Hello, everyone. We're nearly there. You've almost made it. Thank you all so much for joining us. I know we're going to be a little bit short on time. And so we're just going to go ahead and move right into it. My name is Kip Wayne Scott. Yes, thank you. My name is Kip Wayne Scott. I'm a senior advisor at the National Democratic Institute. We are a global democracy NGO. We work around the world on issues like strengthening and supporting democratic institutions, mechanisms for electoral integrity, responsive governance, all of these fun democracy issues. And sort of within that context, civic tech has certainly emerged and become an increasingly elevated focus area across our programs. And we appreciate that a strong and sustainable civic tech movement would be a very positive and powerful force multiplier for the democracy community. And so to that end, we've been formally partnering with the Code for All Network on a number of issues since 2016. But more recently, in thinking about how we might broaden support for civic tech, we've partnered with a number of organizations, including the Omidyar Network, My Society, who are both represented in this conversation, to organize and convene a donors forum for civic tech that we are planning to convene in July at the margins of the OGP summit in Tbilisi. And so we're hopeful that this conversation today, this discussion can help to inform and help us sort of optimize the value of that convening in July as we prepare for it. We're very fortunate to have a collection of very bright voices to contribute to this conversation. I think maybe in the interest of time, if we could maybe weave introductions into sort of a kickoff question that I think is sort of a big state of the movement question. I'd love to hear from each of you, from your respective advantages, in thinking about funding and sustainability, how would you assess the overall health of civic tech? What's working? What needs to change? Stacey, maybe we could start with you and just work our way down. Hi, I'm Stacey Donahue. I'm an investment partner and managing director at Omidyar Network's Governance and Citizen Engagement Initiative. And I lead civic tech investing globally across the firm. So one of the things that is a bit unique about our civic tech investing is that we do both for-profit investing and non-profit grant-making in the space. And I'm curious to know by a show of hands, is anyone in the room working for a for-profit company in the civic tech space? Yeah, so I think that's an interesting observation here as we think about the overall landscape for civic tech to answer your question, Kit, that it is a broad landscape that includes both non-profit civil society players and for-profit companies with respect to what that outlook looks like right now for us. I would say there are reasons for optimism and some reasons to pause. On the optimistic side, engagement is at all new levels for reasons that are probably obvious to most of us because of the state of democracy around the world. So if user apathy was the problem a few years ago with civic tech, that's no longer the issue. And we see in the US environment that funding for engagement-related civic tech is definitely taking off. And the number of organizations that are starting new projects or companies around civic tech for engagement is also booming. An example would be New Media Ventures, which is a very early stage funder in this space and a funder that we have contributed to, did a rebuild and resist open call for projects. And in this last round got 500 applications, which was double the applications they'd ever gotten before. They've since done yet another call around storytelling for engagement and gotten over 700 applications. So that is one data point around optimism that there is more usage of civic tech happening. On the for-profit side, there's definitely more investment happening in this space. Venture capitalists, however you feel about them, are definitely getting more involved in investing in for-profit companies and acquisitions of for-profit civic tech companies are on the rise just yesterday so Crata announced that it's being acquired by a U.S. company called Tyler Technologies. So those are some of the data points that are optimistic in terms of availability of funding and also user engagement. On the flip side, it is still, as I think we all know, a really fragmented space in terms of funding. And one of the things that Kip and we are working together on is to try to get new funders in the space who haven't traditionally funded civic tech for its own sake but tend to be very issue-oriented in their funding and so it's trying to bring those issue-oriented funders into the space to get more familiar with how tech could be an element of the types of things that they fund. So all in all, talking fast here because we don't have much time, I'd say it's a mixed picture with some reasons for hope but things that we still need to work on. So with my society, I'm marked from my society, I think you know that by now, my society is something that I've ridden as much as we were a not-for-profit organization, we were a charity, but we have a wholly owned commercial subsidiary as well. And one of the, I guess the reason I was hired, or one of the reasons I was hired to go over from Tom was because of my previous commercial experience and having grown a startup organization. And when I joined, I just naively assumed because we had this wonderful funder, Mediar, who was really paying quite a large proportion of their grant covered a large proportion of our costs.  And then I think it took me just a few weeks to realize that there are quite so many Mediar's as there could be. And actually funding needed to come from a different set of sources. And so obviously from a charitable perspective, the funding we always want to find, the Holy Grail is those large unrestricted grants which just let you, especially as a relatively large organization in the field, we are about 30 people, which historically for me is not a large organization, but within the civic tech field is fairly substantial. And what comes with that is overheads and salaries and careers and your long-term ambitions of individual staff. So you need to have the ongoing funding to be able to support that. But that's not always straightforward. And the project-based funding, and Stacey talked about the issue-based funding, that obviously often comes with, it's relatively smaller in amount. It often comes with a set of constraints or outcomes or outputs rather that need to be delivered against. And if those outputs don't align with your day-to-day work, actually those 50 to 100, 150,000 grants can actually become a real risk for the organization because you have to deliver all these extra things, but you still don't have the time to find the day-to-day funding. So that mix is quite complicated. So within all that, we've had an ongoing program to try and find appropriate commercial revenue that sits, that is aligned with our charitable goals, but achieves those charitable goals via other means. And that isn't always straightforward. But we've developed five commercial services which are aligned with our charitable goals. At least one of them shows enough promise around Fix My Street to, you know, you can imagine it would have the potential to be spun out as a commercially