TICTeC, our Impacts of Civic Technology conference, has been running since 2015. Over the years, we’ve seen shifts within both tech and democracy that have been reflected as priority topics: from the foundational (and evergreen) question of ‘how can you assess the value of civic technology if you don’t measure its impacts?’, to the rise of authoritarian ‘strong man’ leaders across the world, to a surge of enthusiasm for what blockchain can do around civic tech.
As each of these topics rise to the top of the civic tech community consciousness, TICTeC has provided a natural place to air questions, concerns and solutions.
This year, of course, the foundation-shaking issue is AI. Compared to 2024, when the technology was just beginning to be applied in our field, there’s been a maturing of the discussion, and much more concrete engagement with both the opportunities and the challenges that AI brings around government, truth, trust and delivery.
Our job is to make sure we steer towards the good — or, to phrase it in alignment with mySociety’s own aims, to examine how to engage critically and transparently with AI to create a fair and safe society.
AI across TICTeC 2025
The theme of AI was woven through the conference: where it wasn’t the primary topic itself, it coloured our thinking and had relevance everywhere.
Sessions dealing primarily with AI could be divided into three broad angles:
- Since AI is already making inroads into governance systems, how can we ensure it is used well?
- How have AI’s capabilities been harnessed to make civic tech tools, improve functionality or increase efficiency, and how’s that going?
- Can tools counter the problems that AI presents around truth and trust?
Let’s look at each of these in turn.
AI and democratic governance
Both of our keynote speakers were keen to point out the need for oversight and citizen participation as AI is rapidly adopted across government systems.
Marietje Schaake, whose presentation you can rewatch here, warned of the dangers of private tech firms holding more power than our constitutional democracies, thanks to the limitless profits to be made from this new technology; while Fernanda Campagnucci (presentation here) advocated for citizens to be allowed into the decision-making processes not just around governance itself, but in the making of the tools that facilitate it.
We also heard from the people at the frontline of governance. An instructive session from Westminster Foundation For Democracy and the Hellenic Parliament (not recorded) quizzed participants on how comfortable they would be in easing the administrative burden of parliaments by allowing AI to help categorise, filter and even answer letters from citizens. Would our opinion change if we knew, for example, that there was a backlog of 40,000 messages to representatives?
In a session deeply rooted in the realities of running a local authority during a period of tech acceleration, Manchester City Council explained that in a city where 450,000 people don’t even use the internet, it is crucial to ensure AI is being used ethically and to communicate how it affects citizens’ lives: “Whether or not you choose to interact with AI there’s no way of opting out – AI based decision making is happening around you.”
Three speakers from the Civic Tech Field Guide laid out the case for audits on how AI is being used in your own community, showing how anyone can do it, and Felix Sieker from Bertelsmann Stiftung made a strong argument for public AI, with proper accountability and democratic oversight, rather than the power being concentrated in a handful of private firms — something that is already being developed in several different forms, including by Mozilla.
MIT GOV/LAB ran a workshop (not recorded) in which we could chat with a simulation of a person from the future about the effects of a climate policy, then decide whether or not we would implement that policy once we had a human account of its results. This is part of ongoing research into helping to break deadlocks in policy decision-making.
How AI is already being used in civic tech
Both Code for Pakistan and Tainan Sprout [link coming soon] showed how they’ve deployed AI to allow citizens to query dense policy documentation and get answers that are easy to understand
Demos talked about the work they’ve been doing around a new AI-powered digital deliberation process called Waves, hoping to ‘do democracy differently’ in our current crisis of mistrust.
Dealing with AI and misinformation
Camino Rojo from Google Spain showcased new tools, some of which are shortly to be rolled out, to help counteract misinformation. In particular, these allow users to check whether or not media displayed in search results was artificially generated. At the moment, the onus lies with the image generator to provide this information. Strict guidelines apply, in particular, to those advertising around sensitive areas such as elections.
AI and mySociety
In the final session of the conference, we presented the various ways that we’ve been exploring how AI can support mySociety’s work. You can rewatch this session in full here.
We have been guided by our own AI framework, in which we set out the six ethical principles by which we adhere when adopting this (or any) new technology. In essence, these can be boiled down to the single sentence: “We should use AI solutions when they are the best way of solving significant problems, are compatible with our wider ethical principles and reputation, and can be sustainably integrated into our work.”
In other words, we are not working backwards from the existence of AI to see what we could do with it, but approaching from the question of what we want to achieve, and then examining whether AI would aid us to do so more efficiently.
In this session you can discover how we’ve used AI to more effectively deal with problems in bulk, and make information easier for everyone to access across our work in Transparency; hear thoughts on how, for our work in Democracy, and especially the recent WhoFundsThem project, we’ve found that a human approach is sometimes needed — but that there are some tasks that AI can make easier here.
For the future we’re thinking about AI as it might apply to WriteToThem not to burden representatives with more mail, but perhaps communications of a higher quality.
Overall, we’re keeping a wary eye open for how AI will almost certainly be (and already is?) muddying the ability to trust the provenance of information — especially given that mySociety is essentially a ‘resupplier’ of data from public authorities and Parliament.
In a LinkedIn post, our Democracy Lead Alex got at the core of the challenges ahead of us all in the civic tech field, when he said: “Different kinds of technologies make different kinds of futures easier – and what we’re trying to do with pro-democratic tech is to make democratic futures easier. But the opposite is obviously [possible], and AI has arrived at the right time to merge aesthetically and ideologically with authoritarian regimes.
“A core to the spirit of civic tech is persuasion by demonstration – and to me TICTeC is a wonderful distillation of that spirit of both imagining better things, and doing the work to show what’s possible.”
And on that thought, we will roll up our sleeves and work towards the version of the future that is better for everyone.
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