TICTeC is wrapped up for another year. The roller banners are stowed away, the lanyards saved for next year, and now we’re back home from Belgium with memories, insights and enough hope to keep us going ’til next time.
It’s always energising to come together with the global civic tech community and share everything we’ve learned. We had attendees from 34 countries, bringing together their experiences — and judging by the comments we’re seeing, we’re not the only ones to have found it both enjoyable and valuable.
The two days were “fabulous and thought provoking”, allowing for “the exchange of experiences and coordinated actions”, and delegates said they returned “inspired, with new insights on civic tech trends and promising collaboration ideas”.
Perhaps Hendrik Nahr from make.org, summed the whole experience up best when he said, “It felt like a family gathering of the civic tech community from Europe and beyond. I’m grateful for the energy, the open exchanges, and the motivation to keep pushing forward tech for democracy.”
We are grateful too: TICTeC is not just about mySociety creating an open space for such discourse; it also depends on the people who participate and the insights they so generously articulate.
What we talked about
It’s hard to provide a full summary of such a packed event, but fortunately we’ll soon be able to share videos of the majority of the presentations, along with slides and photographs, so you’ll be able to choose what you’d like to see.
The overall theme of the conference was tech to defend and advance democracy, and within that there were strong strands around tech to tackle the climate emergency; citizen participation and deliberation; transparency and access to information… and across everything we heard of the seismic changes to society, to tech and to democracy — both already seen, and expected soon — by the emergence of AI.
To pull out a few high points from so many thought-provoking moments:
Marietje Schaake, delivering her keynote remotely because of last minute train strike issues, still managed to enthrall the auditorium and ignite our two days of conversation with an incisive overview of how big tech is overtaking democratic governance globally, with oversight lagging dangerously behind. We posted a summary on Bluesky in real time, if you can’t wait for the video.
Fernanda Campagnucci‘s day two keynote (summarised here) sliced up the different approaches government can take to citizen participation, from citizens feeding into decision-making processes, to citizens being invited to co-create both the data and the governance systems, featuring a nice story about an elderly lady who grumbled that everyone was talking about APIs (a way for software systems to communicate with one another) at a town meeting but she didn’t know what it meant. Once someone had explained to her, she turned up at every subsequent meeting to request APIs of every department’s output.
Colin Megill used the opportunity provided by TICTeC to launch Pol.is 2.0 to a highly relevant audience. This is a paid version of the open source decision-making platform — the basis of Twitter’s “Community Notes” functionality — which contains a ‘superset’ of new features. Its enhanced LLM capabilities allow it to break sprawling conversations into any number of subtopics, making them easier to moderate and removing blocks to overall consensus that can be created by small sticking points.
Panels brought people together to talk about aspects of parliamentary monitoring and access to information from around the world – discussions we will be continuing through our communities of practice work.
There was a useful session on the importance of, and methods for, measuring impact — after all, TICTEC’s foundational purpose — from OpenUp South Africa, Hungary’s Átlátszónet Foundation and SPOON Netherlands.
We wrapped up the conference with an examination of how mySociety is navigating AI in recent and near future work, and an open forum about how TICTeC can evolve and continue to be useful to the global civic tech community.
We presented how we’re thinking about, utilising and navigating both the positives and potential dangers of AI. Such considerations are also preoccupations for others in our field: several organisations are experimenting with AI to achieve or work more efficiently toward their pro-democracy aims; others are foreseeing problems that AI may bring, from amplifying misinformation to algorithm-based decisions that affect individuals’ lives.
There wasn’t an organisation at TICTeC that isn’t thinking about AI in one way or another, as evidenced in diverse sessions across the entire conference. There’s a sense that the conversation has matured from last year, moving on from hype to clear engagement on practical uses, and for scrutiny of both model creators and government uses. We’ll write more about this in a separate post.
And also, watch this space for videos and photos from TICTeC 2025, which we’ll share as soon as they’re ready. That should keep us all going until next year.