funded organization at some point in the future. So I guess the approach we're taking is where it's possible to move some of these core efforts and have them funded by other means because they'll be sustainable and they'll be supported over a long time. You can actually build some successful partner organization and potentially free up more time within the core organization to do new things. One final point is the challenge though with balancing commercial and charitable work is that on the one side where you're advocating for political change through one of your services and then on the other side, you're working hand in hand with a local government organization as a client, that changes the dynamic quite substantially. We had one situation where we, obviously we've run these FOI services and what did they know especially? And we had a local government client who we were providing an FOI service to the client. And when the client asked us to remove some material from the charitable service, that caused a massive conflict of interest. We had to ultimately get rid of the client but it creates all those different dynamics that you need to deal with as well. So complicated, a huge amount of fun but yeah, no easy answers. And always trying to find a way to kind of, find a positive sustainable future for different parts of the organization and carefully target the charitable funding we can find. Hi, I'm Rachel. I run 360 giving. We are opening up funding data so that anyone can find out who is funding, what, where, how much. In answer to your question, what's working well, I think picking up on this lady's point, there are lots of good initiatives out there. There's lots of sharing. I personally feel there is a great sense of community. Here we are at Tic-Tac, people from all over the world. I think there was a lot of willingness to learn from and support one another. And that really has seen a real uplift in the last five years in particular I would say. And I personally am always amazed and grateful for the time that people are willing to give when you're starting out on initiatives. You're just trying to throw stuff out of a wall and see what works. And I think funders have been particularly good at trying to join up their grantees to help have those conversations so you do feel part of the community. What needs to change, I don't think anyone would be surprised if I say that funding needs to be more sustainable. So long-term, not just for projects, you don't solve intractable long-term issues with a one-year project grant. And I think there should be more willingness to allow for failure at a realistic percentage rate. I'm rarely asked to write about what stuff isn't working. I'm asked to write about outcomes and targets. I put a challenge section into every funder report that I write, but it's not always, perhaps as honest as it should be. It's sometimes talking about challenges that I will then overcome to get more funding. And I think funders are wise to that as well. So it's about how do you create a space to really talk about failure and change and try stuff out in civic tech, which isn't easy to do, because you're often doing it for the first time. And I think another thing that needs to change is it's seen as a little bit niche. So if you don't fund civic tech, how do you start funding this stuff? Actually, lots of funders we have found when we look at their data that they're sharing with us. So the Big Lottery Fund, a big funder in the UK, didn't really necessarily think they were funding some of this stuff. And then when we looked at their grants, we could show them lots of grants where they had been funding this stuff. They just didn't call it civic tech. So there's something about labelling, I think, that can put people off. And I think picking up on your point, Mark, should grantees be a bit braver about seeking commercial income? Should we only rely on grants to support civic tech? I think the answer is no, we can't. But it's not easy and it feels a bit scary sometimes to have to start seeking that commercial income. So some advice and ideas on that, I think would be really welcome from funders as well. A little bit gone from our organization is the Open Culture Foundation. Our model, I think the question is not how to sustain, but the question is, the hardest one is how to scale up, yeah? Because our model is, Open Culture Foundation is founded by different open source communities. So loose communities, they are not legal entities. So they have their independent account in our organization. So we're kind of like an umbrella organization. We take a 10% for overhead to run a courting office and infrastructure. So we can run this model for, I can see maybe 10, next 10 years, but how you scale up. So that would be very challenging. And I think, ideally, I think for us, most civic tech are open source. So how they build up their own community and not only build up the community around the civic tech project. And because those open source or civic tech tools, usually they require a mass of the user in certain city or country. So because or some cross source, some tools is a cross source tool. So maybe we can consider crowdfunding, some service, you provide some service for $1 or $2 a week or a month. So this kind of stuff is actually, we do have some, another civic tech organization right now in Taiwan. They do the parliament watch. They are running this model right now. Not very successful. They have to go to their founder every month to get the cash. But still, they try to find a way to do their business model. But after all, I think if we are a nonprofit organization, the way you sustain is always come from different donors. Maybe it's a big founder or maybe it's a small donor like your user. So how to combine your tool to engage citizen or user and the money. I think that would be the things we can consider. My name is Kole Shatima. I work with the MacArthur Foundation. I'm based in Abuja. I think for the groups that I deal with on a regular basis, I think that they are always facing challenges. These are very small groups who have very little capacity to get the resources that they need in order to do their work. Who are bounded by some legal requirements that is difficult for them to meet. And therefore, the tendency is that they usually get small amounts of money. They usually get funds that issue specific. We are not able to support them in terms of giving them a general support because of some, somebody somewhere have done some rules and regulations. So I think that many of these groups is really, really always struggling about issue-based support, short-term support. Many funders even don't support them in terms of their human resources and things. They just want them to implement the project. They don't care how they are stopping the place or what kind of other overhead costs they do and things. So I think for many of those groups is really, really a big struggle. And we definitely are focusing in terms of issues. The only bright side of it is that we try as much as possible to make it a three-year grant and also as much as possible to see if we can, you know, even if it is the issue, we try to see if we can also carry them over over the next set of issues rather than just dumping them at the end of the three-year and say bye-bye to them and other things. But I think that