Okay. So, are we good? I decided that I need to do some redecorating. I spray painted this little table from Ikea. The spray paint's not really sticking that well, so I thought what I should do is pour some resin. That's all in the end there. And I'm just gonna protect it. It's all up really good. And I have over here some gold leaf. We're gonna mix that in, and then just like whatever it does, whatever happens happens. We're gonna call it happy accident. We use our circle calculator on our resume.com. Eight ounces of resin, eight ounces of partner. I'm literally just gonna plump this in. See how easily it tears apart? We might get some big chunks mixed in. We might get some little chunks mixed in. I don't really know. Gold and black is gonna look so good. Am I right, Tracy? It does. So this has already been mixed up. I'm literally just mixing the leaf in. And ready? Here we go. Yeah, baby. Ooh, it's beautiful. Already it's beautiful. It says 59. And I have to walk the dogs right now. But I'm so happy with that. Okay, I can go on my walk.


will not look away. No matter how horrific it gets, I will not look away. No matter how many children I see killed and injured in the most gruesome ways imaginable, I will not look away. No matter how much human suffering I see by keeping my gaze on Gaza, I will not look away. No matter how many nightmares I have, I will not look away. No matter how many tears I shed, I will not look away. No matter how many reasons the propagandists and manipulators come up with for me to turn my gaze elsewhere, I will not look away. No matter how many insults and accusations I am tarred with for refusing to look away, I will not look away. No matter how much easier it would be to look away, I will not look away. I will not avert my gaze. I will not become distracted. I will not lose myself to the sedated stupor of escapism. I will not do my best to pretend that everything is normal and that life is basically fine. It's a paltry offering, really, almost nothing, but it's all I've got to offer, this simple sacred vow to honor the victims by refusing to look away from what's being inflicted upon them, to be here for it to the furthest extent possible. The people of Gaza are suffering far more than I have ever suffered and probably far more than I ever will suffer, but in my own meager and entirely insufficient way, I can try to make sure they're not suffering on their own. To the extent of one person's gaze, one person's attention, one person's reverence, I can ensure that the world has not turned their back on them. I can ensure that, to that extent, they are not forgotten. That way, even if my other efforts fail, even if all our collective efforts fail, if the activism comes up short, if we fail to open enough eyes and apply enough pressure in the necessary places, then at least their deaths, their losses and their anguish will not have slipped by unnoticed, unappreciated, unvalued, unwitnessed. I will not look away because these lives matter and I have a duty to honor them. I will not look away because that would be giving the bastards what they want. I will not look away because even in my powerlessness to help, I still have the power to bear witness. I will not look away for the same reason that when my parents are dying, I will hold their hand and stay by their bedside until they are gone. Even if we can't stop this, at the very least we can give them our seeing. At the very least, we owe them that.


So you wish there was an easy way to draw beautiful looking designs on a transparent billboard, not a problem. Heads up for this tutorial, I am assuming that you've already set up the transparency shader requirements from the transparency tutorial. Here you can see we have a basic police hat and a single-sided flat mesh with nothing on it at all. Which happens to be all we need to create literally any type of design that we want. I want to create a golden winged insignia, so to start things off, I'll drag a basic brass gold material, add a fill layer, hold alt and left click to disable everything except height. Drag height up a bit, right click, add a black mask, right click the mask and add a paint layer. And just to see what we're doing, let's go ahead and drag any alpha we want for our design onto the mesh. Then right click the mask again and add an anchor point. Then add a new fill layer, hold alt and left click to disable everything except opacity. Then drag opacity all the way down. Then right click, add a white mask, right click the mask and add a fill layer. And under gray scale, click anchor, pick your anchor point and then click invert. And from here you can drag the points to control how sharp the borders are before they become transparent. Now this is cool, but we can easily make it better by adding a new fill layer, hold alt and left click to disable everything except for height, increase the height a bit, right click and add a black mask. Then right click the mask, add a fill layer and under gray scale, click anchor. Set it to your anchor point, then right click your mask, add a filter, click filter and add a bevel. And now we go to fill, reduce the levels and go back to our bevel layer. Now we can control the bevel edge wear of our transparent ornament. You're done. And again, this is completely non-destructive. So if you go to the paint layer, you can draw whatever you want or use more alphas to make even more cool designs. Just make sure that your alphas are good because otherwise you might get some really weird borders. But otherwise, hope that helps and as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.


In this presentation, we will record withdrawals from partners from the partnership. Our information is going to be here on the left side. We will record that into the general journal with journal entries and then post that to our worksheet to see the effect on the trial balance as well as the accounts in it. We have a trial balance as recorded in terms of assets in green, liabilities in orange. Then we have the capital accounts where we're going to be focusing our time. We have our partners of C, K, and M and then we've got revenue and expenses, debits are non-bracketed, credits are bracketed, zero means that the debits minus the credits are in balance, net income 7,000 which is the 10,000 minus the 3,000 to get to that 7,000. We're going to focus in on here on the partnership and this is really where it gets a little bit confusing because you'll note that a partnership's capital accounts can get rather long and cumbersome looking because we're going to need multiple partner capital accounts as opposed to a sole proprietor and it can even be more intimidating than a corporation many times because of the similarities with all the stockholders in a corporation can simplify that process a bit as well. The partnership, we're going to have like a sole proprietor a capital account and then a withdrawals account. That's usually the way the trial balance will be set up meaning if the partnership has investments in the company we usually just record that in the capital account but the withdrawals for whatever reason basically because there's going to be more withdrawals than investments hopefully. The withdrawals we typically record in its own account so we can track it separately as time passes. So in other words it would be nice we would expect that if everything went well the owner would put in an initial investment into the partnership and then from that point forward the partnership would earn revenue and then the owner would not be putting any more money into the partnership but would be withdrawing out on a regular basis and therefore we would want to track the withdrawals in a separate account because there will be significant activity there and we don't need really a separate account for capital investments but can just put that into the capital account itself because hopefully there's not going to be that many of them in the future. And so the other thing that goes into the capital account will be when we close out the process. We'll close out revenue and expenses there and we'll close out the draws there. So draws is a funny account then for most people to wrap their head around when we first think about it because it's kind of a capital account but it's not really on the balance sheet in terms of the financial statements because it's a temporary account meaning it's really the only one of the only it's pretty much the only temporary balance sheet account there is that we work with a lot. It's going to be this draws account or dividends for incorporation a similar type of account meaning all other temporary accounts that close out are on the income statement and they close out the capital account and they affect net income. This draws account does not affect net income but is temporary and will close out to the capital account. And the reason that's the case is because because it's a draw it's not part it's not an expense so we want to make sure we put it up here into the capital accounts. So let's see what that looks like we got draws for CK and M so C draws out 2000 so we're just going to say that cash is going to go down because he took money out of the company or the partnership so we're going to right click on cash copy and put that on the bottom in B3 right click and paste 123 the amount in D3 will be a credit which is a negative 2000 and then we'll debit something 2000 in C2 by saying I'm going to do the negative of this number and enter so there's the 2000 there now we just need to put that into the proper account which will be the C draws account so we'll copy C with draws right click and copy and put that in B2 right click and paste 123 now we'll post this out and see what happens so we're going to get these C withdrawals here here's the C withdrawals on the trial balance we want to be in H6 where we will say equals and point to that withdrawals of the 2000 bringing the balance up from 0 to 2000 note that the withdrawals is a debit balance account even though it's in the capital section that's because it's kind of like a contra capital accounts meaning