From Digital Public Infrastructure to Democratic Public Infrastructure
Imagine a world where every citizen automatically receives the government grants they’re entitled to, stays informed about public consultations, and can easily contribute feedback—feedback that they trust will genuinely shape policy decisions. Services like these could strengthen and transform democracies worldwide.<br>But, should this be the reality we ought to seek? What are the opportunities and challenges? And how close are we to achieving this?<br>At this TICTeC gathering, we heard from two insightful speakers:<br><br>Richard Gevers, Head of Service Design and Delivery at the Digital Services Unit of The Presidency South Africa.<br>Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta, Specialist in the Democratic Innovations programme at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.<br><br>Sign up for our newsletter to be informed about future events, and find out more about TICTeC at tictec.mysociety.org. Appreciate mySociety’s work? Please do donate!<br>Transcript:<br>[00:04] Louise Crow: Welcome everyone. I’m Louise Crow. I’m Chief Executive of mySociety. Thank you so much for joining us today for this TICTeC community gathering: ‘From digital public infrastructure to democratic public infrastructure’.<br>[00:20] Just as a brief reminder, TICTeC stands for The Impacts of Civic Technology. TICTeC started life as a conference, but since 2020 we’ve been running year round activities to try and connect people building using and researching technology to strengthen democracy and civic power, with the aim of helping us learn from each other and boost our collective impact.<br>[00:44] So ahead of the global DPI summit next week, we thought this was a good time to talk about civic tech’s relationship to digital public infrastructure. What are we talking about when we say digital public infrastructure? (more…)
Top Keywords
- civic 0.010
- civic tech 0.010
- government 0.009
- open 0.008
- tech 0.008
- finland 0.007
- open source 0.007
- services 0.006
- source 0.006
- service 0.005
- around 0.005
- democracy 0.005
Transcript
Welcome, everyone. I'm Louise Crowe. I'm chief executive of mySociety. Thank you so much for joining us today for this TicTech Tech community gathering, from digital public infrastructure to democratic public infrastructure. Just as a brief reminder, TicTEC stands for the impacts of civic technology. TicTEC started life as a conference, but since 2020, we've been running year round activities to try and connect people, building, using, and researching technology to strengthen democracy and civic power with the aim of helping us learn from each other and boost our collective impact. So ahead of the global DPI summit next week, we thought this was a good time to talk about CivicTec's relationship digital public infrastructure. What are we talking about when we say digital public infrastructure? Well, as we're about to hear all over the world, governments are implementing fundamental digital systems to enable improved delivery of services, to try and facilitate data exchange, and to foster economic growth. And we know that DPI initiatives are leading to benefits for citizens so they can access vital services like social payments and healthcare without the need to queue for hours and hours at government offices, but should we be thinking beyond that and beyond service delivery to ways to provide opportunities for citizens to participate more fully in decision making. What are the risks and opportunities around that, and are there lessons from the growth in DPI for building transparency, accountability, and citizen participation infrastructure? So lots of big questions To help us contextualize and maybe answer a few of them, we're delighted to be joined today by two fantastic speakers. We have Richard Givers, the head of service design and delivery at the digital services unit of the South African presidency, and Sanakisa Salaranta, specialist in the democratic innovations program at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. Firstly, we're going to hear from Richard Gebas, who's got substantial, experience working outside of government on civic tech projects as well as now within government, and he's going to talk about his work implementing DPI at a national level in South Africa as well as thoughts that he has on the relationship of that to democratic participation.