for many of these groups, I think I see struggles every day and it's not good. Maybe we could follow up on this point that came up, I think, across the practitioners on the panel about sort of the balancing the short-term objectives against the cycles, the short-term cycles, funding cycles, kind of balancing longer-term impact. This is also something that was picked up in the Knight Foundation reports on scaling civic tech that was released last year. So maybe beginning with Stacey and Kole, if you could sort of speak to whether the current funding modalities are well-suited to longer-term investment and what some of the constraints around that are, and then if any of the others on the panel want to weigh in as well, that would be great. Sure, so the way we've thought about funding has evolved somewhat over time in terms of how we measure short-term success to understand what long-term potential is. In general, when we're doing nonprofit funding, we really try to emphasize core general operating support for all the reasons that Mark had articulated about the problems that project-related funding can cause or the wrong incentives that can be put in place. We are very cognizant of the fact that you can't measure impact over the course of a one-year grant or even a three-year grant, and now I've been doing this for, I'm going in my 10th year now, and I'm finally starting to see or be able to articulate with some of our longer-term investees actual end-user impact in ways that was very difficult in the first few years. So the way we've tried to mitigate that is to do a milestone-based funding. So we know that there's something kind of shorter-term that's usually kind of more output-oriented or process-oriented than it is outcome-oriented, but at least it gets everybody on the same page that we're headed in the same direction. And then we look at longer-term impact in terms of defining the actual change or improvement to life that's happening to the users of a service or the beneficiaries. So in the early years, we invested in a lot of what we'd call ecosystem-building activities, and we still do that today with things like supporting Civic Hall and Mika's here today. It's very important to be building an ecosystem around Civic Tech to give entrepreneurs the support they need in order to stay alive long enough to get to the impact that we're all trying to achieve. So we have funding milestones and goals around ecosystem-building, and then we have longer-term goals around social impact or impact to end users. So that's how we try to balance the short-term and the long-term. I think that for us, I think we talk about momentum. Do we see momentum towards that direction? Do we see some movement, some directions change in that what we're trying to achieve and I think. We know that because of our three-year funding or I don't know, even five, six years' funding, probably we can see some movements in the right direction, but probably I don't think that we are going to have an impact in terms of what we are trying to do and I think. So I think that, so as much as possible, yes, we may have some big things that we talk about in terms of goals and impact and I think, but the real issue is are we moving in the right direction and is that sufficient for us to see whether that is enough for us to continue and I think. But I also want to say that because we are not like, we are not taking, our origin is different from our media and others. So I think that we also appreciate our limitations that probably there are other people who are able to invest in this field, so to speak, much more other than others because we are coming into this from a different direction than others and therefore I can see that in some ways we may not be the best supporters of many of the people in the field because that is not really what is driving us. So one may be driving us is maybe about education or about health or accountability or whatever it is and then we try to say, okay, how can we use the technology in order to help us to deliver those kinds of things as well. Thank you. Rachel. A point about short-term versus long-term, just on a very practical level, we were incubated by a funder, so just a really short-term and it was just me writing a strategy trying to raise some money. You know, we had a desk and a space and support and contacts and access through that funder. So there's supporting kind as well, which I think you'd be surprised, actually say you're not maybe best placed, I think you'd be surprised how helpful your contacts could be to start-ups and that time and generosity of supporting kind really, I think is important to knowledge as well and then that shifting into long-term because you've had the time and space to think what's needed short-term to get going, that's a big piece of learning and appreciative support that we got. Okay, well I do wanna open this up to audience questions here in a minute. Before we go there, I was wondering if any of the panelists had any thoughts on sort of the impact of the global environment right now, the effect that it's having as we're thinking about sort of broadening support for civic tech. We're certainly moved from a much more cyber utopiasm to sort of cyber skepticism and pessimism and at the same time we're seeing this decline in trust in democratic institutions around the world. Stacey, you mentioned sort of an uptick in advocacy focused or issue focused efforts. I'm just wondering if others, if there are observations as to how this current moment and how these global events are shaping the opportunities or maybe a little bit of skittishness in supporting civic tech. I'll just make two points. One is, I think I've described civic tech as a maturing sector in as much as there are a number of practitioners, obviously a lot of us in this room, have been through a number of rounds of different projects, different experiences and so on. So the ability to kind of share them and kind of understand that there are methods and techniques and approaches that can actually make a measurable difference and collectively we can be thinking rather than, what's your more general point, rather than this obsession with novelty, especially in projects funds, we want to give you a relatively modest amount of money to do a new thing that we can see we collectively came up with. That obsession with new tools, new techniques is incredibly damaging. When what we're trying to do is build a relatively finite body of activity that we can use to make change happen in the world. So these kind of convening meetings are incredibly important for that, for that sharing of knowledge, but also recognizing that just because something has been done before and it could be used successfully in another place, that there's a huge amount of efficiency that could be drawn from that and certainly thinking about that in a global perspective incredibly important. Anyone else? Yes, I had mentioned before that we've seen engagement really increasing in terms of the types of civic tech projects that are coming through the pipeline. I think the corollary to that is projects that are around service delivery I think are a bit challenged right now in certain countries and I'll just use the US as an example. Over the last eight years when civic tech was as a movement fairly engaged at the federal level with the Obama administration