it has a balance that's opposite to the normal balance for most capital accounts and that's because it's bringing capital down and we had owed the company the company or the business or the partnership owed C $40,000 if C took 2000 out then the difference is what is still owed 38 in this case so when we close this out at the end of the day at the end of the period the month or the year to the capital account will currently we'll have at that point 38,000 then the other side is going to go to cash which is in H2 where we will say equals point to that 2000 bringing the balance from 48,000 down by 2002 46,000 then we've got K's draws so K drew out 1000 once again is cash affected we'll say yes cash is going down so I'm going to right-click and copy cash we'll skip a line skip another line and put that on the bottom in B6 so within B6 we're going to say right-click and paste 1 then the amount is in D6 where we will say equals or just negative 1000 and then up above it will put the debit in C5 negative of this number where you can just type in 1000 but I like to put that little formula in there and then we're going to say that that's going to be case withdrawals so case withdrawals right-click and copy put that up top right-click and paste 123 so here we have case withdrawals are going to go here on the trial balance we're over in H8 where we will say equals and point to that 1000 bringing the balance up from 0 by 1002 1000 then we've got C the cash so cash is up top something's in it already in H2 therefore we will double click on it go to the end of it say plus and point to the 1000 bringing the balance from 46,000 down by 1002 45,000 so now we've got case withdrawals here bringing down the balance so we owed K 50,000 it took out 1000 we owe 49,000 at this time then we've got Ms. Draws so 1500 so again cash is going to go down so we're going to right-click and copy cash we're going to skip a line we're going to skip another line put that on the bottom in B9 right-click and paste 123 and then we'll go to the right in D9 and we'll put the negative 1500 and enter and then we'll put the same amount up top in C8 I'm going to do that with the negative of that number that's going to be the 1500 then we just need to put the amount or the capital account which will be Ms. withdrawals so Ms. withdrawals we will right-click and copy put that up top in B8 right-click and paste 123 now we'll post this out so Ms. withdrawals are here here's Ms. withdrawals we're going to be in H10 equals and we'll point to that 1500 and enter bringing the balance from 0 up by 1500 to 1500 then we're going to go up to H2 double-click on it go to the end of it plus point to that 1500 and enter so that brings the balance to 43,500 and we have recorded everything note that there's no effect on the income statement here so no effect on revenue and expenses that's kind of the point a mistake would be to pay out the cash and then debit some kind of expense account because that would lower net income improperly we want to put it into that temporary account but one which is not part of the net income and that makes sure that we don't mistake net income and also track the owners what is owed to the owners as we should because we want to be very careful to do that properly within a partnership so there's no disagreements within the partnership and we want to document all that as much as possible also note that there's a profit sharing of 321 here and that does not necessarily have anything to do with the withdrawals that has to do with how we're going to split the net income so it and unless the partnership agreement says that the withdrawals are limited in some way or must be in accordance with that same ratio it's not by default typically the case so meaning the partner can draw whatever they want in theory up to their capital account unless restricted by the partners and of course you know the partners are going to want to keep some type of capital in there and there might be some restrictions or some incentives to do so within the partnership agreements such as having more more of the net income allocated to you if you have more capital investment or just a restriction of a minimum balance or something like that but point being is that the withdrawals don't necessarily match the profit sharing amounts for the amount that will be withdrawn


Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation Dental Insurance and Obamacare Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance Remember that insurance is part of our long term risk mitigation strategy where we use the adage of measure twice cut once putting a formal plan in place looking something like setting our insurance goals, developing a plan to reach the goals putting the plan in action, reviewing the results, repeating the process periodically We're looking at dental insurance and Obamacare Most of this information can be found at Investopedia Can I get dental insurance with Obamacare which you can find online Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there This is by Andre Blockham, updated December 31, 2021 In prior presentations, we've been talking about insurance in general Moving then to the medical insurance which is more complex in some ways because of the laws and regulations around the medical field and insurance in general and the complexity of the medical field and we note that when we think about the normal kind of insurance with the liability insurance or the property insurance or life insurance we're often trying to safeguard against some event that may be less likely to happen but if it did happen would be quite costly and therefore we want to insure against it from happening that's a little bit different than the medical insurance which does have that capacity to it with the medical insurance because we still might have some big expensive illness that we're trying to safeguard against but they also kind of expanded so that the insurance is often covering as well the routine type of maintenance kind of stuff that would be in the healthcare process The dental insurance is similar to the medical insurance and less similar to like traditional types of insurance where we're typically trying to safeguard against an event that were less likely to happen but which would be financially devastating on the dental insurance type of things we're often times trying to think about can we pay for insurance to mitigate the actual costs of the routine checkups and maintenance kind of stuff and or possibly safeguarding some of that long-term kind of catastrophic event although the caps on insurance are a little bit different than on other medical areas as we've discussed in prior presentations when we're thinking about normal medical insurance you usually have that out-of-pocket cap you don't have that same kind of thing with the dental insurance the dental insurance often having a cap on how much the dental insurance will pay on a yearly basis often times that cap being relatively low compared to costs that could be gathered from dental problems that would be significant okay can I get dental insurance with Obamacare that's the relevant question get into that why don't you okay does Obamacare cover dental insurance the short answer is yes you actually obtain dental coverage through the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Obamacare is just a slang term for it you can use the federal health insurance marketplace at healthcare.gov so notice this is a similar kind of process that we talked about with the health insurance so you've got different options for the health insurance and the questions would then be well if there's like a subsidy kind of program for the health insurance often times people might think well I can I apply that same kind of process to the medical insurance which may be more likely to be beneficial for example if certain conditions are met possibly including your income being below a certain threshold so you can use the federal health insurance marketplace at healthcare.gov notice that some states might have their own kind of marketplace so it depends on the state you look at the state you could go to healthcare.gov enter your zip code that might direct you to the state areas if you don't have a state area you might then go to the federal side to find compare dental plans available in your area and enroll in one if you choose generally you will actually go to your own states health insurance marketplace site to enroll so in other words you could start at the healthcare.gov which is kind of like the federal site if you put in your zip code I believe it'll then take you to the relevant state site if you have a relevant state site if not then it might be covered through the federal site some of the general health insurance options available to you may include dental care so if you look at the general health insurance this is often a question that comes up you're saying okay I'm buying health insurance does that cover dental what kind of dental does it cover the normal kind of dental stuff or only like if I got into an accident have reconstructive stuff under the medical side of things so if not you can choose to add a stand-alone dental insurance plan and pay a separate premium for it in any event you must enroll in a health plan to obtain access to a stand-alone dental plan dental plan categories so there are two categories of Obamacare dental insurance plan you've got the high you've got the low the highs and the lows that's what life's about man highs and lows it's all gravy baby the high coverage level has higher premiums but lower co-payments and deductibles and this is the relationship that we would expect between the deductibles and the co-pays and the premiums remember that the deductible represents the amount that you would have to pay for certain services certain dental services before the insurance kind of kicks in so you would expect that if you have a lower deductible that would be less you'd have to pay before the insurance kicks in for certain items and therefore the premiums the amount that you would pay monthly would be higher and vice