So, yeah, welcome, everyone. As mentioned, Richard Givers, formerly, like, commerce of a recovering economist turned data scientist turned technologist turned, founder of Open Cities Lab, which was a civic tech is a it's it's still going. I'm not there. It's a really good civic tech organization that runs, data and digital government projects across Africa, and have now joined the presidency as we see. We get into that. And I think when, you know, thinking about the topic today, DPI can do much more than government service delivery and government efficiency. It can strengthen trust, transparency, and participation. And I'm I probably should have highlighted the can rather than the the others. So in the, in in the context of what we're working in, we're trying to understand how this infrastructure that is meant to rapidly deliver social a a much better social protection, link between social protection and employment, and we'll get into that. Also enables citizens to shape decisions that affect them, in the design across this across the ecosystem. So just some context, and apologies for those that may have seen, similar slides, at Tic Tac. I'll go through these fairly quickly. But like many, countries, South Africa was exposed in the pandemic around its ability to deliver services. So history of siloed and outdated and in in in inefficiencies, digital infrastructure, the stuff we know, meant that we couldn't prove people were who they said they were. We couldn't pay them easily. Rapid development and some very good pilots and prototypes and projects, and and the universal ground came into place, as a result of this. But mostly across the board, things kind of ground to a halt halt. And so there was plans made to create this digital transformation road map, and they happen to evolve at the time that DPI became something that became a common global language. And I think also for the first time and why I, hopped in to go excuse me, into government was the first time I I saw director general. So our highest level civil servants, my government ministers, presidents starting to understand that this isn't the the sort of domain of IT as they would describe it, but the domain of governments and society. Everyone knows the the the sort of future. You've probably seen this a lot. A lot of a lot of talking about what DPI is and stacks. This diagram, actually, originally created by Richard Pope, talks about this sort of idea of reforming governments from silos into your day to day and hardware shift infrastructure services. I'm presuming I'm talking to a DPI enabled crowd, and so gonna not spend a lot of time on that. But I think a lot of what's, you know, Lou Louise is saying has been interesting. And I you know, I'm sort of walking a line from being a civil servant but from the context of my background because what, you know, these slides show is that what's compelling to South Africa was faster services, less fraud and corruption, savings. You can see there the economic impact being very prominent in these slides of have of DPI experiences around the world, and an understanding of DPI as debt exchange, payments, identity, and then the services layers that sit on top of it. I think one of the things that we're trying to break in break into the the Zeitgeist to kind of build capacity around is that when you start to create a universal service channel, when you start to do things like implement data exchange across the country, digital ID, to governments, people payments, and the and vice versa, It creates channels that can carry both services and voice. And you've gotta be very deliberate. We are trying to be very deliberate on that in our design that that voice isn't one going one way from us to people. And so, when we and, you know, on LinkedIn, I've I've started to develop and and write weak notes. There's a lot more communications that'll be coming out of, this whole project as we try to work in the open and really take that principal work in open, show the thing very seriously. But building in openness, consent, and transparency can obviously do way more than just pay someone their grant or help them not have to stand on a queue. And can start to ask, you know one of the key connections I made at Tic Tac actually was, with who I, you know, I owe a lot of, you know, apologies to because it's taken a long time for us to collaborate. We're starting to get to a point where there will be a collaboration around, building into our our universal service channel to, be a way that we can chat to citizens about even about the design and implementation of our DPI. But this can enable participatory budgeting, policy consultations. You know, what we've seen is when going into any of our government's websites, department teams, that being the the main way apart from a government office, that people receive services. No user feedback loops. Nothing. No ability to communicate past probably an email address around. And so we're really looking at the chain of service design, which is why I fought hard for that to be in my title. I think also at the data level, at registries level, we've got opportunities and risks around what's happening with open APIs, data exchange, what will go into AI, and how, you know, how AI comes into this environment. But I think there's the risk of doing a little bit what I would say the way I described it was back at Open Data Days when when Trump became president, and all of a sudden, some of the na naivete around open openness and open access to information were exposed and led to harm. Whereas some other areas where openness hadn't been so focused and should have been, like, meant that we that there wasn't transparency. And there's a there's a really good discussion in DPI around, like, the implementation. Does the private sector implement something? Does government implement something, or is it self sovereign? And, you know, I think right now, people are seeing the move around DPR very much from a supply side type of thinking and very much from a commoditizing or taking back areas and put in digital infrastructure that the private sector