and there were a lot of young talented people going actually to work in government to deploy tech at the national level. In the new administration context those same people have either left or are very worried about the ways in which civic tech deployed by government could be used for harm instead of good. And so I think the second trend we're seeing in addition to a rise in tech around engagement is a lot more skittishness around tech for service delivery and what it means to partner with governments to deploy technology. It varies between the federal level and the city level and for those of you who aren't familiar there are certain cities in the US for example that have come out very vocally in opposition to the federal government's policies around things like immigration and have set themselves up to be sanctuary cities or safe places and so there are pockets where tech for service delivery and the talent that is focused on that is now gravitating to work with cities but in general the proposition of tech for service delivery is a lot more fraught than it was a few years ago and so when we're measuring the impact of our portfolio and where we're seeing the most progress in the last six months it's been on the engagement side not on the service delivery side. Any other thoughts before we open it up? Okay, we've got about five minutes so maybe if we could take a collection of questions and then just let the panelists respond as appropriate. I see David and go ahead. Go ahead, David. It's fun to be a donor, asking the donor now. So I guess the corollary we do a lot of long-term dental operating support funds for the employer grantee's life. Corollary to that or the other side of the point is that we don't have as much grantee to fund new organizations emerging organizations. In the city tech field there are a lot of organizations now that have staff of two or three or four sometimes they have more board members than they have staff. And so I'm curious for your advice on when to stop funding. How should we know when to stop funding to make room for other board institutions? Is that a question? Is that all right? I would just write down my four top changes. One is if it's an ecosystem treated like an ecosystem which means co-dependence of the variables like you have to make sure that it operates as an ecosystem. The second one is there are old civic institutions if you're going into a set and this is not true for the long-term management if you're going in new don't just fund civic tech as a thing it's a you're in a sector already understand and know that sector don't ignore the old civic ecosystem that's already there. And it may be putting a bit into that that's going to be more effective than funding new things. No map learn other donors. I think most of us are playing donors off against each other a bit. But that's incredibly inefficient and actually more efficiency there would be better. And then fund leadership infrastructure back end and network field building stuff because that's actually how we get the value from each other in things like this that make that work increase things that push really boring stuff but more having to deal with the GDPR even U.S. organizations can somebody just help convene something quick? You know that stuff reduces costs I guess. Anyway there's my top brass. You sir. Yeah, quick question and we talk about when we talk about the ecosystem end and how the ecosystem growth and growth and the impact and cetera. Those are some external factors that seem very powerful. I wanted to get sort of the privacy and the impact on this discussion. And the second one is sort of the fact that we're increasingly delivering all these things on the platforms. And these are sort of the huge issues around that and recently one of the media grantees on the arc raised the issues about lack of traditional content by Facebook. I'm wondering if like donors have a role to play in highlighting sort of what are the big rules of the game that we say is living under on privacy and the platforms. Sir. Also a short question following up on your question in our years to one sector startups. You may also have old institutions that work on governance for a long time but have to transform themselves to hear how to work in the technology and experience in that form. And then this was, did you have a question as well? Ah yes. So I'm wondering and part of my ignorance in the donor sector of Civic Tech but I'm wondering is there any work that donors, funders in Civic Tech are doing to educate other foundations and donors that Civic Tech can be a means to their end. So for instance there are many, many funders who don't self-proclaim them and self as Civic Tech interested but I think kind of is there a role that donors are pursuing to kind of educate other donors as well. Okay, one last question, Jim. Is anyone doing payment by results or outcomes based commissioning or social impact bonding stuff? Or is that bad? Okay, so we have a category of questions and I'm gonna let each of the panelists sort of respond to the questions as appropriate as they feel comfortable and then I'd like you to end and conclude with sort of a one sentence summary for our benefit in thinking about this donor's forum. What's the most valuable insight that you think funders and practitioners could better understand about each other coming out of the forum? So Stacy, maybe we should start with you. Do you have a question for me? Oh, sure. A question, I know David's was about when to stop funding. Not some murders and acquisitions. Do donors have a role to play in sort of government? Sort of the Fendiar example. Yes. Education between and among foundations and donors and payment by results. Yes, okay. So when to stop funding and how to think about consolidation that is a huge question for us. We really try to think hard about dependency and the unintended effects of creating an unhealthy financial relationship between ourselves and an investing, especially when we're in an investing for a long period of time. We don't have a great answer to that. We try to remain under 20% of an organization's funding to limit that issue. And we also try to communicate very far in advance before ending a funding relationship so that it doesn't come as a surprise and an organization has time to think about its next steps. We used to have a pretty strong policy about not funding an organization for more than say six or seven years total because we were providing growth capital and not perpetual capital. And while we certainly still don't do perpetual, we are more flexible now about thinking about organizations that are sort of foundational to the field and ways in which we can be supportive for sometimes longer periods of time. But I don't have a great answer to that question. With respect to mergers and acquisitions, those terms are uncomfortable, I think in the nonprofit space and civil society space, but I do think it's very important to think about how combinations of organizations can be more impactful and more cost effective and efficient. And donors do have a role to play there in identifying what parties could go together well. And we don't do enough of that. I think these donors are also uncomfortable with it. So room for opportunity for sure. On your topic, Anders, about role of donors with the platforms, I was personally engaged with