versa if you had a higher deductible that would be better for the insurance company and therefore they might be able to allow you to pay a lower monthly premiums for it so you'll pay more every month but less when you use dental services the low coverage level has lower premiums and higher co-payments and deductibles so notice if you're thinking about like classical insurance kind of thing where you're trying to safeguard against say a higher bill that might happen but is less likely to happen as opposed to having something that's going to be there for the more routine type of stuff you might try to have your own insurance meaning self-insured savings to cover up to a certain level and then that would clear the deductibles and beyond that the insurance possibly helps you to kick in on the coverage that's more of a classical way of thinking about it obviously as you have more insurance needs or more dental needs going forward you'd be thinking more and more how can I get insurance that's going to be covering the more visits that I'm going to be having throughout the year but note remember the dental insurance is a little bit different in that it doesn't have that out-of-pocket maximum that you kind of have with the medical oftentimes and so therefore you want to think about what's going to be how much will the insurance company cover if you're trying to think of it as safeguarding you against a more high-cost dental year that they could happen for whatever reason so you'll pay less every month but more when you use the dental services when you compare dental plans and the marketplace you'll find details about each plan's costs, co-payments, deductibles and services covered dental coverage for children versus adults so we got differences with regards to some of the laws and whatnot with children versus adults which makes sense because you would think that the children as their mouth is growing would have different possibly more necessity for preventative stuff and getting things right at that point so under the Affordable Care Act dental insurance is treated differently for adults and children 18 and under it is an essential health care benefit for children this means if you're getting health coverage for someone 18 or younger dental coverage must be available for your child either as part of a health plan or as a standalone plan in contrast dental coverage isn't considered an essential health benefit for adults and insurers don't have to offer dental care as part of their health plans though it must be available to you buying it is optional so we have the Affordable Care Act the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010 with the intent to improve health outcomes lower costs and ensure that a larger number of Americans get medical insurance the laws constitutionality has been challenged in courts and congress with conservatives and labor unions among groups seeking its repeal so we've discussed it's an interesting debate with the Affordable Care Act and the legality of it and basically the constitutionality of it and the whole concept of how it could basically provide more care possibly but how it would also do that to lower costs and the debate is can we lower costs can we extend the care coverage and also lower the cost can we extend the coverage without lowering the quality of the medical services as years go forward so we still have a competitive and advancing medical service in terms of just the science around medicine so these are all interesting questions that we've been addressing lately so the law was upheld by the US Supreme Court in June 2021 some of the rules have changed however the annual enrollment period has shrunk and efforts to promote and support the program have tapered off if you want to use healthcare.gov to obtain coverage be sure to find out the dates of the next enrollment period so there's windows that you need to use for the enrollment period so sign up at the proper time signing up for dental insurance if you want dental insurance the health insurance marketplace gives you a way to easily check for options and compare prices if you sign up for a standalone dental plan remember that you'll be billed separately for the coverage how does one get dental coverage through the Affordable Care Act Affordable Care is available and shoppers need to visit the dental information page at healthcare.gov so you go to healthcare.gov start searching around there if you so choose most people get coverage through their own state's affiliated program so you might go to the federal site and kind of put your zip code in there to link you to your state program so you can take a look at it from there do I get dental insurance as a standalone plan separate from regular healthcare so this is what's kind of confusing with dental you're thinking okay I got medical but then dental is that kind of separate or is it linked in and it gets a little bit confusing because what kind of stuff is going to be part of medical that's related to the mouth versus what would be covered under the dental items so maybe some of the general health insurance options available may include dental care if not you can choose to add on a standalone dental insurance plan and pay a separate premium for it either way you must enroll in a health plan to obtain access to a standalone dental plan for which you'll be billed separately what are the two tiers of Obama dental care they tried to make this one easy with a high and a low tier so notice one of the things that we end up seeing when you try to make something kind of a top down type of thing meaning you kind of regulated more and more from like the federal government or the state government the federal even more so is they're going to try to limit the options and the goal of limiting the options typically will be said that it's going to make things easy it'll make life easy but again that's one of the trade-offs that we have to kind of consider when we're thinking about whether we want a top down system or whether we want you know more open up the market-based kind of system is it better to have less of the choices or would it be better to have more choices even though that can be kind of confusing but then you have more people that can possibly have specialty kind of areas so again interesting debate to look at what you think would be the best way to go the high option has higher premiums but lower co-payments and deductibles meaning you pay more every month but less when you use dental services and as you might guess low coverage has lower premiums but higher co-payments and deductibles you'll pay less every month but more when you use dental services what's the bottom line for crying out loud despite numerous efforts to kill it off the ACA the Affordable Care Act service survives and dental care is included so go to the healthcare.gov dental page to find and compare dental plans available in your area and enroll in one if you choose you can check that out do some more research at healthcare.gov


Welcome. I'm really, really excited to be kicking off our second tic-tac show and tell event here. As we said, we've just been waiting for other people to join, but we don't want to be too tardy. This is supposed to be a really quick snappy punchy event.  It's fantastic. We're actually up to nearly 90 participants already, which is amazing given we are over a year into just doing Zoom events. I'm astonished no one else is bored. But yeah, welcome all. It's great to see you. So I am Rebecca Rumble. I'm head of research at My Society and we've been running tic-tac now for nearly seven years. Obviously, this used to be a annual conference event with some little research events in between, but we've been online for the last year, as has everyone else. So yeah, welcome. Thank you obviously to all of our speakers for joining us and putting together some incredibly interesting sessions for us. And thank you all for participating. It's really, as I said, it's really, really great to see so many people are still willing to join a Zoom call at this point. So really, really pleased to see you all. And so pleased as well that we've got such an international audience testament to the fact that some of the fantastic presentations that we've got here are so relevant across borders. So just a quick housekeeping reminder. We are recording this event for those other people that aren't able to join us live. It's nighttime in various corners of the world. So I'm sure some people would like to access this when they're actually awake. Please ask questions in the chat. It's there for interaction because of the nature of this event. We're not going to be asking speakers just to answer questions live. What we're going to be doing is we will collect all of those questions and we will ask the speakers to provide a substantial answer afterwards and we will email that around to everyone so that they have access to that. It enables us to keep the kind of pace going. And it means that speakers can actually put a little bit of thought and maybe a little bit extra into their answers to you rather than kind of being on the back foot, trying to be very quick about it, but also trying to give you a good answer. Still absolutely please put all your questions in the chat. We will collect them all. We will send them all out to the relevant speakers and you will get an answer very, very soon. Please tweet as well. Obviously tweeting is still a thing. We're using hashtag tech tech. Details again will be posted periodically in the chat for you to see, but it'd be great to know what you think. And yeah, it's up to you if you want to have your camera on or not. Obviously I love to see all your faces, but it's very, very exhausting as well. I know having your camera on and being on all the time, so if you want to turn it off feel free to do so. We have some collaborative notes as well. The link again will be in the chat if you would like to contribute to the note taking on the presentations that are going on here. Please jump in there and do so. So I think I was supposed to be going through these slides. As I said, tech tech