has taken over. But I think it needs to go further into what and you know, the next question and what should not be government but actually owned by citizens and residents and people. Our, you know, through a lot of, use you well, and and maybe not enough, but but through significant amounts of user design around the drawing of this strategy, this digital road map that South Africa launched in 05/20/2025 this year and which set up the DSU and started this journey towards DPI, was this sort of archetype of South archetype of South African tundi. And so, you know, the idea would be tundi, early school like, a school leaver that's done really well at school looking for employment opportunities, looking for job, educational further education opportunities, likely to have a young child, likely to be supporting people that live in a more rural area with digital access issues and digital literacy issues and a platform, my agency that sort of uses the, benefits of DPI to reach out. But when you're talking about democracy, in the next phase, you know, she doesn't just have to receive. It can be that two way flow, and can start to be a discussion between people and government about what they want their government to be. And I think that that's something that is not again, with not very clear in our our strategy yet. We've all probably seen this sort of in in a lot of your countries where you are much further in this journey, the sort of change of, of view towards life stage versus having to know the supply side government department that you need to go to and being stuck in this mire of local to national to departments, agencies, and trying to navigate government. So the whole idea here is how does Tandi get stuff, you know, get have something that she can access based on her need? So demand driven, demand filled kind of approach. And so we've set up a number of projects around this, which include your classic digital identity, trust ecosystems with verified credentials. We're using x we've just launched an extra based data exchange, Exchange. Next week, we're gonna be launching more, which I might give a little sneak peek of because this video will come out after that, and so I won't be in trouble for sharing things early. But I think right at the bottom, you know, what's been quite interesting is a lot of reading into this is that services you know, that that quote from Matt Bracken and and David Eaves and and, I think, Michelle Wronski. That paper basically was said, you know, the services begets stacks. Stacks don't begets services. And the whole idea of if you're gonna go from a DPI approach, which quite frankly, the even framing around DPI has really got a lot of what a lot of us have been doing for the last fifteen years. A lot of government as platform thinking, a lot of demand driven kind of well, this is where it has to go. It's a sort of service or demand driven space. And so I'm less interested in DPI will be around until, you know, donors are bored, and then it'll be the next thing. So to our community, it's about what it what I think it has really helped with was we always found in civic tech, we were heading up against very embedded, infrastructural and and and government government structure problems that we're really preventing our ability to build accountability, to build openness. And so I think the sort of supply side focus on the actual infrastructure of the state has been critical, but the risk is that it overplays its supply side hand and doesn't remember that everything has to be a demand pull from the the citizen need or the the peep the people need. These are very governmenty sides. I've presented them before, but just sort of to back the idea that this is the first time in probably 20 digital transformation plans of South Africa that we've seen a whole of government adoption. So steering committee that is led by the presidency and our our our national treasury. So our, and our digital department. So DGs are responsible for work streams that implement those technical things, but also the others. And I think this is where it's interesting because, we need to move from I mean, the first thing this does is try to coordinate a whole of government approach, but it has to be a whole of society approach. And, again, that, to me, is the jump to democracy. So people are, you know, consultants made this with us. I was one of the drafters, and it's, I can't I have to take culpability myself. People have a house, a vision house. Everyone's excited about the stuff on the left, but I think it's the stuff on the right, five to eight, that's going to change the future for South Africa and for the the the the people in the continent we work with. South Africa often becomes a good lab for the continent, in some ways, and in some ways, it isn't. But, you know, that pointing to that non a vibrant nongovernment community, you know, a lot of what we're looking through now is what are our government mechanisms that includes civil society, civic tech, participation platforms, you know, power feedback, trans transparency, accountability. So, you know, what's nice is that is that this is baked into the strategy. It's cabinet adopted, presidency led, busy building into institutional reform so that it's not reliant on, presidential administration terms. But I think what's also very key there is this sort of idea of how do we build in everything from implementation to safeguarding to monitoring to participation to trusted intermediaries in our our approach. And that's gonna be the kind of things that creates, you know, these sorts of things. I'm gonna send these slides through, and you can find out more about a lot of this with because I've got five minutes. We got given five minutes extra. So I wanna jump into something a little bit more a couple more key points. I think one of the the biggest problems for me in DPI in places where it's been interpreted as as very government heavy is that it is very government efficiency heavy. And I I would say government and I've said this and people have disagreed with me, but I think government efficiency is a trap. Platform