Imagine a world where every citizen automatically receives the government grants they’re entitled to, stays informed about public consultations, and can easily contribute feedback—feedback that they trust will genuinely shape policy decisions. Services like these could strengthen and transform democracies worldwide.

But, should this be the reality we ought to seek? What are the opportunities and challenges? And how close are we to achieving this?

At this TICTeC gathering, we heard from two insightful speakers:

• Richard Gevers, Head of Service Design and Delivery at the Digital Services Unit of The Presidency South Africa.
• Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta, Specialist in the Democratic Innovations programme at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.

Sign up for our newsletter to be informed about future events, and find out more about TICTeC at tictec.mysociety.org. Appreciate mySociety’s work? Please do donate!

Transcript:

[00:04] Louise Crow: Welcome everyone. I’m Louise Crow. I’m Chief Executive of mySociety. Thank you so much for joining us today for this TICTeC community gathering: ‘From digital public infrastructure to democratic public infrastructure’.

[00:20] Just as a brief reminder, TICTeC stands for The Impacts of Civic Technology. TICTeC started life as a conference, but since 2020 we’ve been running year round activities to try and connect people building using and researching technology to strengthen democracy and civic power, with the aim of helping us learn from each other and boost our collective impact.

[00:44] So ahead of the global DPI summit next week, we thought this was a good time to talk about civic tech’s relationship to digital public infrastructure. What are we talking about when we say digital public infrastructure? (more…)