is one of our flagship events. It's mostly focused around impact research and hopefully I'm keeping my fingers crossed really tightly. We will be able to meet in person again next year and have kind of wonderful interaction and conversations that we would normally have in person. As I've said, I think I've been through all of those. And one last thing before I pass on to all of you speakers, next Wednesday we are going to be launching a report about reforming freedom of information in the UK. We've done a lot of work on how freedom of information operates over the last few years. Many of you will know that my society run the What Do They Know and Albert Halley websites which assist people in making freedom of information requests. And we've got some what we think are really, really exciting ideas for how freedom of information can be reformed and can be better, especially in terms of being able to use it and benefiting the public in terms of holding the government to account. So please do join us for that event next week if that is of interest to you. So moving swiftly on, each speaker will have seven minutes to make the presentation. We are going to be very brutal with the cutoff. There is going to be a time effort for all of our speakers. And once that seven minutes is up, we will be moving swiftly on. They will be muted if they go over seven minutes just so we can keep to time. So I have utter faith that all our speakers are well drilled and we'll be able to do that. Without further ado, I am going to hand over to our first speaker. It's Chloe Poad from Sivok Krissi. Chloe, excellent. Very, very quick. Okay. So Chloe, over to you. Hi everybody. So I'll try to be sharp for seven minutes. So my name is Chloe. I'm the founder of Sivok Krissi, a citizen engagement platform. We work with over 50 government organizations in Europe, helping them gather their community around goal projects and policies to collect their feedback and insights. Our mission is to foster inclusion, transparency and collaboration between government and their citizens. So we all remember 13 months ago when the whole world came into lockdown. This was such a shock. And it was time also for hard questioning. I think about what this crisis was pointing out on our deficiencies in our society. And of course, our team at Sivok Krissi was no exception. We felt that we could play an important role to facilitate a dialogue and the emergence of idea about the changes people wanted to see in the world after COVID. The problem is like the many cities we work with were so overwhelmed with like restriction and all this emergency they had to face on, they couldn't tackle this momentum. So we had to find another way. We have 20,000 French people subscribed on our platform on Sivok Krissi. So we decided in a few weeks to launch a complete independent consultation asking one simple question. What do we want for the world after COVID? We called this movement Construisons Demants. So let's build tomorrow together. And we launched online questionnaire, open discussion webinar to collect this idea. We partner with several organizations specialized in the transition. After a few days rolling on this project, one of my very good friends, Marc-Hon-Tuan, who is also the CEO of a Sivik tech platform named Toguna, he called me saying that they were doing exactly the same thing. And actually that many several initiatives similar to us was appearing everywhere in France. So the opportunity to gather those initiatives together and amplify the voice of citizens was too good to be missed. So Marc-Hon-Tuan has already drafted a few days before our website to list those initiatives and I joined him on those spots. And this is how, après maintenant, was born. The requirement for the initiative to join us was very simple and clear. Provide all the inputs from the citizen in open data and open source and explain your methodology of collect and analysis. So in total, we were 14 initiatives joining forces. We received more than 300,000 contributions and 3 million citizens took part of it. It was like very different initiatives, somewhere like professional like us, like Sivik tech platform, somewhere like parliamentarian who launched a questionnaire and question on Facebook, somewhere student and association. Some tried to find a polling. It was really diverse and amazing. The most astonishing part of this experiment was in every platform we found the same consensus around the society people wanted to live in. So there were six key issues that French citizens were expressing. Consideration of ecological and environmental challenge, transformation and consumption and project methods, changing our economic model to something more sustainable and resilient, increase effort in education system, more support in health system and strengthening our democratic functioning. Because in Sivik tech platform, every time the reproach we have was like you are not representative, we kind of like wanted to mirror what we found on our platform with a more scientific approach to show that actually our finding was representative of what French people want. So we partner with a polling institute named Opinionway and we took the 20 most voted contribution on all of our platforms and we ask again through Opinionway the same question. The results were the same, astonishing. People were expressing exactly the same idea of what they wanted for the world after COVID. Our movement got the attention of the French president Macron's cabinet and he mandated after a few weeks an official analysis of the contribution that we were able to present in Paris in July 2020. So I'm not sure it was actually taking into account for the recovery plan but it was still a big milestone like he audited all the platform. We had a very interesting exchange. We were able to present it to several of those institutions in France. So I wanted to finish, I have two minutes left, it's perfect like with explaining a little bit my takeaways on these experiments. I think there are three key things I observed. First, the cooperation between the 14 initiative made it disruptive but also impactful. What we started as like complete independent and all in our corner, the fact that we joined forces made it more visible and actually finished in the end of the president. The second one is for me looking at as a common future was the number one condition for a constructive and meaningful debate. There was no moderation involved and like the consensus that emerged and like the constructive idea was really good. So I think the real question behind every consultation whether it's a local one or a national one should always be what do we want as a community? What do we want in our society? The third takeaway I took care of from last year experiment was the reality. Our reality mirrored in the media and social media doesn't translate what people think and what people want. Those those platforms and I think unfortunately a lot of the I'm happy to discuss this afterwards but a lot of the media are highlighting only the senses and conflict and the fueling outrage and confusion. But again when you set up the condition of actually thinking of a future together there is space for debate there is space for constructive idea and there is very few people that use their work in the media or in social media to actually like amplify it but yeah I think it's a shame but it was still like a very beautiful milestone in my career in civic tech. Thirteen say good I'm very good so I hope I have two questions afterwards I heard we can respond by email and everything so I hope I'll get some good feedback from you guys. Thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you so much Chloe that was really really impressive not only the initiative but the fact you managed to do it within the seven minutes in the second language as well which is not as easy I don't think. Also I mean that last point you made I think we're all guilty sometimes of sort of disappearing into social media sometimes and forgetting that actually the world is very different than just you know the kind of relentless echo chamber you're often exposed to so really really important points and yes obviously everyone questions for Chloe in the chat we will get them over to her as soon as we have finished today. Right so thank you so much Chloe swiftly on we've now got Abigail Selmon from Ideas 42 and Adrienne Kins from OpenUp with their presentation understanding the small hurdles the block community engagement with behavioral design so the floor is yours. Wonderful thank you so much Rebecca and thanks we're really excited to share with you today how we use behavioral design to increase community engagement in South Africa. My name is Abigail Selmon and I'm a senior associate at Ideas 42. Thanks Abigail. Hi I'm Adrienne Kins from a civic organization OpenUp based in South Africa. Next slide. Yeah it's just some background and how it all started in South Africa community engagement in local policy making is crucial for effective governance as you can see in South Africa 65.5 percent of individuals had never spoken to their local counselor 21.5 percent of individuals had never attended a community meeting but would have had if they had the chance to. Next slide. OpenUp developed a digital tool for community members with information on how to engage in local policy making as OpenUp in understanding what to do in terms of civic tech. We realized the following access to information alone was not sufficient to drive engagement between a municipality and its community. We needed to develop a civic tool that went from informing to empowering and allowing a citizen to actively engage government in this instance and municipality. We needed to establish a relationship and ensure buying from the local municipality. We didn't anticipate resistance but we nestled the project around COVID-19 its impact and the likely need for technology to ensure public participation given the limitations as we all know around social distancing. Next slide. OpenUp is focused around user centered development. So before we even embark