Land by Richard Pope and other books, you you know, Recoding America, the the sort of books that are leading that, like, similar thinking around digital and government. You know, they all point to the fact that I mean, firstly, this is, you know, digital and service design responds to policy. And so if we're not selling our policy, then DPI is limited in its ability to, and so the link and to to have impact. So the link between policy and and and and service design that then drives the way that the DPI comes together into services was a piece that I think is under focused on in our current thinking. But then I think also, I mean, we've obviously seen Doge and and, you know, that my, I always have to apologize for my, you know, my countryman who who claims to have started Tesla and and did all of the dodgy things. But, efficiency gains and and cost saving in government is not a bad thing. But if you stop there, it it risks not actually changing anything, significantly. It might mean more people get caught. It might mean some real outcomes for sure. But, I think one of the key focuses for us in the way we're measuring ourselves, and there's been some very good impact. So Dial has put out a very good impact measurement tool and others, you know, starting to think how do you make sure you're you're essentially measuring your impact on how to solve society. At at my previous organization, we had this realization in Civic Tech that we don't you know, that we often work in ecosystems where if you're buy shopping for running shoes and you buy a pair of running shoes, you're the donor, the customer, the user, and the beneficiary. Civic tech taught us, and DPI needs, you know, needs to take this on, that your customer, your beneficiary, or your user, and your and your and the and the money are all often different and have overlapping but not aligned fully aligned goals. And they're all gonna pull you in different directions on terms of how they measure your success and impact. And so learning how to create frameworks that make sure that, like, the citizen is or the person person that means Africa, whether a citizen is a citizen or not if they're visiting, are are the ones who, are at the top of that framework of impact and not the donors' needs, which is very difficult, especially when that becomes fiscus funding. And then not the customer's needs, which is often go government leadership, might not even be the user needs, which could be a gov government worker or intermediary, you know, when the beneficiary is someone without digital access. But, actually, that it sort of ends up there. Is that sort of framework of thinking about impact is really critical. Yeah. So, I mean, I put a bunch into, like, the, appendix just to, like, close out on what we're doing. You know, the these were scribbles of mine that became a prototype. And I think just a lot of things around, you know, democracy at different levels. What does democracy and data and registries mean? Democracy and shared components and service design. A lot for us is just that as we build this my aims on cgov. Today single universal port like channel two services, that accessibility and security, localization, data minimization, etcetera, etcetera are built into the core of the design. And so what we're in this sort of method of doing is also trying to embed, open and so we'll publish quite soon. I was I I mentioned my week notes. We'll publish quite soon our principles and our service early service design manual design system, but really making in the reuse of open source systems into this sort of, stack that we're creating and the service design, that leads us through the sort of single portal, whether it's an app or a screen in a in a service center in person or a website or a trusted intermediary that's doing things for you. You're able to access your government from end to end through, you know, this one place and then talk to us about it. I mean, I think one of the things we're trying to do in the implementation of, DPI is firstly show that there's a lot of solved problems. So this is a working software. This is a thing I say that we'll be showing the public for the first time on Tuesday, next week in the DPI summit. But we put this together in ten weeks. It'll be available to the public in the first half of of twenty twenty six. But so, you know, there are a lot of known problems inside governments and democracy that we we know people need to give government information, and government government needs to store that information and apply it. We know it needs to do checks to understand eligibility for grants. We know these things. And so trying to rapidly move through the things we know to make sure that our design is around contextualization, localization, and the stuff we don't know is really critical. And so what I've just kind of demoed is the fact that, you know, from we've we've gone really rapidly into something that we're gonna start to put into as many people's hands as possible just, you know, so that between now and launch, we are able to start to get and hear this feedback and start to build these loops in. But that sitting underneath there is, as I say, like, a lot of what came out of GDS, what came out of it's Xroad. It's come out of India. It's come out of Brazil. And we use gov.pr/ds for design system base. And so I know as civic technologists, you know, we've we've always said, you know, I suppose, taken the idea of big big civic small technology. And the biggest challenge for us is to say, well, what are the gaps in the service from end to end from policy to someone getting what they need and being able to express it back and have that two way flow? And then how does the technology fit into that? What are solve problems, then what do we have to solve? But trying to keep that idea of, like, the end user need and and the ability to to participate and then hopefully eventually deliberate
kind of at the core. Now let's pass on to Samik Heizer who is going to talk about Citra's work on citizen participation projects and their ideas about scaling up participatory democracy.