FANDR and that set of organizations in helping get those issues surfaced publicly. And so I consider that a tiny victory in a large war around holding platforms accountable for the things that happen on their platforms, whether it's intentional or unintended. It is also challenging because we want, in some cases, to partner with platforms to try to create the social impact that we're trying to create. And so it's another one of these really messy things where sometimes we're trying to partner in the spirit of creating an outcome and sometimes we're more adversarial or oppositional. In the Academia Group, we have several different teams. And so sometimes one team will be pursuing more of an external strategy and one team will be pursuing more of an internal strategy, but it's tough. Collaboration between foundations and donors, sharing practices and payments by results. Okay. So on payments by results, first, social impact bonds, we definitely support that and invest or invest in intermediaries who create those at the Omidyar network level. I haven't seen a lot in the civic tech space yet and I have had that on my radar for a while because I think there are potential opportunities for civic tech players to be one of the delivery providers in a social impact bond or pay for a result situation. So I'd be curious if offline, please come talk to me about that because I'd love to see more of that happening. And then finally, collaboration between donors and practitioners. I think sharing information between and among foundations and donors. Oh, yes, yes. Yeah, so I think today the way that happens is very one on one. Donors know who fund in similar spaces, know each other. And so if we share information informally or we network in kind of general ways where you might find an investee that has a common interest for multiple funders. And I'd use Code for America as an example of that where they've been funded by, recently by Chan Zuckerberg initiative, for example, who doesn't have an explicit focus on civic tech but has an interest in better public service delivery. And so we intersect that way, but I think it is a great idea to try to systematize that a little bit more and try to, for civic tech funders to get more involved in trying to pitch civic tech as an investment area to other funders. And there's room for improvement for sure. For example, yes. Mark? So we're really over time, so I'm going to keep this very quick. We had a conversation last week internally about people's careers and using the phrase a career within our type of space. The fact that people may want to have career progression and move up and be able to expand their capabilities and horizons and so on. That's casting that against your piecemeal funding, uncertainty, always six months away from disaster.  On the kind of mergers and acquisitions, we're very polite about wanting to discuss that. And as a result, lots of NGOs just can continue on. And they don't continue, because you can continue on a project NGO in your spare time. You're around some paid for work, all the rest of it. So lots of these things just kind of go on and on and on.  There's no such thing as a merger. It's always a takeover. You know, there's always one dominant partner and that changes things. So of course it may be uncomfortable to talk about it in this space, but if we don't do it because we don't want to upset people, and then we squander people's lives because the just fritter away project isn't actually having some impact, maybe we're doing more damage that way as well. So lots of things to think about. But I'm positive about the future and I'm certainly positive about this, but we're way over time. So Gemma wants to do a photograph outside. Okay, I'll be very quick. When to stop funding, big versus new. I mean, that links into all of Karen's points that she made, all of which I agree with. Just the transparency. I should say she and I used to work together, so we've discussed this at length. Treat it like an ecosystem. What is your strategy? What do you want to achieve? How's the ecosystem looking? If you're worried about long-term, I would question what some people think long-term is. I was having a conversation recently with a funder in the UK. They fund a minimum 10 years. That's long-term for them. What's your long-term? So if you're trying to fix homelessness, there might be a role in civic tech in that and it might be 10 years worth of funding to some organisations and then short bits to new organisations, you can mix and match. That might involve changing some of your funding mechanisms, which may not be so easy, but actually maybe you have to do things differently and you can do big versus new. But it should treat it as an ecosystem and see how it's coming together. And I think this goes back to the labelling of civic tech. So actually it's the issue you're trying to improve health outcomes or education outcomes or housing and homelessness. There's a role of civic tech in all of those things. So what is your strategy as a funder for the ecosystem and the supporting civic tech within that? In terms of funders sharing stuff to educate others, there was an example recently in the UK where six funders got together with a company called Shift Design and they looked at the tech for good funding space and one of the key findings from that was three years isn't long enough to fund a tech for good project and part of the reason for that work was to try and bring in other funders who are a bit scared about getting into this space. So I recommend having a look at that Shift Design work. People can come and ask me about it afterwards if they want to find out more. And the thing about mergers and acquisitions, I would push that back onto funders. A lot of you are funding the same stuff. Why aren't you merging? Why aren't you putting in lots of money together and funding it? Why should we be the only people who are asked to do that? Okay, so go back to the donor forum. What would I see in the donor forum happen? I would like to say from the foreign petitioners, we should share more knowledge on your own funding model. We can share different governance model, funding model, how we persuade your donor, what's your arguments, and this kind of knowledge is what we need to share more with each other. And in different levels, some is the city level, some is national level, and now we have an international network in like a co-for-all and assume we will open up to all kind of civic tech organization. And also I want to echo that one say we should engage in more traditional civil society organization. And as a civic tech, maybe some of us are very good at tech, but the civic problem, some people are already studied for decades, two decades. So if we can bring more traditional civil society to understand the digital, international, internet progress like what's AI, big data, blockchain, and try to keep them up, I think that would be more healthy for your sustainability and go to the crowd. On margins and acquisitions, I would say this is a very sensitive topic to raise with people, but certainly personally I have tried to raise it as a friend and saw that not as a funder because I see some of the challenges some of these organizations are facing and maybe coming together might be a better option and sadly I think that have seen pushback from all those people. I