on software development we want to know some of the following things. We want to know more about the environment. We wanted to know more about the environment about community participation in terms of the various community dynamics and various assumptions like why citizens were not participating and what prevented citizens from participating. We want to know more about the environment of the municipality and the processes and what barriers municipalities were facing. Abigail will expand more on how we reach some conclusions when some of the above through the collaboration between OpenUp and ideas 42. Thanks Adrian. So as Adrian mentioned we worked with OpenUp to use our innovative behavioral design methodology to diagnose the barriers that were preventing individuals participating and design solutions to help increase participation. So the behavioral design methodology uses insights from psychology economics and human centered design to understand why people do what they do and then design very tailored solutions to change behavior. So through our formative work with OpenUp we uncovered eight barriers to participation and we'll just be sharing two of them with you today that we hope are relevant for your work as well. So the first behavioral barrier that may prevent individuals from participating is that community members often do not consider themselves as a type of person who formally participates. It's not part of who they are. It's not how they perceive themselves. It's not part of their identity and there are many reasons for this but one reason is that even though most of Africans speak another language at home, most of the communications from government and the formal participation channels are predominantly in English. And so what this does is it sends an implicit social signal about who should be participating and those people who aren't English speakers at home might not feel that it's within their identity to participate. And therefore they might not form the intention to ever participate. Four people that do form an intention to participate, they still might not follow through on that intention and actually participate in the long run. And one reason for this is because they face many small houses of participation. So small hassle factors like pushing multiple buttons, navigating to many platforms for finding the contact information or location of a public meeting can have a disproportionate effect on outcomes and really deter people from participating. I mean I'm sure we can all think of a small thing that got in our way of doing something. So we use these insights to develop low cost light touch solutions for OpenUp's platform. First to foster a sense of identity, we simply recommended that OpenUp create the platform in many languages. And second we recommended removing as many hassles as possible and in this case we even recommended that they create a submission platform directly on the tool where individuals could contact their local officials removing all the hassles from the communication The last few things I want to touch on are lessons that OpenUp and Adrian and his team shared with us that they took out of employing the behavioral design process and working with us. So firstly we received feedback from Adrian and his team that the municipalities themselves appreciated the behaviorally designed features. Being able to explain the behavioral mechanisms behind their design decisions really helped open up build buy-in from the municipalities. And secondly Adrian and his team shared with us that they appreciated that some of these behavioral design principles can be applied much more generally. So the insight to remove hassles is something that you can take to any development of any civic technology and the OpenUp team has shared with us that they are consistently now thinking about how they can make their technology as hassle free as possible. And to wrap up we wanted to share these three things we hope you'll take away from our presentation today which is firstly that information alone is often not sufficient for a civic technology to inspire action. But drawing on a deep understanding of human behavior can be useful to make civic technology more impactful and some of these principles while they are very tailored to the context and to the insights we learned can be applied much more widely and are also useful for building stakeholder buy-in. So thank you so much we are in time and I'll just lastly in the last few seconds share our contact information so please feel free to reach out to either of us after this event if you have more questions or want to learn more about the barriers or how you might apply them in your content. Thank you so much Abigail and Adrian that was that was really fascinating and I'm sure everyone on this call will have had some experience of terrible digital design that they've been massively frustrated with in the past. Normally the key perpetrators are normally governments and local authorities I think aren't they so all this kind of work all the research all the design work all behavioral work that goes into making it more seamless is so so important so we will be really excited once it's been running a while to look at that impact and monitoring research that you do on it. So yeah please again share with the network as when that happens but yeah thank you very much for that. Moving swiftly on we've got Luke Jordan up next from Grassroots and MIT GOVLAB with the presentation and I love the name of this presentation Don't Build It a practical guide for those building civic tech so over to you Luke. Thanks Rebecca hi everyone so this is I'm going to present today a guide that we just published a week ago as Rebecca said called Don't Build It and I'll talk about why and why actually we talk about things that you can do when building that represents the experience gained over five six years building a platform in South Africa called Grassroots so Grassroots was a platform that I built with a team over five six years that reached over two and a half million users and had over 40,000 activities called through it it was ran over USSD and four community organizers over WhatsApp it was used in national presidential debates and major COVID campaigns last year including having over 100,000 users use it in a few days and it's something that was built with our users from community organizers to major national campaigns. My personal background is combines policy and technology so both on the code and on working with the field team and on policy questions so the guide tries to combine those. So the guide's headlines very quickly are first any piece of technology that you can avoid building you should probably not build if you have to build it make sure that you hire a CTO ship very early and mature as long as you can and no matter what happens you're on a crew that's built over time but lean and fast and get close to and build with your users as soon as possible. Now there's all quite high level and heard often so what the guide does is tries to go into detail on each of them over its length. So the first point on why not build it the point that we make in the guide and that I learned the hard way through multiple projects that we should not have built a grassroots is that technology provides no friction to what you need to build in software anything can be built which means that unlike buildings say a clinic or a school where it's very difficult to do it and if it goes wrong you're going to have an embarrassing building in the middle of nowhere that nobody uses with technology it's easy to build it anybody can write some code these days cloud platforms etc so you need to lean against that tendency and so what we recommend again what we learned and grassroots over the years was always ask a few quick questions which is you know first are people already trying to do what the technology is supposed to help them do if they are doing it how are you sure you know why it doesn't work there's often a lot of assumptions about why it doesn't work and we think we know why technology would help but often it won't help and it won't make a difference. Second if they're not trying to do it why would technology make a difference to that and why would someone who doesn't want to do something at the moment such as participate in a denibration perhaps because they don't trust that government will do anything with that deliberation want to do it just because they have a nice and easy technology to do it so in general first thing is don't build it second thing is if you do have to build it there are a few a few tips and ideas that we've learned I've learned from the practicality but so first outsourcing in terms of outsourcing to developers great as a tactic for bringing on individual contributors but a terrible strategy and we describe the guy why procuring whole development teams tends to end very badly secondly adding full-time talent do that cautiously and at cost levels where you can keep them in the team and invest in growth over time and a few others through the guide but the one that I wanted to speak about a lot today is in the time and apologies that I'm going very quickly through the material but the tech and field connections and this is something that we hear quite often as an injunction to sort of make sure that the technology is close to users I'd actually do that when we sketch out where we say is an artificial way which is you have a field team you have a developer team you have a daily or weekly stand-up and in that stand-up field team and developer team read bullet points at each other and expect each other to understand and then every now and then go in a team building and pretend to have fun and then when one does why sort of the feedback loops aren't working an organic way to do that is to have individual level connections between field team members and developers so for example developers go individual developers go on field trips all the time with field team members field team members bringing direct feedback developers asking field team members directly for help judging the