Well, first of all, honored to be invited by my society here. This is a a big opportunity for me to talk about our work and, what amazing work my society has been doing for impactful civic tech. This is all followed by us, embraced by us in Sitra. And today, I'm gonna show you what we have done, how we have approached advancing democracy in Finland. I'm going a bit deeper dive into civic tech, and I'm also going to talk about one kind of piece of democratic public infrastructure we've been drafting with our team in for the EU, to enable impactful civic tech on such a wide scale. But let's get started. So, I work as a specialist in a democracy innovation program in Sidra, And, our mission in Sitra is it's a independent future fund. We are not, using money from the government budget. We run-in the return of our own investment fund. We are still accountable to the Finnish parliament, so we work closely together with the public sector. You can consider us as an innovation driver and funding partner, and this is how we approach, change and innovation in Finland. So when we advance democracy, what do we do? So we are helping authorities and decision makers to address the growing societal crisis. We help them strategically develop, citizen participation for the use and that they can solve these biggest problems of our times. And on a national level, regional level, local level. For example, just to bring a bit more broad perspective, it's not only civic tech that I'm delving into. We have also, we've been also advancing deliberative democracy. We've been building capacity. For example, for citizen assemblies, you have services for sortition, not only for research. And then you have also facilitators. We've been educating now we have actually educated an educator and, networks of facilitators for citizen assemblies. And then we have used, civic tech with the deliberative processes, civic tech alone, in different processes. And this all needs capacity building. And today, when I'm talking, I'm talking on different terms, than Richard before and because my background is actually in social and public policy. And this I think it's really nicely giving a different kind of view and perspective to to the discussion today. So now it's the time for next slide. Yes. Okay. So I'm gonna dwell more into our experiments and how we've been, scaling, implementing, routing into a societal use police platform. And I think many in audience know this platform. It's developed by the Computational Democracy Project in Seattle, USA. First, we collaborated with them and one in house company called Digi Finland. We wanted to have a service provider in Finland that can use this open source tool, and that was the first capacity building project together with Digi Finland. We installed open source code to their cloud. We made it GDPR compatible and this kind of first version that we can start to experiment with. And we started to experiment with the first round in 2023. We had these counties that are they are responsible for health and social care services in Finland. They were re newly established layer of governance, and we want to make sure that this level of governance is, actually recognizing the democratic perspective when they are developing this government governmental level. So it was a strategic decision to start on the regional level. And we had more than 30 different police conversations, and all these were, different processes, different topics always connected to a different decision making process. And, yes, they were always conducted by the civil servants who were working in the public sector, regional authorities. They had a small team, different capabilities, communications, substance person who has the substance skills for this topic and also a person who can do this kind of participatory processes internally. And they drafted this process, and they were taking the buy in from the political side and building structures for the processes. We had also learnings and recommendations after this round, as a paper. It's unfortunately only in Finnish. But we did also our own experiment with Polish platform those days. We had a bigger, a nationwide, what do you think Finland campaign. And it gained 18,000 participants on the Polish platform, and, it was discussed a lot. We framed it also as, we have technology that can be used for good constructive discussion among, thousands and thousands of participants. This kind of technology exists. Come and give your, opinion about the future direction Finland should take. This was also in the morning news and everywhere, so it blew up. We didn't expect so many people to join, but it was a amazing experiment. We learned a lot. Also did some technical fixes, with this kind of scale. We got user feedback, a lot about the user interface. And after this, we knew that we can't go on without renewing the user interface. I think sometimes civic tech practitioners are criticized that they are too much concentrated on the UX and UI. I I think it's still rather important. You have to meet kind of it's the window what you meet. We made a mobile first, version of this on this platform, and