think they have left organizations to die instead of probably bringing their synergies together and see what they can actually achieve in our things. I think that our funding cycle, usually, we've found for about 10 years until recently, and sometimes it's really difficult to say, I'm going to cut you off, I don't know why, but there are people that we have been funding for more than 10 years and we think they are doing the work they are doing, which is good, and therefore it's difficult for us to now say, well look for new people to do something else and I can realize the danger also of perpetuating some organizations, whether some organizations that have been doing so well that probably one also has to be careful not just to cut people because of you wanting new people. The last point I want to make in terms of educating each other in our things, maybe it's not conscious, but I know that our colleagues, for example, from our media will claim that they are not trying to lobby but they tell us we should be doing some more work on these and our things and so there are all these informal conversations that you people with people who are really aware of this is their field and I think why don't you think about these people and our things and of course they also when come to us and say how does it feel look like, who should we be talking to and I think so I think there's always some cross-partalization and conversations among ourselves about what we should do and what we should not do and our things and especially for those of us in the field I think because we are not really many so we talk to each other all the time anyway in terms of who do we see, what should we be doing and what should we do with these, is there any insight? I think there's no insight but just to appreciate the fact that all of us have all limitations in terms of what we are legally allowed to do and what we're not allowed to do and therefore sometimes it's very difficult really to explain to people that why you cannot do this just because that's what it is and I think that realizing that limitation as to what grantees can do and what funders can do and not and our things I think it's good to help in trying to all of us appreciate each other's limitations. Thank you. Thanks so much everyone. I appreciate you all bearing with us some of the time constraints. I think it was a fascinating discussion. Look forward to continuing the conversation. If you have any thoughts or would like to feed in as we're planning this donors forum in Tbilisi, please come and find us. We'll be around after and thank you.


s lots of other fantastic work being done at a local level to address child poverty by local authorities in Scotland, often working in partnership with the local voluntary sector. I would like to highlight the role of the Scottish child poverty strategy, which should be one of the key ways that different examples of good practice are brought together to make sure that there is the learning from what is happening at a local level and that that can be effectively reproduced Scotland-wide. Harking back to the Children and Young People Scotland Act 2014, one of the things that Barnardo has welcomed was the general requirement to take account of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, particularly article 27 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that a standard of living that is good enough to meet the physical and social needs of a child is a right of every child. We hope to see every element of the Scottish Government, the Scottish Government itself, local authorities embody that right going forward in everything that they do. Two things on the support with costs of food during the school holidays and the initiative that Mr Bibby flagged up. I think that he is very welcome in looking at other ways, but I think that he is looking at the costs of school holidays across the piece as well, not just meals but costs of additional childcare, costs of access to holiday activities. You can link some of those things together and look at how you can ensure that by providing a free meal during an activity programme that helps to bring young people into that activity programme during the school holidays, but also ensures that they have a decent meal at least at some point during the day. Those approaches are very welcome. We are doing some work at the moment with Glasgow Life and partners in Glasgow looking at the costs of the school holidays. As we did research over this summer holiday period, there is no question that additional costs of food, additional costs of childcare and additional costs of activities all put a huge pressure on families, so finding ways to remove those financial barriers would be very welcome. Absolutely, we need to see how I flagged up earlier the role that tax and benefits play in preventing and reducing levels of child poverty. It is its redistribution through the tax and benefits system that helps to bring levels of child poverty down in almost every European country that there is. We need to look at ways of doing that more effectively Scotland is an extraordinarily wealthy country. There are huge resources here. We need to look at those as well as the social security powers that are coming to Scotland. We need to look at the existing tax powers and the new tax powers to look at how we can harness that wealth and ensure that those who are able to are making a fairer contribution to ensuring that none of our children grow up in poverty and preventing those additional costs that build up to society and to us all as a result of child poverty. However, it is not just about redistribution from those with resources and wealth to those less, so it is redistribution across the life course as well. There are certain points in our lives where we encourage additional costs as a result of bringing up children and we potentially very often lose some of our income as well as we have to give up some of our work time in order to provide for our children, so additional costs lower incomes. The tax and benefits system is a way of redistributing resources across the life course, so it is not just about transferring resources from the rich to the poor, it is about ensuring that we are all investing and ensuring ourselves for the realities of the costs that life imposes on us in such a way that at certain points we do not leave people, particularly children, without the resources that they need for a decent standard of living. I thank everybody for taking part today. You have given us a great amount of food for thought in terms of what is happening. You have just mentioned human rights and, of course, there are proposals to change the human rights bill as well, which I am sure will come under further scrutiny within the Scottish Parliament as well. However, if there is anything that we have not covered that is not in your submissions that you want to highlight to the committee, please feel free to follow up and write to us. We are about to move into private session to discuss our post Christmas work programme and review the evidence that we have today. This is the last meeting before October recess, and our next meeting will be on 27 October. We will continue to take oral evidence into an inquiry into the future delivery of social security in Scotland. I will now move into private session. Thank you very much.