future trade-off and so on so that was something that at grassroots we tried to do over time and what it led to was that on average we were releasing new features or tweaks into the application and I could mention since this was running over ussd we were targeting very squarely people who had no smartphone or had no data the kind of ussd-based platforms that typically are very difficult to get people to use and of course at the beginning we had very low user numbers or usage numbers and over time it was ticked up until we were having 80% plus organic growth and it was largely through implementing these methods of having the developer team and the field team very deeply connected and exchanging ideas at an individual level rather than a collective level now one of the things that we found absolutely necessary is having a CTO now by that we mean somebody who's an engineering team leader more than a sort of large company CTO it's still a little bit astonishing that whereas a public health NGO that had no medical expertise or an education NGO that had no pedagogical expertise will be considered if we would look at that strangely at the same time there's lots of times where we have technology or organizations that sort of build technology but have no technological expertise on the senior management so there needs to be a CTO or somebody at senior management level who knows and understands technology and here's hiring some of the questions that could be asked of that person the guide includes similar hiring guides hiring questions and examples for junior developers UX UI and others a lot of which were used over over the years as we were hiring and building a team so that's a very rapid walkthrough also in the guide there are some examples of of good and not so good team structures hiring guides for the rest of the team some rules of thumb on timelines and budgets some guidance on technology choices languages and the like and of course more reasons and rationales for not to build it so the links on the screen can also contact me in any of those details and hopefully approves useful and we're very glad to hear from everybody so that's me done amazing thank you so much Luke and I'm sure that so many people are going to be digging into this guys immediately there's so much good stuff there and yeah I look forward to going through it myself and I think that an awful lot of people I know an awful lot of my colleagues will completely agree that there's maybe been a little bit too much in the past of people running off to build something and then having to backward engineer a reason why almost I think yeah there's lots and lots of examples that out there so great great stuff really useful and hopefully people on this call will be able to use some of your advice for the future so thank you very much next up we've got number four speaker number four we're whipping through these well done to everyone for keeping time so far so now we have Samantha McDonald of the University of California with a presentation as you can see it takes two when citizens and congress members deliberate online Samantha take it away great thank you so much um sorry my own time or just in case I can't see that one but thank you everybody my name is Sam McDonald I am a PhD kid well I just passed my dissertation on Monday so I guess I'm almost not a kid anymore I want to talk a little bit about the research that I did as part of my dissertation testing online deliberative session with US Congress so as a high level overview members of congress represent lots of people with an average being over 700,000 and for the past five years now I've been studying the communication structures within congress and trying to understand how they work and to sum it up in a very brief note a lot of the current communication structures really do not provide meaningful methods for dialogue and understanding for members of congress here in the federal government of the US to come and engage with their constituents in a meaningful way for constituents to also have impact so I thought methods for deliberate engagement would be a great way to explore new opportunities to have this engagement especially online so I did an experiment as part of my dissertation to do so and essentially what I looked at was how to design a platform for deliberation between members of congress and their and their constituency that allowed the member to come in and say that they want to talk about a topic with them and their staff supporting and having these discussions online and I ran this experiment as an online week long asynchronous single topic forum for deliberation that's a lot to understand so let me break it apart a little bit first it was online I worked with the company pop fox which is a small civic tech company here in the US to run these deliberations on the online platform and also something that could be used for longevity once I graduated that these things could still be tested and used long term by members of congress it was a week long to support slower moving dialogue instead of having a two-hour town hall or just a uni-directional dialogue through emails or phone calls we actually had this experiment run for a week and it was asynchronous and that people could log on and log off whenever they like to have these discussions there was no set time where they had to engage to sort of open up opportunities for people who could not come during certain times and also allow for that flexibility it was a single topic and that the member congress specifically chose a topic we asked them to choose the topic that would have impact on their decision making and in this case the member which I keep anonymous chose homelessness in america and that specific county to talk about those issues in which we created a single topic uh fact sheet for everyone so they could be informed and engaged and this was reviewed by different congressional experts and used all just government information and lastly it was a form for deliberation so taking some of the theories and these big lover big level academic stuff of deliberate democracy we recruited a representative sample of constituents that represented the district of demographics and we also brought in this sort of quasi-anonymous stance where we knew that these people were being represented by the member of congress but the constituents could actually use usernames to keep themselves anonymous among their peers to see if it would provoke different kinds of more open discussions online so we recruited 300 constituents from that district using random representative sampling half attended the forum and half were in a control group and we had out of 150 people we did invite 51 people that attended in some capacity and it was fairly represented district of the people who actually did engage in a 10 it was slightly over represented by males and more educated people within the district but we had some really good and uh diversity within the group of people for sake of time and also for the anonymity of the site it kind of looked like this we had a post by the member of congress and then there was a formatting structure that was allowed on pop box that allowed people to comment on the post and then for the lawmaker to respond in their own capacity so general findings what did we find from this well constituents really did engage substantively offering lots of different solutions for what they think should happen with homelessness wanting to engage a member and asking and bringing up their own personal experiences uh often referencing something that's called a lot in the US NIMBY or not in my backyard to talk about the tensions around homelessness in America the members conference actually were very interesting because they reflected more of these theories called presentation itself where the member of congress really focused on responding constituents to show that they're qualified for their job that they could identify with constituents and really have empathy which is really interesting sort of the capacity and how the member was responding to constituents and overall actually some constituents were disappointed by the overall engagement with the member asking that the member engage more and it felt like they were kind of playing it safe which kind of was really interesting looking at the results of what we asked people in a survey and in a survey that we did with constituents there wasn't uh significant changes to people's feelings of internal external political efficacy essentially the way to feel like if citizens are empowered and having engagement and impact and discussion um but also feelings of the the institution is responsive to them that being said constituents did overall feel a significantly higher impact with the members decision making from the conference uh from the conversation compared to previous engagements that they've had with the member in the past and how they come to connect with the member so that was really enlightening um and most constituents actually really wanted forums like this a quarter which actually lasted longer than a week and wish that these were slower moving dialogues um so there is some sort of appetite at least here in the US within this particular constituency to have these longer slower online dialogues with their representatives we also did uh interviews with staffers that were part of the member congress office after this was done and most surprisingly to us which I think is the whole it's safe to this thing here is that um because the staffers were actually the ones leading most of the conversation and that the member was not really involved in the actual engagement this is actually really interesting from a from a standpoint of congress because this is an accepted norm where staffers are a huge part of the um the whole engagement process especially online and it really talks to some of these dynamics that are going on of empowering staff in this part of the situation but overall the staffers actually found again that the engagement from constituents was really substantive especially what they see on other platforms and