this was done with different democratic demographics of people, young people, elderly interviews, design workshops together with civil servants. This was a joint process that needed to be done, and now it is in Finland's context at at least, user interface that we are happy about and we can continue. And now this year, we've made a second pilot round. We have been piloting in schools, municipals, ministries, government agencies, NGOs. Again, different topics. We had also our constitutional AI process then one national one we did on our own. So what kind of rules, AI should have when it's used in the public services, in public sector, this kind of discussion we ran. There were over 6,000 people taking part of it, and the analysis is going on. But now we come then to, next step. We found out that, okay, if we wanna scale this effectively, Now we start to have capabilities and skills around Polish platform. We still need to have more service provider. Not only one service provider that can offer this in a finished context. We need more of them. Otherwise, it's too risky that when we are getting away as a Citra from this field that the story goes down. We founded this kind of, open source community. It's run by open source Finland. And first decision this, community made was that they changed the name. And it was a good one because, police actually is a police officer in Finland, and it goes to near when we have discussions about the security situation. It just doesn't fit. And this is okay, a story, and experience is gathered in a long term now. But as it's often said, it's less about the tool, but more about the effective process we are able to build to support the decision making. And when I was talking about this experience, experiments we have been, funding and and instructing and done together with civil servants, they could always create a method that was fit for their own resources. And they could build around Vox Ipsos, meaning the Polish platform. They could build around this kind of maxi public, mini public, seams, have a final report, have a decision made based on that. This is just layering one example, of one Northern Karelian area where this was made. And step by step, they have done this, and I think they have done amazing, improvement in a way that they don't only tell about the outcome, but they also tell about the, impact of these processes. But it's a learning curve, and you need to be, doing civic tech that you learn the most of it. There needs to be place and space for that kind of experimentation. And then we have been watching a long time Finland, but we also start to get more and more questions all around Europe. So how did you start it to scale this Polish platform? And and can you tell more about it? And then we also see, okay, there's a momentum now in Europe. Everybody is, looking at the democratic backsliding happening in different countries. EU is gonna push now for democracy shield program having, investments on democratic resilience. And this shouldn't be only in our view, it shouldn't be only about, protecting from outside threats. It should be also about renewing democracy. And this is why we started to draft with our team an European civic tech hub. And this could be one point of view to a democratic public infrastructure that enables European, thriving European civic tech ecosystem. And this hub oh, it's I'll go further. It has two purposes. One is to strengthen and renew European democracy by helping to anchor this effective use of civic tech into a policy making at local, regional, national, European levels. Second, enhance European technological sovereignty by creating a European ecosystem for civic tech platform solutions and services. And how we approached, something like this could exist already about what kind of services this kind of hub could offer for for the civic tech industry and citizens. We needed to first, 12 into bottlenecks and do an analysis what is really needed. And here I've highlighted some of these bottlenecks for you to see what kind of the analysis of what are the problems that this civic tech hub needs to tackle and build the services on. If you watch from the citizen side, you, you might lack of trust of different civic tech tools. You don't want them to be used in the decision making. That's also not always clear. But you have to earn that trust with many kind of ways. You have to have open technology. You have to show that they can make a difference, that that they can be trusted. Then there's also unawareness. When can I participate? And as Richard was before explaining, well, this this should be also seen through one app. And just to give a bit provocative here, it's, it's actually funny. We live at times that you can order a package from Amazon and follow it step by step when it's delivered to you, but then we can't follow legislative process, how it's approaching step by step, and when is my time to have a say. We have done as a Citra also work to map the legislative process. It is messy, but it's a important work. We also do, on the national level, and you have to create a quite heavy infrastructure and system