Achieving Real Change through Mass Collaboration

What will this session be about?

Achieving real change is hard. And it’s getting harder as our society becomes ever more complex and intertwined. This session brings together multiple organisations that are looking at effective ways to achieve real change: from horizontal market making (connecting), applying best practices on a particular topic (vertical) through to innovating how we innovate together (challenge-centric).

The panel participants will share their different approaches and what they see as key topics to really achieve a step change in our collective ability to collaborate effectively.

About the speakers:

Neil Smyth (he/him) is co-founder and CTO of Alkemio, a non-profit foundation establishing an Open Innovation platform and community. Neil’s background is as a tech-entrepreneur, startup and scale up founder. Since leaving his scale up, he has been focused on societal change. He has guided 50+ digital startups via his role as YES!Delft Digital Technical Director where has also been driving GovTech initiatives as well as co-founding 2tokens.org. Corona triggered a shift in focus, realising that we needed a platform to make a step change in how we collaborate - with Challenges central.

Jean F. Queralt (he/him) is the Founder and CEO of The IO Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for Data-Centric Digital Rights. Disturbed by the level of intrusion of technology in the lives of citizens, he took the leap in 2018 of starting TIOF to establish a more solid and targeted direction to address Digital Rights from a technical standards perspective.

Mark Frischmuth founded DemocracyLab in 2006 to build an online platform to crowdsource public policy. Making obvious mistakes, DemocracyLab built a platform no one really wanted to use, but learned a great deal in the process. In 2012, the organization pivoted to address inefficiencies in the civic technology sector, which we believed were caused by poor information flows and resource allocation. DemocracyLab now works to address these problems. Mark spent 20 years working as a financial advisor and 401(k) wholesaler. In 2015 he began graduate school at the University of Washington, where he earned MBA and MPA degrees.

When is this session happening?

Monday, September 27th at 16:00 UTC (covert to your time zone here)

What is the Summit?

Code for All's 2021 Summit wishes to welcome everyone and anyone interested in civic tech to attend our free sessions. From those who have been involved in the community since its inception to those only hearing about it now - all are welcome to come and find out more, make some friends, and workshop new ways to help.

What exactly is civic tech?

Civic tech, in short, is technology that positively impacts society — but that’s not the whole story. It’s about creating civic innovation tools (tools that help make more democratic, transparent and people centered governments), but it isn’t only about the tools themselves — it’s about the process through which these tools are created. Here's a good place to learn more.

Who is Code for All?

Code for All is an international network of organizations supporting each other to empower citizens to meaningfully engage in the public sphere and have a positive impact on their communities.