like that and most important to the staffers um was that there was opportunities for collaboration and for people who don't know understand who people who don't understand how congress works inside each member of congress's office they have staffers um that focus on communication and staffers are working on policy and actually this opportunity of asynchronousity allow them to collaborate in a way that they thought was really helpful and it's really unprecedented in some ways when you see these collaborations which in my opinion talking to the staffers may actually have more impact on the members of congress decision-making than actually going to the member themselves um so it really does bring up these interesting questions the dynamics when it comes to the values of people behind the scenes and not just the representative so what does this all mean essentially I believe there's a lot of potential here still lots of testing that I have to do and for people to test out with members and asynchronousity could play an important role um there are institutional barriers to exist this was a really hard project to do lots of stuff to do and lastly staffer vital and kind of rethinking the role if we're looking at policymakers and thinking about the people behind the scenes as important part of these discussions there's a lot of work going on the environmental justice committee is working on things like this but yeah so that's basically it for me amazing thank you so much Samantha that was a lot of been a lot of information in seven minutes um so yeah great great to great to hear that um and really I think fascinating point there about staff working for for representatives I don't think that gets enough attention a lot of the time people kind of see their representatives and they forget that those people do need staff around them to help them do their jobs and it's it's not being given much attention I don't think in terms of engagement and the research we're doing around that so really really fascinating that you've kind of highlighted that and hopefully that will that will enable more people to kind of shine a light on that and see how we can make that better in terms of participation and engagement between representatives and citizens so thank you very much really really interesting um we're on to speaker number five uh we now have Craig Morby from future future gov and scott betterfield from blackpool council again junior junior duo uh with presentation leave no one behind overcoming hurdles to online citizen assemblies so take it away thanks uh everyone for having us here so I'm scott and blackpool councils policy and strategy manager and we're going to talk about blackpool's climate assembly um so by way of a background uh councils in england are very big on climate emergencies at moment there's over 300 in the country it's a kind of uh generated from the grassroots a kind of challenge to government policy on the agenda in blackpool we want to go net zero in terms of carbon emissions by 2030 that's both the council as an organization and companies we control and the town as a whole there was a real desire when we declared the emergency to put residents businesses and young people particularly the heart of the process and one of the major factors that we have uh to deal with in blackpool is the fact that we are britain's most deprived town um my colleagues from visit blackpool would emphasize that we're also britain's most popular seaside resort but nevertheless there is deprivation in the town and we knew we had to go the extra mile to make sure that we had a representative process to involving communities in ways which worked for them in terms of the format of citizens assembly I'm sure you're aware is a deliberative approach to decision making it allows participants access to information and time and space to talk about that consider it and come to conclusions before making recommendations we commissioned fuchs guff uh to design and deliver our assembly kreg will talk about a case study as a result of that we brought 40 people in uh residents we selected them for a random sample and then we made sure we oversampled in certain areas where we knew we would have issues in terms of deprived communities and then we used a process called sortition to make sure that those people represented a mini version of the town of blackpool so representative in terms of age sex their home location disabilities and also views on climate change we made sure that we included a question do your views on climate change tend to differ to people nearby you so that that way we also got the skeptics and we also got hopefully some of the more engaged people on this issue we ran sessions over four sessions of two and a half hours each which worked very well it was really a response to covid that the sessions moved online but the process of using zoom to get through the sessions and to break out rooms was really kind of intuitive and our citizens really enjoyed that we feel one of the main issues in that was making sure people were ready to go with the technology and so we made sure that we got those groups that have already mentioned and anticipated the barriers to need so we provided ict equipment for those that weren't familiar and craig particularly spent a lot of time and effort with people one to one sessions on how to use the zoom call technology and the tablets that we provided to certain people we also provided webcams to to a couple of other people who had online access we were ready to provide internet access but actually we seem to recruit people who already had access to the internet through some routes and we also had potential for paid child care translation and signage sign language support and a point of contact which was craig to access before each of the sessions and so all in all we wanted to reflect on the needs of the people and deal with those appropriately yeah hi everyone my name is craig from future gov community engagement and participation manager so um when eric a 78 year old man who was living in shouted housing received a letter asking him if he wanted to take part in the climate assembly said yeah because he'd heard a lot of distressing news on the tv but didn't quite know what to do about it other than sorting his recycling out into the right boxes and when he recor received a call saying that he'd been selected he was really happy actually and he said i didn't think at my age i'd forget to learn something new again but you're never too too old to learn but he said one of the things which was concerning him was about the fact that it was on zoom and that he wasn't um able to use it at that point so i ran him up along with everyone else um in the assembly and um just had a chat with him we organized a one-to-one zoom session and then i talked him through how to use um how to download zoom and then once he was on it how to use the microphone and the video and the chat function and gave him a number as well that he could give me a ring if he ever had any issues and he said um when i spoke to him after the assembly is that it must have worked because he got into every single one completely fine and i think in the first sessions he really enjoyed like the informal atmosphere when he first got on and people were like sharing like song lyrics and stuff of um of um of things which remind him of climate change although he said at least your keys this world has gone far was a bit depressing but um but then when um went into the presentations they were obviously all virtual and stuff and he found them really good and informative um and was able to use the chat function to ask questions as well and he said he started really looking forward to to Tuesday evenings and really and particularly enjoyed being able to talk through what he'd heard um with very good groups with four other participants and he said what what he felt worked there was where the facilitators really got to know the people in the groups and set some good working agreements about how people would work together and um as well as guiding principles for making decisions um but AerosGoo was really passionate about um using Blackpool's natural resources to generate and buy clean energy because it's on the sea um and they had some really good conversations and generated solutions and captured those in that information by using the google slides and um in the final session we lied to the fact that he was able to meet move between different groups because we set up a world cafe style event where they could go into different breakout rooms and he was able to have his voice heard on all of the issues and he was really pleased that um all of the um things that he put forward ended up in the in the report but um perhaps um one of the best things about was actually an unintended consequence which he said to me I haven't actually been able to see my grandkids space for every year now but now because I can use zoom I'll be able to see them on that which I thought was lovely it was one of those benefits that we all kind of felt uh was it was made it all worthwhile regardless of the deliberation actually helping somebody in that way um so we actually had a hundred percent attendance the 37 people who started finished we did have actually one disruptive participant but because we had a behind the scenes WhatsApp group we were able to deal with that quite quickly and resolve what could have been an issue that took over the assembly but we had a hundred percent of the participants saying the technology was at least somewhat easy to use uh and that was a council we've got an evidence base we're going to bring that together with a road map to net zero from the carbon trust make sure that we're including people's views at every stage and now we're moving on to identify funding for meaningful activity the assembly members want to keep involved in future and so we're looking at ways of doing that too. When's the thought thank you so much um Craig and Scott for that um it's really really lovely to hear those kind of individual user stories because I think a lot of us because we work