that you are able to use that app and also follow when it's my turn to have a say. But it's all possible, I believe. And then, bottlenecks from the public authority side, there's a lack of skills, awareness, and trust. They see that, oh, there's a lot of different tools here. Where do I start to look for one? They might be rated to some level, but they need quite a lot of information about the maturity of these technologies. And there's just a lot of, skills you also need when you are trying to imagine and building this kind of processes around different civic tech tools. Then there's also when public sector themselves, they try to build technologies, civic tech tools internally. It's often a project that ends, and then there's always lack of resources for maintenance then comes to security problems, etcetera. So it's not the most optimal always to have it built fully internally and then be fully in-depth with different kind of other services and interoperability first thinking. It's, then there's a lack of collective learning for these different regional and national level civil servants, what could they do and how they could use these tools. There's a lot of interest for learning together. But and then also highlighting the complexity when you use open source tools. The procurement processes are not easy. It's not easy to deploy this, especially if you are like myself. You're not a data scientist. You are, participatory democracy expert. So then on the other hand, you have European civic tech communities, startup you have startups and companies, like our Voxit, open source community. There's just lack of resources for open source development and maintenance or constant lack of resources. There's even situations that the company wants to open source its tool, but it's just too costly even though there are synergies and you could, gain a lot together in a community. Small seed funding or something would help a lot further. And complexities of compliance, so I know as we have been scaling this together with the service provider, so kind of civic tech companies, you always meet different kind of interpretations of, GDPR, depends what kind of municipal officer you go. So some kind of labeling and, standards should be used here and clarified better in this civic tech hub. Last but not least, the lack of spaces for experimentation. What, like, we have done at Citra is super important that we can learn together, and also develop jointly together with civil servants for their use, these tools, and that direction is right. They can actually be connected to decision making prop decision making scene. And, also, if we think public services are definitely something, important for democracy and that they function well and digital infrastructure supporting that, but we also need to reach people outside of the services. This is the this is what the democracy tool should be used for. Thank you. It was my pleasure to introduce this to you. And if you have further questions, I'm happy to think about it with you further.
Thanks so much, Sanaka. It's a really interesting and reminds me when I was preparing for this session that the term digital public infrastructure, I think, originated in the deliberative community. So perhaps from both the presentations, we can take away that they're not so far apart as we might imagine with the current focus on services. Richard has been answering questions in the sidebar busily, but I want to pull out, the top one at the moment, and please do add others. The questioner wants to ask you both about the relationship between open source tools and the kind of infrastructure you're talking about. Do you feel like it is necessary that DPI is open source, challenges and opportunities around that relationship? Yeah. I think it's a good question. And this is actually, often asked,
from me that what do you think about open source? And I think in a context of what I was just talking more like a civic tech and, not that the whole infrastructure government infrastructure has to be open sourced. I think that path is a bit longer. But when we have such a platforms, like, for example, Polis, yes, you there you don't have the vendor lock ins, that might create black boxes of how these tools are actually built and how they work. But it's not only that. It's, you can have also company doing services with their own, really well designed civic tech. And then you might have a civil servant who needs exactly the whole package and doesn't have resources to plan anything like this, what we have done here. And I think, especially on the national level, you need, maybe on the EU level as well, you need, that kind of service provider that there comes the technology, there comes the skill to help you to make the process. And I don't say that if you haven't open sourced your tool that you would be out of the game. It's a I think they are serving many kinds of purposes now. But open source tool collaboration, it is competing with quality, and I think it's a good driving innovation system for civic tech.
Yeah. Richard, you're much more embedded in the service delivery end. What's your experience been?
