TICTeC 2024: Civic tech and journalism: impact through collaboration

Christoph Raetzsch (Aarhus University) at mySociety's The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC) on 13 June 2024 in London and online.

This session highlights the contributions of civic tech projects within data journalism projects and digital civic infrastructures, drawing on examples from Europe and Japan. Its main focus are impact pathways between civic tech activism, journalism and infrastructures for civic participation.

Impact beyond a project’s runtime depends on accommodating different field logics and embedding stakeholder interests from the start, to ensure uptake after a project is finished.

Through examples of citizen-sensed data and journalistic storytelling as well as audience engagement, the presentation underlines the need for collaborations between civic tech activists and journalists.

One core example of such a collaboration is a project from Berlin, where citizen-sensed data was used both in policy and in journalistic reporting to effect changes in the division of public road space to ensure safety of cyclists.

Further examples include data interfaces and journalistic visualisations, which make climate change scenarios and their local ramifications understandable on a granular and everyday level.

Such collaborations between journalists and civic tech activists here go beyond the provision of data or content for reporting, but contribute to shaping public knowledge platforms which act as civic infrastructures for decision-making. Co-designing platforms and interfaces to make climate and sustainability transitions relatable to individual citizens as well as policy makers can thus be a core pathway to impact.

See the slides in more detail: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XcxN...

See the Q&A associated with this session:    • TICTeC 2024: Q&A for ‘Citizen science...  

TICTeC 2024 brought together 180+ people from 35 different countries.

It was the seventh in an annual series of conferences from mySociety, focusing on making civic technology more successful and impactful, to tackle global problems around democracy and climate change.

To find out more about TICTeC please visit: http://tictec.mysociety.org