slightly away from from the actual users we we don't get those um and and we forget sometimes that it's so so very impactful and so you know has so many other wider kind of implications and consequences for people's lives rather than just taking part uh in in a citizens assembly um and I think you know it seems that citizens assemblies are only going to kind of get more popular in terms of engaging uh with the public and any lessons that we can learn and pass on to make sure that future ends are more effective um are really important so thank you thank you very much for that again um I think there are plenty of questions uh being thrown up in the chat so we will send those around to you uh finally um speaking number six we have Mike Saunders from Commonplace uh with his presentation as you can see here engaging for the future what do the public want from engagement and how can digital deliver Mike your headlining off you go thank you very much hi everybody um so just as a bit of a context Commonplace is a digital platform um and we've engaged over three and a half million people in over a thousand online conversations um really focusing on the places that people live in work in play in and care about um we facilitate very open trusted conversations and through which we get high response rates uh we collect lots of robust data and produce insights from reporting for our customers and our customers are local authorities typically um but also planning applicants mainly property developers so we work across both the the public and the private sectors um we've always been fascinated about what people want from civic engagement around places and even more so in the last year when we've seen such a huge in fact an order of magnitude increase in online um engagement and lots of research showing that people feel more connected than ever to the neighborhood so when the government published their planning for the future white paper we took it as an opportunity to run our own research um a representative sample of a thousand people two focus groups and seven years of commonplace data and I just want to take you through some of the findings so firstly there's a huge appetite for long-term public involvement in planning 76 percent of people thought the local uh local people should have a greater say in what goes on in their neighborhoods and 71 percent said that they wanted regular updates on planning issues but despite this huge appetite only 27 percent of people have ever taken part in any kind of planning engagements and of those twice as many have signed a position a petition to prevent something happening has as have intended any kind of um constructive engagement or meeting so why aren't these people engaging and how can technology help so the first big barrier we found was about lack of accessibility and awareness given the demand that I just talked about um almost half 48 percent of people said they'd never even been aware of a local uh consultation 70 percent have never participated but if you contrast that with commonplace where as I said three and a half million people have engaged digitally contributing over two million times in a thousand projects and that's just commonplace alone so digital has a huge opportunity to open up these kind of conversations and meet this demand the second barrier is about motivation and attitude um so as I mentioned current engagements not only low but it's often negatively motivated but on commonplace we have not only large numbers but we also have very constructed set of responses 66 percent of people on average are actively supportive or neutral to the plans that being put before them so just to give you an example of how this works lead city council use commonplace on their transport strategy and it helped them to dial up the scale and constructiveness of their engagement they had conversations at a citywide level as well as neighborhood-based changes and it worked over more than two years and resulted in 65 000 responses and it's enabled the council to build a deep understanding of the community need and their expectations for infrastructure investment taking people from the very local outside their house to strategic feedback that's informed future plans in the city and Lee's was one of the councils that took advantage of a free offer that we made at the beginning of the COVID epidemic to local authorities which has now been taken up by I think 65 local authorities around the around the UK the next barrier is about transparency and over half the people in our responses said that planning decisions were taken in secret specifically to avoid public backlash so there's a huge trust gap there but the trend that we see over and over again on commonplace is that digital engagements are great at delivering social proof through transparency when people see other neighbours taking part they're twice as likely to contribute themselves so digital engagement can harness the public's need to see this social proof the to see proof that engagement is trusted and this encourages lots more participation I wanted to mention Blackpool briefly partly because we were very close with Scott who've just heard from Blackpool borough council used commonplace to run a public dialogue about Blackpool's future and they received over three and a half thousand contributions in just under six weeks they had very very positive responses and we got over two thirds of the responses via mobile which is similar across all of our projects so mobile is an absolutely key platform for these kind of conversations and just bringing all of that together I wanted to talk lastly about Catford and Newisham so Catford is a town in southeast London we started a commonplace there about Catford Town Centre which engaged local people in large numbers because they saw their neighbours taking part that as I've just described the council used our dashboard to analyze respondents by demographic and then they used targeted social media to fill in the gaps they collected 15,000 responses online all of which fed into and provided a transparent benchmark for a subsequent master plan that they developed and the Catford team used our tools such as a special tablet designed for face-to-face events so they could collect not only online responses but also collect responses at face-to-face conversations as well and then we conducted engagement conversations around the rest of the borough in transport, in housing, in parks and leisure and community infrastructure and developers are now starting to use commonplace in Newisham benefiting from tapping into this active community so we're not only doing individual projects but we're also giving the community the opportunity to join up all of those conversations into something that's holistic and meaningful so now two and a half or actually three years on Newisham council are using commonplace to launch their local plan which is a very strategic overview of the future of Lewisham so our conclusions about this are that continuous long-term engagement is what people want and produces both greater volume of and more constructive engagement as I mentioned in Catford we notify people we join up conversations we get five times more people participating if they've already participated and digital tools have the opportunity to really tap into this demand and appetite for local engagement and create a different kind of conversation one that's constructive and one that takes people on a long-term journey so people are more interested never in their communities partly due to the results of the pandemic there's a huge appetite and there's therefore a huge opportunity for digital tools to really deliver the demand that we're seeing and you can download the full reports at our website if you're interested thanks very much thank you so much Mike really really interesting and yeah amen to the ongoing conversation not just a one-off survey point yeah the the conversations around local authority areas and how things are growing and being more strategic I think it's more important than ever so yeah really interesting stuff there and again lots of questions we will pass them on to you so yeah thank you very much Mike thank you very much to all of us because I can't believe that's nearly an hour there that's just sped by so quickly so yeah thank you to everyone we will send recordings of this with subtitles around later in the week so if it went a little bit fast for you or if you want to revisit anything we'll be sending that round so you can do that as I said we'll be sending answers to the questions around as well our next show and tell for tic-tac another session like this is on the 25th of May so we would love to see you all again then same format same great lineup of different speakers um and yeah that's pretty much it I'm just going to remind you all again of that launch of our freedom of information report next Wednesday April the 28th at 4 p.m. British time we're really excited about that we've got some guest speakers on there as well so yeah hopefully we will see you see some of you there otherwise thank you all so much for joining us we really we love doing these events and we're really pleased that people are still interested in joining a zoom event again as I said after a year of not being able to go to a real one so brilliant thanks very much it's we've finished with two minutes to spare hopefully you've got time to make a cup of tea before your next call thanks for everyone see you next time


cloud computing is becoming increasingly important in the education sector due to its ability to provide remote access to educational resources and services. To ensure the quality of these resources and services, international standardization efforts are needed to establish a common framework for cloud computing. The Joint Technical Committee of ISO slash IEC has already begun developing standards that define terminology and typical architecture of cloud computing. This effort will help to ensure that cloud computing can be used safely and securely in the education sector. This article was authored by Eugene Osenko.