I mean, I think, I think that's open source wrapping delivery in open source frameworks and open frameworks, which is different, is really critical. I don't think that within the service chains, you can't it can't be that proprietary tools are used. I think there's a place for them. But I think that the standards and framework and implementation around anything that is proprietary should be such that it can be swapped out immediately with no cost to anyone, not financial or nonfinancial cost. You know? And I think that that's really what we try to get across is that, you know, at at least it's like we we stopped using civic tech as a term because it it you know, even though that's what we do as a community. And in that, I also think with open source, open is not the same as open source, which is not the same as open data. Those are all conflated too much. To get to truly open society, I think that that as a goal may mean frameworks that are that encourage openness and transparency, but it doesn't mean that the only way to digitally get there is with open source. It's it's to say as I say, it's the environment safeguards and implementation and design methods you put in the in in the place that allow for a chain that can include it. I would say that it's core DPI is taking is commoditizing or at least, you you know, leveraging open source to take back areas that it shouldn't have lost to the private sector. And then if you think about the opportunities on top of an open source, largely open source d p you know, DPR largely open source government as a platform, I think that gives a lot of opportunity for and that's where you see the GDP bumps. And and the last thing I'll say is, you know, I think of that flag before and after the GDS flag, the map of The UK with technology providers to the states that had, I think, five dots around London. And then posts, you know, five years later, you had, like, over a thousand dots across The UK of technology providers to the UK government who were able to build open source and even proprietary tools on top of the public rails that were built. You know? And that's that, I think, is really critical. The new those are jobs and skills and capacity that are being built in house in in country rather than being shipped to Silicon Valley. You know?
Yeah. Alright. Absolutely. I'm gonna come back to a question that you briefly answered in the sidebar, but I think it's a a really important one, which is how do we address the problem when citizens' feedback is not aligned with the policy road map or the agenda? And I guess I would build on that, kind of, thinking about, when citizens want to do interact with the government in more oppositional ways. So I guess question to both of you, Richard, you talked about services that are neither government nor private sector, but somewhere in between. How do we where would we host that kind of service, if it's less likely that the government is is keen on developing it? And how do you fund it? Where do you situate it in institutions?
So that's a lot of difficult questions in one. That's a lot of questions. Whichever whichever aspect you want to address, please. I think the point is there's never been more of a need for civic tech. And I think that once the hype around DPR starts to fade, I I I have a feeling that the next stage for us, because let's say AI is already here, is trust them back to open data, weirdly. And, the trust ecosystem so, basically, the the thing that says, you know, we know we have privacy, but openness, we know we have digital trust in payments and data and, you know, sort of those sorts of things. So coming back, you know, coming back to that, I mean, there's never been more of a need for civil society to be active. But there's but then you you said the funding question, and I'm like, I don't know, but which is a question we were talking about. And and now in the environment of, cut to budgets and and things like that, you know, to me, that's something we should almost be and I've said this to the sort of society groups. This is gonna go on YouTube, and my colleagues are gonna hear this, and I'm gonna get in trouble. But we should be giving them the platforms to shout at us or at least facilitating the space for those platforms to be created. That's where I see civic tech as as crucial. You know? If it's all gonna be done by us, then there's no way we're gonna we're gonna make sure that all voice still heard in, you know, just, I think, fundamentally, capacity wise, even if we had the best intent. You know? Yep. No. Totally. And final words from you,
Sannekaiza, on that question.
I hope I get it right. It was a good question. Many questions that I started to think there, but about the civil society and for the civil society, how they could be, using these tools and where does this actually, I think there are roof organizations that could implement these tools and offer them almost as free. So we know this moment that there's a lack of resources, but there should be, institutions, kind of the rooftop institutions that offer the usage for free education around them for free that they are and they able to adopt them. And then the role, of course, is different. It might be, not such a connection to decision making, as it is harder to build on, but it's a important voice because you have to also all the time bring out, out of the out of the political agenda, you have to raise the voice. And we have in Finland quite well institutionalized citizen initiative process. But alongside of that, I see that there should be better use of civic tech, in the civil society abroad. So giving voices to those initiate initiation processes would be really fruitful.
Terrific. Well, thank you both so much for sharing your work and your expertise. Thank you to you all for coming to listen. We are gonna be hosting more Tic Tac gatherings between now and the end of the year. So to hear about these, do subscribe for Tic Tac email updates. Just to give you a taster, our next gathering will be the November 11 on networked auditors, crowdsourcing, and community led access to information. And we're gonna be hearing from some great organizations across Nigeria, Germany, and Poland who've been working with volunteers for public interest transparency projects, so very relevant to that last point of discussion. And following on from that, we'll be meeting again on the November 24 to talk about converting information from access to information requests to journalist friendly resources. So thank you all once again and to our speakers and hope to see you soon. Bye everyone.
