- Author
- Angela Dixon
- Role
- Managing Director
At SocietyWorks we believe in transparency. One of the ways we live this value is by working in the open, and giving our team members space on our blog to write about what they’re working on, something they’re interested in or even perhaps a mistake or challenge they’ve learned from.
In this blog post our managing director, Angela Dixon, shares some thoughts on what failure means in the civic tech space, and what we can learn from it.
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Over the past week, I’ve been having an incredibly thought provoking dialogue with a truly awesome mind, Matthew Somerville (aka dracos; aka the traintimes guy; aka civic tech pioneer; aka Head of Development, SocietyWorks).
The question… What does ‘failure’ mean in civic tech?
Two serendipitous strands of thought and activity led us here. Firstly, I recently decided that in order to make better decisions as we move into the future for SocietyWorks, I had to better understand its past, which is rooted in mySociety’s rich history. Thankfully, this history has been documented across two decades on mySociety’s blog; a riveting read uncovering hidden treasures and heroic feats from the early civic tech pioneers. Secondly, Matthew was interested in responding to a call for participation in a Workshop of Discontinued Civic Tech exploring this very question.
I’ve been at mySociety for three years now. I am not a techie. I am the person who talks about strategy, business cases, investment for growth and impact. All the annoying stuff amongst a group of nimble fingered, creative minded, agile spirited engineers who can design, build, and iterate citizen centric digital services at an astonishing speed. So it’s always intriguing when a question has the power to bring together different world perspectives as we seek shared understanding.
You probably know that the mySociety of now continues to run the widely used sites:
- WhatDoTheyKnow (FOI request site);
- TheyWorkForYou (parliamentary monitoring site);
- WriteToThem (communicating with your representatives);
- FixMyStreet (street and environment fault reporting);
- MapIt (geographic boundaries mapping).
In more recent years, we have added climate focused initiatives, including Climate Action Plan Explorer; Neighbourhood Warmth, and Local Intelligence Hub. Research has continued across the years, with all activity focused on a vision of a transparent, resilient democracy; and a mission of using our data and digital skills to put more power in more people’s hands so that together we can build a fairer, safer future.
Our current sites could be considered civic tech successes, if we define success as:
- over 30 million sessions across our sites each year;
- continued existence of our sites in spite of the odds stacked against maintaining important infrastructural civic technology, tech that nudges systemic change, on a shoestring budget; and
- wider impact in the sense of enabling other individuals and groups, by extension, to deliver important societal initiatives.
These current sites are just a handful of the many sites and services that mySociety spun up with their wizardry over the years. Other sites were either transferred to new ownership or were closed down and consigned to the graveyard of civic tech.
A quick look back over some of the past feats of civic tech heroism by mySociety will include:
- Mapumental (with maps that display transit time rather than distance);
- Scenic or Not (a gamified approach to mapping aesthetic qualities across England, Scotland, and Wales);
- Collideoscope (an initiative to create safer road infrastructure, including for cyclists);
- FixMyTransport (identifying damaged transport infrastructure and directing reports to the responsible authorities); and
- Pledgebank (mobilising community action). Oh, Pledgebank. More on this service to come.
On my journey through the past, over and over again, I see inspirational services built, and importantly, used, by multitudes of citizens, sometimes globally. And I began to question why aren’t these services, or iterations of these services, that were in many cases well loved, still in existence today? Were they failures, if failure is to be defined as no longer in existence and no longer having impact? Some broad themes have emerged in this initial dialogue.
Lack of resources and funding
For sites to continue to develop and iterate in a fast moving external environment, you need competent people and maintained infrastructure to be able to do this responsibly. While we still see the sacrificial acts of civic technicians maintaining services off their own backs with altruistic motivations, there are only so many services that can be carried like this and only so many of these unique individuals about.
In general, without funding, you can’t pay salaries for the people and the supplier costs for maintaining infrastructure for services. I know that in the early days of mySociety there were a number of initiatives employed to commercialise aspects of services with the objective of self funding. This is hard to do and often requires years of commitment and investment in order to realise returns. In the case of the aforementioned services, these strategies didn’t work out. We were fortunate that FixMyStreet did become a success story in this sense.
Running before you can walk
Perhaps some of the sites were before their time and the conditions in the world around them had not yet emerged sufficiently to allow them to reach their potential. Certainly, more commercially focused organisations would come to spot this potential and capitalise on the opportunities presented by tools such as Pledgebank (think Kickstarter and Groupon).
So back to the question, what does ‘failure’ mean in civic tech? Do we define failure as an impactful site no longer run and maintained for current and future users? Or do we see success in what it achieved whilst it could, when it was properly funded and maintained?
The extract we’ve submitted to the Workshop of Discontinued Civic Tech focuses on Pledgebank. It could have been another project, but Matthew had me rambling on about how the community engagement and activating approach is still relevant today, a problem that has not yet been solved by society at large in the context of citizen voice and community action.
Here is the extract…
“PledgeBank was a website run by the UK charity mySociety from 2005 to 2015.
It let people set up pledges in the form: ‘I will do something, but only if a certain number of people will help me’ – one of the earliest attempts to use the internet to gather people together in a common cause, getting them past the barrier of acting alone; a model which was later used to great effect by Groupon, Kickstarter and similar sites.
Translated into 14 languages, with early features such as SMS signing, PDF poster generation and local alerts, PledgeBank was used for pledges as wide-ranging as collecting underwear for orphans in Liberia, donating books to create a town library in India, setting up the Open Rights Group in the United Kingdom, raising money to rebuild a furniture store after riots, and burying buckets to create homes for stag beetles.
The site never grew as much as we might have hoped, and was closed after running for ten years, due to mySociety concentrating on its core sites and international partnerships at the time. I will provide information on its successes and failures, going into possible reasons for its failure.”
As we come closer to landing, I’m going to disappoint by not providing a three point summary defining what failure in civic tech looks like to me. Rather, I’m going to leave it as a question for ongoing pondering, and I’m certainly interested in the reflections of others.
If we get the opportunity to present at the Workshop of Discontinued Civic Tech, Matthew has promised to follow up with a post to share his reflections on this, and perhaps we’ll be able to converge on a definition. [edit: read Matthew’s follow up post]
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Connect with Angela on LinkedIn, or drop her an email (angela@mysociety.org) if you’d like to discuss your own definition of and learnings from civic tech failures.
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Image: Jonathan Farber on Unsplash