The recent ban that has been come on the protests inside the Delhi University is a curbing of the students' rights to protest and dissent over the matters and over the inequalities or anything that is going inside the college or the campus areas. So basically this ban on Dharanas is just another way by which the administration of this university is trying to reduce political questions into a question about disciplinary misbehavior or actions. While we need to know that currently in the past two-three years there have been large parts in the sections of the university that have come up and voiced its various disagreements against various educational policies or other policies of this government, of this administration. And this is just a way for them to divide people and individuate people. They are afraid of student solidarity, they are afraid of student teacher and Karmachari solidarity and they are just trying to curb down on this. This is basically very problematic and depicts the structural flaws of the whole university and what it is basically meant to do is to kill the voices of dissent. Whenever there are fascist forces that are coming up in any country, the first attack by them is on education, is on the people who they know are potential threats to their fascist agenda. This circular is aimed at the students in the university not to protest, protest, protest, protest, protest, protest. This is our constitutional right. This circular is to take away our constitutional rights. What this notice shows is that students are stopped by picking up their voices and this is against the fundamental rights of our people and if we students are stopped by picking up their voices and if we take our voices in the campus, If we go to the campus, will we move towards the public temple to raise our small voices? Or will we move towards the parliament or is it our right to raise our voices against any of our authorities? If we fight for our rights in this campus, then where will we fight? They say that by protesting, we are disrupting education but isn't privatisation of education and messing with educational syllabus based on political lines, messing with our future and our educational right too. Why is that not seen as a disturbance and why is us coming on the streets to claim what our right is and to democratise this institution seen as a disturbance? We are being brought up by the government, the government and the government. We are going to stop the people from entering the country, society and other institutions or to take things into our favour for some wasted political interest. We protest against those things, we protest against the students. We protest against the democratisation of the society and the university. If we stop them, then you can define how to stop them against your basic rights because you are protesting against the basic rights of your basic rights We protest against them but if we stop them, then they are against the basic rights of our life. We will challenge them to how to bring a circular like this. The university will protest against the rights of the students. The Constitution has given us a right. We are against the Supreme Court. If we can challenge the students in a legal way, then why can't we protest against our constitutional right? If they are told to take legal steps against them, then there will be no place for them to protest. This is our campus, this is our place, we are students. If we don't raise our voices here, then where will we raise them? This should be our right. We should be able to live in the limits of our constitutional rights. We shouldn't be violent. We should be able to live in the limits of our constitutional rights. We are not afraid of any of the movements from the part of the administration as we are determined to safeguard the rights of common students in the campus areas at any level. So we are not afraid of any curbing or any expulsion from the campuses or colleges but we are determined to continue the struggles forward. Edmund Burke, a famous British philosopher, said that law can punish a single solitary person who violates it. It cannot persecute a multitude. And when students, because we are the pioneer force that will lead to the fall of fascism, we will be the force that leads to the fall of fascism. And when this student community refuses to recognize that law that is made to put us down, that is made to shut our voices, I don't think they have anything that they can do to prevent that from happening. When we come together in a collective, when they can't take individual action against us, they fear that because they know that they can break individuals but they can't break collectives that easily. And when collectives come together, you have to be accountable, you have to come and answer. It's basically about unity. When all the students will come together, I don't think they will expel the whole Delhi University for it. So our protests are not going to stop and our attempts at questioning the administration and demanding accountability is not going to stop. Student Federation of India will of course organize struggles and protests against this and these student motions of the administration's level and we will ensure that we will have a joint movement against this whole. We can go legally, we can protest, rally, whatever happens, we are ready to do everything. We will protest against it and we will try our best to take this circular back and we will try our best to reclaim the space of democratic voices.


