Opening up. Our journey in becoming Civic Tech Sisters

This blog post is written by a mentoring team in the Civic Tech Sisters program.

Nadiia and Clarisse on the Civic Tech Summit 2020; image sources: North Rhine-Westphalia, CC BY-SA, Ukraine, CC BY-SA

Think Big

Be it in Ukraine or in Germany: democratic societies master digital transformation by enabling the people to co-create their tools. Public infrastructure and access to technology are regarded as a common good. In order to be resilient, we need mobility of resources, skills, positions. Democracy needs digital dilettantes.

In the wake of change, we need to integrate knowledge and skills that our schools yet did not necessarily prepare us for, for example about the mechanisms and business models in information technology. We need to understand our own roles as users and beneficiaries, as individuals, and collectively.

This applies even more so to governmental bodies. Public IT needs to be highly aware of its own strategy and governance. Since public IT has a transformational effect on how we run our governments, it cannot be left to its own specialists. Like every change in public structures, it has to be designed in a very open and participatory way in order to achieve the necessary resilience (with crises like a pandemia in mind or scenarios of the global warming which we are now starting to experience).

So the overall challenge question we came up with for our mentoring program was:

How could we enable a broader variety of people (“dilettantes”) to participate in the co-creation of public IT?

Start Small

So much for the big picture. Obviously, we had to break it down to some baby steps, to doable actions during the months of the program - in addition to our day jobs.

Clarisse participated in a barcamp organised by the German Network for Digital Transformation in Public Administration with Fraunhofer and wrote about her session on open knowledge about public IT at the German Young E-Government Network. She interviewed a technical writer on how to produce good specifications. In her team on the job, she contributed to opening up data on public services and their digitisation status.

Nadiia organised the Closed Data Conference where activists, government and business came together to talk about government data and what should be done to open it up. Nadiia arranged a talk on Open Public Services Data Standards with an official from the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation to discuss data on public services, its accessibility and standards and we published a blog post about it.

Both Nadiia and Clarisse produced small pieces of content, for example videos on Open Government and Public IT, that are easy to consume and share.

We will continue on these tracks, partnering in our endeavours, as a part of the very strong network of the Civic Tech Sisters.

Abundance of Sisterhood

The Civic Tech Sisters learning journey is about more than theory and action plans. It is about personal development, strengthening the civic network across countries. So both Clarisse and Nadiia started off by opening up, telling their personal stories and sharing empowering messages. We want to make women, people of all colors and genders more visible in the process of shaping the digital age!

Change and empowerment starts from within. We reflected on our own volunteering for the cause of Open Government and came up with the image of a well-packed backpack, containing:

  • A compass of strong values, such as equal opportunities for all to participate in the shaping of the digital age;
  • A map as a metaphor for all the people and institutions that are part of our strong network;
  • Good gear to be equipped with the right tools: methods and skills we acquired in the field of civic tech;
  • And last but not least, supply of water and food to rest and to refill our inner batteries.

Our weekly video calls established a reflection on our own habits and attitudes in a trustful relationship. Over the course of the program we were able to reinforce beneficial habits, such as speaking out loud, celebrating every step, and frequent time off the computer with walks in the fresh air. As a result, we both experienced the abundant feeling of balance, the alignment of our day jobs and volunteering, and our small goals materialising with hardly any effort.

You Are Invited!

Together with our Civic Tech Sisters and like-minded friends from many countries across Europe and America, we celebrated the finale of the program on the 2020 Civic Tech Summit, wrapping up the experience and announcing the next step, opening up the Civic Tech Sisters! If you feel like-minded, you are warmly invited to the Civic Tech Networking Thursdays:

We are looking forward to continuing our journey as Open Government activists together in the strong and diverse Civic Tech community.

This post is written by a mentor-mentee-partnership of the Civic Tech Sisters programme, provided by a German-Ukranian consortium June-November 2020.

Our Podcast

The first episode of the series "Wir kriegen die Krise." (only in German)