thanks for the schedule again Gemma.

I really would have liked to attend but, as always, I'm on the other side of the world.

Could I ask mysociety to consider doing something a little different for this conference?

It has to do with your ideas about putting together Communities of Practice, and specifically I'm interested in one for digital infrastructures.

What I was imagining is a Q&A space (like this one) that linked, eg. from the Q&A page on the schedule to a place like this. That way, after an event, you'd put up the recordings and have a COP's Q&A page where we could keep a record of both the invitation, the recording and the ongoing discussions.

Janos and I have illustrated over at the opengovernment discourse site just what I mean.I had hoped by now we would have seen some (online) collaboration between the organisations and individuals who make up the UK Democracy Network to take this approach.

Would you also ask Louise Crow and other attendees to consider this online session sometime in the future?

The biggest challenge we have at the moment is getting National governments to coordinate the development of their govtech stuff.

That said, this is a similar approach to what Matt is suggesting, especially if we take the an OGP "co-design/co-creation approach" of public spaces. Additionally, we will want to include network engineers who have been left out of the civitech/govtech discussions to date - the managers of public networks. That means redesigning public networks.

Hopefully we can bring theses two communities to (design on) the same page.

Please come back.

regards, Simon

[Steven Clift EDem]

"It has to do with your ideas about putting together Communities of Practice," 

Oh, where is this documented?

Years ago some of us were working on the idea that leaders in civic tech/democracy online could step up and build an infrastructure for democracy builders writ large help them to connect horizontally and globally with well facilitated, technology appropriate/effective tech.

We are literally watching the end of effective democracy under our watch, so if necessity is the mother of all invention, I'm in.

I have an outline of a proposal somewhere if someone wants to glean ideas off of it for whatever is being considered now. 

Let me know and I'll dig around for it.

Fwiw, post-2016 election no foundations were interested in our efforts to use tech to expressly build bridges across differences. It was war ... digitally speaking. So we are in all volunteer legal maintenance mode looking for ways to archive our 1994-2017 lessons.

Steve 

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[Steven Clift EDem]

Found it!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WWvuH4z4_0mgqndIQsMeCqrRze-PEaEmrwtc8nE3FC8/edit?usp=drivesdk

In general, my take is that civic tech as island not building a collaborative/knowledge exchange infrastructure for the whole of the democracy building world is a missed opportunity.

Back in the day before mySociety/Code for America you basically had "democracy people" who were inspired to use whatever tech tool (typically free out of the box) for their democracy building goals.

Then the biggest wave of funding got more or less behind technologists and their ideas for how democracy could be supported that more or less embrace meritocracy.

At one point E-Democracy did have the ability to shape some tools and contribute to the world of open source, which was great. But other than us as a bridge of sorts, the classic democracy builders/civic engagement crowd rarely had the opportunity to be at the table building out the specs. Many of them probably didn't get that that's where they build out the democratic DNA into how things work.

So, what I like about the concept of civic technologists supporting the global democracy building community in general is creating a chance to build "what if the tech did this" bridges. 

I do believe we are at the point where autocracy is on the march seeking to exploit the weaknesses in democratic checks and balances to then create permanent majorities to cement minority rule that is far less democratic than what we have had. So if that's not a motivating factor to connect and support as many democracy builders as possible, I don't know what is?

Anyway, I have no idea what the communities of practice conversation is about, but I'd be happy to talk to whoever is working the idea and the scope.

Ultimately, post 2016, almost all the big money in civic tech/media/democracy online has gone into reactionary things to the problems (disinformation, etc.) and the positive "here is what we can do better" agenda has been totally lost on the decision-makers with the purse strings. Perhaps there is an opportunity to revisit this and give the next generation a chance to build new, good things and not just put out fires.

Steve

P.S. As understand it per the draft, the direct democracy folks, have built some stuff. We'll need to check with Bruno. I think all the sectors of democracy building need to be supported and geographically have ways to connect across silos. Meaning I should be able to connect easily with peers globally on a very niche basis but in my home city/state be able to network as easily with people passionate about all the flavors of democracy building.