All right, it's time for the most boring video you're ever gonna see on this channel. Today, we're gonna be talking about and setting up a turn server. So a turn server is just a little software, server software that connects two peers trying to do a WebRTC call. Now, what does that actually mean? Well, it means that if you're using Matrix or XMPP or some other self-hosted chat server, people are gonna wanna do peer-to-peer calls, video calls, voice calls, but that doesn't work unless you have a turn server to tell them each other's IPs. So that's what a turn server does. You ping the turn server, it responds using the stun protocol. It tells them, oh, here's the IP of your peer, the person you're trying to call, and then they can communicate. Now, sometimes that doesn't work and that's where the turn protocol comes into play that relays the information, the video and voice call information between the two users. And that's, of course, favorable if you're using, you know, a firewall or something else, which a lot of people are doing. Anyways, that's just a basic summary of how it works. Let's get into setting one up on Debian 10 using the co-turn turn server software. All right, so as you can see here, I got my Wiki article that's linked in the description if you wanna just follow a text guide. And over here, I got a Debian VPS. So that's one thing you will have to set up. You need some kind of server that's not behind an NAT. Some routers, if you have a home server, let you set up something called a DMZ. A DMZ is essentially giving your server the privileges to be beyond the NAT, which blocks ports and stuff. That's why you gotta port forward with most other applications. I've never seen a co-turn server work that's behind an NAT, so you have to set up either a DMZ that'll be in your router options, or just use a VPS, like on Vulture, Capsule, some other VPS provider. Now we can move on to the next part. So the installation, that's pretty easy. Debian repositories have co-turn in them, so just sudo apt install co-turn, pass dash wide and make it faster as well. Yeah, there you go, it's installed. Now moving on to basic configuration. Now those you can basically copy paste and then using VIM, so sudo vim, etsyturnserver.com. Now this file has a bunch of stuff in it already, and you can go through here and uncomment everything. I recommend just deleting everything because having a simple turn server configuration is gonna be excellent for debugging. So server name, that's easy, just name this turn dot whatever your website is. In my case, turn.denshi.org. My realm, that's just the same name as your server, so turn.denshi.org, in my case. You're listening IP. You wanna put your public IP in here, so let me just quit out of there and type IPA to get my public IP. There it is, inet 696138. It's the IP that I use for my turn server here, so going back into turnserver.com, I'm just gonna copy paste that here, and there you go. Because we're not behind in NAT, we can list it on a public IP, so that's all good. The listening port, you can keep this as is. Min port, you can keep it as is. Max port, you can keep it as is. Every other port is default, so you can just keep them like that. The verbose option is for debugging issues, we're gonna keep that on, and then scrolling down here, we have to pick an authentication method. Now turn servers, because they are relaying information, you have to have some kind of entity in the middle, now your Synapse server or your XMPP server that actually contacts it to set up the connection. And for that, you need authentication. Now in this case, we can use either usernames and passwords or an authentication secret. I'm gonna use an authentication secret because that's just simpler, but if you want, you can use a username and password. So copy paste these two lines over here to get the authentication secret, I'm gonna paste them into here. I'm gonna make the secret, I don't know, something stupidly insecure. Billy, one, two, three. There you go, there's my secret. It's just write quit over here. And now sudo system CTL, restart, coturn, and there you go, it's started. So now I'm gonna go and test out the actual calling on my server. Okay, so this is my config for eJabberty. And over here, there's a wiki article I wrote about how to set up eJabberty. I'll have this linked in the description so you can copy paste the part relating to turn servers. This little part over here, it's a configuration for the mod stun disco, which as the name implies, is a stun discovery modification. We're gonna delete this line that's over here and copy paste the configuration from my wiki, just making sure it's indented correctly. And we're gonna set our shared secret to Billy, one, two, three. We're gonna change our host to turn.denti.org or whatever host you're using. And now we can write and quit system CTL, restart eJabberty. And I'm gonna test the calling using my phone and this computer. But before I do that, let's take a look at how to set this up for your matrix server. So over here on the left, I'm in my home server.yaml file for the matrix Synapse server software. And as you can see, there's a turn section to configure the turn server. The turn your eyes, this is where you wanna put your actual domains. I'm gonna uncomment this. And over here, I'll also have this linked in the description. It's the Synapse turn server guide. And as you can see, they give an example of how to set it up. I'm gonna just copy paste these. Okay, I've copy pasted it. Basically you wanna change this to turn dot whatever it is that you're using. In my case, dentshi.org. Same thing for over here, dentshi.org. Then going to shared secret. This is obviously gonna be Billy, one, two, three. And I can uncomment this line. But anyways, I'm not gonna be testing this out on Synapse. I'm gonna be testing it out using eJabberty and XMPP with my phone and my computer. I'm not actually gonna write any of these changes. These are just informational for anybody who's using matrix and wants to set up voice and video calling. This is how you do it. All right, so I have a test account over here on Movin, which is an online XMPP client. And I have the same test account over here on my phone with just my regular account on blabber.im, which is a good XMPP client for phones. I'm gonna call this person from this phone. Audio call, there you go. There's the call. I'm gonna reply. Hey, this is a call. Yeah, there's an echo. I'll turn that off. But as you can see, the call was connected effectively and we were able to communicate. So that's proof that the turn server is actually working. Now let's take a look at what the logs look like when that's happening. Okay, so as you can see on the left over there, I got the turn server logs. I'm gonna try for another call. All right, I'm gonna reply. There you go. So that's just all the connections. I'm gonna turn this off. But that's the connections happening between me on the phone on a different IP address because I'm on mobile data and my computer over here, all being processed by the turn server. So this is what a good log should look like. And yeah, that's how you set up a co-turn server. That was my little article on it on the wiki. That's how you set it up for eJabberty. And Matrix, enjoy your WebRTC calling. I've been Denchie. Goodbye.