Discovering TICTeC 1: OpenUp South Africa on measuring impact

mySociety

TICTeC, the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference from mySociety, runs for just two days – but those two days are packed with civic tech practitioners sharing insights and experience from projects along the world.

We share most of the sessions as videos on our YouTube channel, and to help you decide what to watch first, we’ve asked mySociety staff to pick their favourites and chat about what they found so interesting. In this episode, Alice, Gemma and Myf discuss “Have you empirically improved transparency and accountability?” from Sean Russell of OpenUp South Africa.

You can watch that session in full for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsfjF7kV5go.

If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.

Transcript

0:00 Gemma: Hi, I’m Gemma I’m mySociety’s Events and Engagement Manager and I am the producer of TICTeC.

Myf: I’m Myf and I am the Communications and Marketing Manager

00:10 at my Society.

Alice: Alice I’m the Head of Fundraising at mySociety.

Myf: Today we’re going to talk about one of the sessions that was at TICTeC 2024 and this was

0:20 Sean Russell from openup South Africa and the title was “Have you empirically improved transparency and accountability?”. Alice you chose this one to talk about.

0:30 Alice: Yeah I liked that he was challenging us to think about how do we prove that we are having the impact in the world that we say we want to? It’s obviously very relevant as a fundraiser.

0:40 I have to demonstrate that we are having an impact. He gave some really good examples of what he called The Good, The Bad and The Misguided.

Gemma: in terms of impact measurement it was a really

0:50 nice sort of back to basics presentation of why it’s important to measure impact in the first place and some ways to go about it, but they also talked

1:00 about some really interesting impacts of their own work which is what TICTeC’s all about. They run a tool, apparently, that is a medicine price registry, so a massive database where you can see

1:10 prices of all the medicines across South Africa at their lowest price, so you can see if you’re being overcharged and apparently it’s a legacy project doesn’t have any funding

1:20 and they don’t measure the impacts of it, and then when website went down one day and they had loads of calls and emails saying, “Where’s the website? I use it all the time!”

1:30 and it it has a massive real world impact that they just weren’t measuring, so I thought about some of mySociety’s tools, you know, our legacy projects that we keep up to date but we don’t

1:40 have any funding for and just wondered what would happen if we turned off some of our sites and what the impact of that would be.

Alice: He also talked about how there’s a service

1:50 that they have for looking at corruption in lottery grants, and he said it essentially only has two users, which if you – and his words were,

2:00 “If you’re measuring success based on user numbers then this would be the worst website ever!”, but he then went on to talk about the fact that those two users have

2:10 then gone on to have like significant impact with that and it’s been dramatic the things that have come from it.

Myf: Those two users are journalists, right?

2:20 Alice: Journalists and legal experts, so people who can actually make change happen from seeing this data, and that I think is really interesting relating it to mySociety again like Gemma was just talking

2:30 about – we’ve got services that are more niche and they they reach like more specific audiences, so user numbers, we’ve got services that reach millions of people, but we’ve got

2:40 other services that have much smaller numbers, but if those people are then going on to have really significant real world change with the information that we’ve provided or the

2:50 way that we’ve been able to connect them to important information, then that’s what we want to see. It doesn’t matter how many people are doing it as long as there is change happing as a result and

3:00 I think that’s where he was trying to make the distinction between outputs and numbers, and actual outcomes and impact.

Gemma: I found it really impressive that they actually could count up

3:10 how much money was actually being recovered from uncovering that corruption so I think he said like 20 million Rands which, I don’t know, is like a million pounds or something that had been recovered from

3:20 those investigations of that civic tech project that had two users.

Myf: I remember he sort of opened the whole talk up, didn’t he, by saying somebody came into the office one day and said, “Why should people fund our projects

3:30 rather than just feeding a hungry child?” The answers that he came up with was that it’s about systemic change so it’s about making the changes that then

3;40 ensure that there are fewer hungry children in the world rather than just addressing the problem.

Alice: Which is what I guess people in civic tech are trying to do like and it’s why

3:50 I think he wanted to do this talk and challenge us in the room to think about how how we’re measuring that systemic impact because it’s harder to prove than, yes, we’ve fed this many children but actually how do you see if you are

4:00 having systemic impact and as you say the systemic change bit is a really important part the impact of civic tech.

Gemma: But also he mentioned that if civil

4:10 society are not doing those projects, then for-profits might take up that space.

Myf: I thought that was a brilliant point actually.

Gemma: Yeah. I find it really refreshing that he was saying how hard

4:20 this stuff is to track you know, because you almost expect everyone else to be finding it a bit easier or like there’s some magic silver bullet that is the way

4:30 to track impact and measure impact but of course there isn’t. They’ve got some really good ideas, you know they gave their methodologies. I feel like it makes us feel a bit better that like this is a hard thing.

4:40 This presentation by OpenUp was chosen for TICTeC 2024 because it it really epitomises what TICTeC’s all about. Obviously the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, we want to talk

4:50 about how do you measure impact, what impact your civic tech projects are having, and the fact that this encapsulated both impacts of their civic tech tools

5:00 telling us about those and methodologies for how to actually do the impact measurement was just TICTeC all over. OpenUp, they’re going to be mentoring a couple

5;10 of the organisations that are part of the Access to Information community to help them measure impact of their civic tech tools and their Access to Information tools, so that’s a a really nice impact of

5:20 TICTeC, you know you meet amazing people doing really interesting work and then you end up partnering with them to do longer term projects.